More and more like an elderly squire patrolling his acres, Lad rambled along, and presently his ears and his nose told him that his two loving friends Rex and Wolf were coming toward him on their home-bound way. His plumy tail wagged expectantly. He was growing a bit lonely on this Sunday afternoon walk of his, and a little tired. It would be a pleasure to have company--especially Wolf's. Rex and Wolf had fared ill on their hunt. They had put up two rabbits. One had doubled and completely escaped them; and in the chase Rex had cut his foot nastily on a strip of unseen barbed wire. The sandlike snow had gotten into the jagged cut in a most irritating way. The second rabbit had dived under a log. Rex had thrust his head fiercely through a snowbank in quest of the vanished prey; and a long briar-thorn, hidden there, had plunged its needle point deep into the inside of his left nostril. The inner nostril is a hundred-fold the most agonizingly sensitive part of a dog's body, and the pain wrung a yell of rage and hurt from the big dog. With a nostril and a foot both hurt, there was no more fun in hunting, and--angry, cross, savagely in pain--Rex loped homeward, Wolf pattering along behind him. Like Lad, they came upon the laborer's trampled path and took advantage of the easier going. Thus it was, at a turn in the track, that they came face to face with Lad. Wolf had already smelled him, and his brush began to quiver in welcome. Rex, his nose in anguish, could smell nothing; not until that turn did he know of Lad's presence. He halted, sulky, and ill-tempered. The queer restlessness, the pre-springtime savagery that had obsessed him of late had been brought to a head by his hurts. He was not himself. His mind was sick. There was not room for two large dogs to pass each other in that narrow trail. One or the other must flounder out into the deep snow to the side. Ordinarily, there would be no question about any other dog on The Place turning out for Lad. It would have been a matter of course, and so, to-day, Lad expected it to be. Onward he moved, at that same dignified walk, until he was not a yard away from Rex. The latter, his brain fevered and his hurts torturing him, suddenly flamed into rebellion. Even as a younger buck sooner or later assails for mastery the leader of the herd, so the brain-sick Rex went back, all at once, to primal instincts, a maniac rage mastered him--the rage of the angry underling, the primitive lust for mastery.