“I’m sure obleeged to you, Chum, son, for rollin’ on his coat just when you happened to be able to roll that note out’n it. You’re one wise pup!” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ FOUR: The Tracker ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration] FOUR: The Tracker The child’s parents were going to Europe for three months, that winter. The child himself was getting over a nervous ailment. The doctors had advised he be kept out of school for a term; and be sent to the country. His mother was afraid the constant travel from place to place, in Europe, might be too much for him. So she asked leave of the Mistress and the Master,—one of whom was her distant relative—for the convalescent to stay at the Place during his parents’ absence. That was how it all started. The youngster was eleven years old; lank and gangling, and blest with a fretful voice and with far less discipline and manners than a three-month collie pup. His name was Cyril. Briefly, he was a pest,—an unspeakable pest. For the first day or two at the Place, the newness of his surroundings kept Cyril more or less in bounds. Then, as homesickness and novelty alike wore off, his adventurous soul expanded. He was very much at home;—far more so than were his hosts, and infinitely more pleased than they with the situation general. He had an infinite genius for getting into trouble. Not in the delightfully normal fashion of the average growing boy; but in furtively crafty ways that did not belong to healthy childhood. Day by day, Cyril impressed his odd personality more and more on everything around him. The atmosphere of sweet peace which had brooded, like a blessing, over the whole Place, was dispersed. The cook,—a marvel of culinary skill and of long service,—gave tearful warning, and departed. This when she found the insides of all her cooking utensils neatly soaped; and the sheaf of home-letters in her work-box replaced by cigar-coupons. One of the workmen threw over his job with noisy blasphemy; when his room above the stables was invaded by stealth and a comic-paper picture of a goat’s head substituted for his dead mother’s photograph in the well-polished little bronze frame on his bureau. And so on, all along the line. The worst and most continuous sufferer from Cyril’s loathed presence on the Place was the massive collie, Lad. The child learned, on the first day of his visit, that it would be well-nigh as safe to play with a handful of dynamite as with Lad’s gold-and-white mate, Lady. Lady did not care for liberties from any one. And she took no pains to mask her snappish first-sight aversion to the lanky Cyril. Her fiery little son, Wolf, was scarce less formidable than she, when it came to being teased by an outsider. But gallant old Lad was safe game.