"Oh--you beauty! You wonder!" She stooped suddenly and caught the big head between her hands. Her eyes were bright and soft. "You noble, noble dog!" Dan drew back. Why all this feminine fuss? Self-consciously he dropped his tail, imploringly he looked up at the man. The man understood. He poked the dog with his foot, and Dan started back with a mock snarl. Embarrassment vanished, equilibrium was established, they were placed at once on that footing of good-fellowship so necessary in the highest relations of man and man and man and dog. "Sob stuff," laughed the man, "rattles him." "Do you think we can keep him, Steve?" the woman pleaded. "Of course." "But suppose his owners come after him!" "I tell you, Marian, he dropped from Mars. I know every bird dog fifty miles around. There's no such breed in _this_ country. One minute." He crossed the floor to a closet. When he turned he held in his hand a gun. At the sight the dog leaped up into the man's laughing face. He ran round and round the room, his eyes brilliant, his nose quivering. The man put the gun away. "To-morrow," he said significantly. They named him Frank. In a week his old life was a memory, a disturbed memory, though, such as sometimes lingers after a grotesque dream. He had awakened, as it were, into a new world, a new and glorious life. From the porch of the old homestead--it sat on a hill that commanded an extensive view--he saw in maplike demarcations fields and woods and bottoms, like those that had rushed past in the dream, lying still and silent beneath him in sunlit reality. His bondage was over. He came and went at will. He had his place by the fire when the night was cold. The strained, restless look left his eyes, and there was peace in his heart. Earle saw and understood. "You haven't always been this way, have you, old man?" he asked. "I guess this is Freedom Hill for you, all right." Frank did not know--being only a dog--the story that lay back of the name: the story that Earle's great-grandfather on the morning the old columned house was completed had summoned the slaves to the porch and given each his freedom. "There will be no bondage here," he had said. Dog and master took long hunts through the fair country that stretched away in blue undulations to the mountains. They returned at dusk, Earle with bulging game pockets, gun stuck under his arm, the setter trotting at his heels. They learned to know each other intimately, to respect each other's ability. "One in a million, that dog," was Earle's verdict. A sense of power, of superabundant life, of fulfilment tingled in his nerves and bones during these hunts. What joy came with the knowledge that his nose was growing keener, his judgment more profound! What added joy that his master knew--his master, stern and unrelenting when he was careless, generous with praise when he did well.