On the ridge-crest, the wind was blowing with razor sharpness. It cut like a billion waxed whiplashes, through the sparse coat and against the sagging ribs of the pup. It drove the snow needles into his watering eyes, and it stung the blown-back insides of his sensitive ears. He cowered under its pitiless might, as under a thrashing; and again he began to whimper and to sob. Below him, from the direction whence he had wormed his slippery way up the ridge, lay the squalidly flat bit of plain with its sprinkle of mean houses; behind it, the straggling suburb whence he had escaped; and behind that, the far-reaching tangle of glare and blackness which was Midwestburg, with miles of lurid light reflection on the low-hanging clouds. Turning, the puppy looked down the farther slope of his ridge to the rolling miles of forest and clearing, with wide-scattered farmsteads and cottages. The wilds seemed less actively and noisily terrifying than the glare and muffled roar of the city behind him. And, as anything was better than to cower freezing there in the wind’s full path, Bobby slunk down the ridge’s northern flank and toward the naked black woodlands beyond its base. The rock edges and the ice cut his uncalloused splay feet. Even out of the wind, the chill gnawed through coat and skin. The world was a miserable place to do one’s living in. Moreover, Bobby had not eaten in more than twenty-four hours; although a pup of his age is supposed to be fed not less than four times a day. The rock-strewn ridge having been passed, the going became easier. Here, on the more level ground, a snow carpet made it softer, if colder. No longer running, but at a loose-jointed wolf trot, Bobby entered the woods. A quarter mile farther on, he stopped again; at sight of something which loomed up at a height of perhaps three feet above the half-acre of cleared ground about it. He had strayed into the once-popular Blake’s Woods Picnic Grove, and the thing which arrested his sick glance was the dancing platform which had been erected at the grove’s painfully geometrical centre. Years agone, Blake’s Woods had been a favourite outing ground for Midwestburg’s workers. The coming of the interurban trolley, which brought Boone Lake Beach within half an hour of the city, had turned these woods into a dead loss as far as local pleasure seekers were concerned. The benches had been split up or stolen or had rotted. The trim central patch of green sward had been left to grow successive unmown harvests of ragweed. The dancing platform, with its once-smooth floor and the bright-painted lattice which ran around its base, was sharing the fate of the rest of the grove. The floor was sunken and holey. The laths of the lattice had fallen away in one or two places, and everywhere they had been washed free of their former gay paint.