Three years before he had opened his amazed puppy eyes on this man (and woman) ruled planet. An agreeable place of abode he had found it as long as he was owned by a man. The Jersey kennels of George Devant had bred him; Devant had himself overlooked his first season's training, had hunted him a few times. At Devant's untimely death, Mrs. Devant had sold the place, the kennels, the mounts. But when, followed by a group of purchasing sportsmen, the widow came to the kennel where he waited at the end of his chain, she had clasped her hands together and cried out: "I won't sell this one!" Lancaster, bachelor friend of the late Devant, spoke up: "Why, I had _my_ eyes on him." "You won't get him," she laughed. "He'll live with me--won't you, beauty?" "He's not a lap dog," Lancaster had reminded her. "Don't you suppose _I_ understand him?" she demanded. Understand him? What did the woman know of a bird dog's soul? The most intolerable of burdens is kindness where no understanding is. To Mrs. Devant it never occurred, even remotely, that her Riverside Drive apartment was a prison. She never dreamed why it was that on their afternoon walks the dog, straining at his leash, kept his hungry eyes fastened always on the cliffs across the Hudson. When they returned, as she pulled off her wraps, she would look down at him. "I know," she would say; "you are trying to tell me you love me!" Courteously he would wag his tail. Futilely, out of upraised, gently brave eyes he would plead for freedom--from a woman who did not know, and could not understand. Then Lancaster, a frequent caller at the apartment of Mrs. Devant, had borrowed him. That morning Lancaster himself had put him aboard this train. "The trip," Lancaster had said, "will be easier if we don't crate him." All day he had known he was being hurled away. Was another grimy wilderness of brick his destination? Had the baggageman closed the door forever on all he loved in the world? The train slowed up, stopped. The baggageman opened the door and dropped to the ground. They were in the country and the sun had set. Through the door the dog looked across a dusky field to a black horizon of forest. Above this forest flamed a scarlet glow. Something far in its depths called him, and he plunged against the chain. He was jerked back, choking, the glow out yonder reflected in his desperate eyes. He backed against the wall, took a running start, and plunged again. The breaking of his collar hurled him against a trunk on the other side of the car, dazed and confused.