Then and then only did Lucius Frayne and Roke look at each other. Long and earnestly they looked. And Frayne reached out his thick hand and shook his kennel man’s soiled fingers. He shook them with much heartiness. He was a democratic sportsman, this owner of the famed Lochinvar Kennels. He did not disdain to grasp the toil-hardened hand of his honest servitor; especially at a time like this. Lochinvar King that day clove his path straight through “Open, Sable-and-White” and “Open, any Colour,” to “Winners”; in a division of fifty-eight collies. Then be annexed the cup and the forty dollars in cash awards for Best of Breed; also four other cash specials. And in the classic special for Best Dog in Show he came as near to winning as ever a present-day collie can hope to at so large a show. Jamie Mackellar, with a vibrating pride and a sense of personal importance, watched and applauded every win of his pup’s matchless sire. “In another year,” he mused raptly, “I’ll be scooping up them same specials with King’s gorgeous little son. This man Frayne is sure one of the fellers that God made.” Four weeks and two days later, a past-worthy slatted crate, labelled “Lochinvar Collie Kennels,” was delivered at Jamie’s door. It arrived a bare ten minutes after Mackellar came home from work. All the family gathered around it in the kitchen; while, with hands that would not stay steady, the head of the house proceeded to unfasten the clamps which held down its top. It was Jamie Mackellar’ s great moment, and his wife and children were infected almost to hysteria by his long-sustained excitement. Back went the crate lid. Out onto the kitchen floor shambled a dog. For a long minute, as the new-arrived collie stood blinking and trembling in the light, everybody peered at him without word or motion. Jamie’s jaw had gone slack, at first sight of him. And it still hung supine; making the man’s mouth look like a frog penny bank’s. The puppy was undersized. He was scrawny and angular and all but shapeless. At a glance, he might have belonged to any breed or to many breeds or to none. His coat was sparse and short and kinky; and through it glared patches of lately-healed eczema. The coat’s colour was indeterminate, what there was of it. Nor had four days in a tight crate improved its looks. The puppy’s chest was pitifully narrow. The sprawly legs were out at elbow and cow-hocked. The shoulders were noteworthy by the absence of any visible sign of them. The brush was an almost hairless rat-tail. The spine was sagged and slightly awry. But the head was the most direful part of the newcomer. Its expressionless eyes were sore and dull. Its ears hung limp as a setter’s. The nose and foreface were as snubbily broad as a Saint Bernard’s. The slack jaw was badly overshot. The jowls showed a marked tendency to cheekiness and the skull seemed to be developing an apple-shaped dome in place of the semi-platform which the top of a collie’s head ought to present.