Brean got to his feet, wondering. The advancing shape took on size and form. The swimmer was emerging from the water. Through the dim starlight, the man was able to make out that the oncomer was a very wet and bedraggled collie. At sight of the man, the pup hesitated, half in and half out of the water. Brean bent toward him and called: “Come on, son! Nobody’s going to hurt you.” The voice and the gesture that went with it were reassuringly friendly. The dog read them aright. He was still little more than a baby. He had been cruelly and unjustly manhandled. His heart ached for the human kindness he had known before he fell into Fraser Colt’s possession. Hesitant no longer, he came straight up to the man. Brean petted him, speaking friendlily. Then, as the light was elusive, he went over to his smoldering camp fire and stirred it into life. The flare showed him every detail of the pup; even to the bleeding and lopped ear. At sight of the injury a long-dormant professional instinct flared up in the wanderer, as suddenly and as brightly as the fire had just flared from its embers. Lionel Arthur Montagu Brean had once possessed the right to tack the courtesy title of “Honorable” in front of his name. For he was the fifth son of Lord Airstoken, an impecunious Irish peer. There had been four older brothers; and Lionel had been allowed to follow his own yearnings to become a physician. He was a natural-born surgeon; and, from the start, he won for himself an enviable name at Guy’s Hospital. But he was a natural-born crook, as well. Thus, within three months after his graduation with honors, he was a fugitive from justice; through the clumsy forging of a check, wherewith to meet certain pressing gambling debts. He smuggled himself to America by steerage. Penniless, hopeless, afflicted with a love for wandering, he had sunk presently to the philosophical leisure of tramphood. Life was easy for him. He followed the climate, north and south, through a belt of the Far West; picking up food and rudimentary clothes as best he could. Half forgotten was his British home. Wholly forgotten had been his almost uncanny skill at surgery;--until the sight of the collie pup’s broken ear revived it. Partly in self-derision, partly in amusement, he set to work, before the crackling campfire, treating the ear. In his final year at Guy’s, he had won a wager from a collie-breeding friend. The latter had claimed that a collie’s broken ear is incurable. Brean had made such an ear as good as new. True, then he had had all manner of appliances for the task; while now he was forced to rely on ingenuity and on such meager makeshifts as his battered kit contained. Yet the old skill was throbbing in his fingertips. The pup did not wince under the deftly light handling. He seemed to know the tramp was trying to help him. If the operation hurt, the accompanying words soothed.