“And don’t you call that an order?” She cracked her great whip. He sprang to the tail-board, hanging on by one arm, and clutched at the trunk with the other, dragging it out. But he had forgotten to reckon with the faithful guardian. Nip, excited as at a rabbit, sprang from the basket in which he had been resting his four weary limbs and growled ominously, and as the burglarious arm did not draw back, the terrier—O almost human ingratitude!—sprang at it and made his beautiful white teeth meet in its fleshy middle. “You little beast!” Alarmed more for his finery than his flesh, he snatched back the elegant London sleeve and dropped off the cart, which soon disappeared down a grim and lonely lane. XI He examined the wound in his coat, and finding to his relief that it could be neatly patched up, he stripped off the garment and surveyed his abraded skin, tooth-marked and red-flecked; Nip’s signature in blood. Then the horrible thought of hydrophobia—he had witnessed a dreadful case in Montreal—popped again into his mind: after all, it was as hot as July, and no sane dog would have behaved so disgracefully! And then, pricked up by the sound of the horn, which came vaunting and taunting from the lane, he started running after the cart yet once more: he must find out if the dog would drink. But even the rumbling of the vehicle could no longer be heard, and he was slackening hopelessly when he became aware how involuted was this lane, and that by trespassing across a ploughed field he could gain several furlongs. Bounding over the ditch with his coat slung over his arm, and nearly tearing it afresh in breaking through the blackberry hedge, he ran as recklessly as a fox-hunter across the furrows, breaking out again like a footpad when he heard Methusalem’s leisurely trot, and catching that unreluctant animal by the beribboned headstall. Jinny manifested no surprise. “I thought you’d get over your silliness,” she said, smiling. “Jump up then!” “I’m not jumping up!” He was angrier and hotter than ever. “I’ve come to give your dog a drink.” “Eh? But we’ve passed ‘The Silverlane Arms.’” “This is no joking matter. He must have water.” “He doesn’t need any. Surely I can look after my own dog—that’s not a man’s place, too, is it?” “It’s not a question of that—but if he doesn’t drink, it may be fatal.” “Nonsense. A kind cottager offered him water only a mile back—he didn’t want it. . . . What’s the matter? You’re looking so strange. . . . Have you had a sunstroke?” The alarm in her voice reflected the alarm in his face, and his alarm was in turn augmented by hers. He had a weird vision of that man in Montreal, thrown into convulsions by the sound of a splash and trying to bite his attendants, and a ghastly memory came to him of a Bradmarsh woman who had frizzled for her foaming child the liver of the dog that had bitten it. “Suppose your dog should be mad?” he asked, with white lips that already felt frothy.