“Did you see how he went?” he asked enthusiastically. “That gait was a thirty-mile-an-hour gait. Why, that dog travels--he travels--” He took out a piece of paper and a pencil and figured it out. “In forty-eight hours he travels fourteen hundred and forty miles! He gets seven hundred and twenty miles from home!” “It doesn't seem possible,” said Murchison. “No,” said Brownlee frankly, “it doesn't.” He went over his figures again. “But that is figured correctly,” he said. “If--but maybe I did not gauge his speed correctly. And I didn't allow for stopping to turn around at the end of the out sprint. What we ought to have on that dog is a pedometer. If I owned a dog like that, the first thing I would get would be a pedometer.” I told Brownlee that if he wished I would give him Fluff, and he could put a pedometer, or anything else, on him; but Brownlee remembered he had some work to do and went home. But he was right about the periodicity of Fluff. Almost on the minute at the end of forty-eight hours Fluff returned, and Brownlee and Murchison, who were there to receive him, were as pleased as if Fluff had been going away instead of returning. “That dog,” said Brownlee, “is a wonderful animal. If Sir Isaac Newton had that dog, he would have proved something or other of universal value by him. That dog is plumb full of ratios and things, if we only knew how to get them out of him. I bet if Sir Isaac Newton had had Fluff as long as you have had him he would have had a formula all worked out--x/y(2xz-dog)=2(4ab-3x) or something of that kind, so that anyone with half a knowledge of algebra could figure out the square root of any dog any time of the day or night. I could get up a Law of Dog myself if I had the time, with a dog like Fluff to work on. 'If one dog travels fourteen hundred and forty miles at the sight of a gun, how far would two dogs travel?' All that sort of thing. Stop!” he ejaculated suddenly. “If one dog travels forty-eight hours at the sight of one gun, how far would he travel at the sight of two guns? Murchison,” he cried enthusiastically, “I've got it! I've got the fundamental law of periodicity in dogs! Go get your gun,” he said to me, “and I will get mine.” [Illustration: 82] He stopped at the gate long enough to say: “I tell you, Murchison, we are on the verge of a mighty important discovery--a mighty important discovery! If this thing turns out right, we will be at the root of all dog nature. We will have the great underlying law of scared dogs.”