Frank of Freedom Hill Part 20

Earle looked beyond her at the bed. The cheeks were crimson, the eyes half closed; through the narrowed slits they burned upward like fire.

Earle turned to the doctor.

"What about it?"

"How long will it take, Mr. Earle?"

"Two hours."

"Yes--I should go--right away!"

Earle crossed the room to the nurse sitting beside the bed. "It won't matter?" he asked. "It won't excite him?"

She shook her head.

He sank on his knees beside the bed, his big arm braced over the heaving little chest, his eyes drinking in the light in those narrowed unseeing ones.

The lips were incredibly hot.

"Old scout!" he choked in the little ear.

He did not look at the faces as he hurried out of the room, nor back at the building when he jumped into his car. He roared through the city, into the silent country. He glimpsed the stone mileposts flash past. He glanced now and then at the clock in the front of the car. He had set an almost impossible time. But he was halfway home at midnight. As he rounded a sharp curve his lights flashed on something far ahead in the road--a hog or perhaps a prowling dog. It sprang aside into the bushes.

He pa.s.sed the spot with a roar.

Behind him Frank leaped back into the road, and stood for a moment staring after the car. He had gotten a glimpse, a whiff--he had thought he knew it. But that car was going the wrong way. He must have been mistaken. Wearily he turned and galloped on toward the city.

He had come many miles. He had many miles yet to go. From sleeping farmhouses dogs bayed him as he pa.s.sed, running like a big fox, silent and swift. The road turned and twisted among hills and small mountains.

Ahead in the sky was a glow unlike the glow of coming day. It grew brighter with the pa.s.sing miles. It drew him on. The distance would have meant little to him, except for the tremendous speed at which he had been travelling. Now his chest was flecked with foam. His tail, carried usually so proudly, followed the curve of his haunches. His overstrained muscles worked mechanically like pistons. His heart pounded his long, lean red ribs.

Dizzy, almost famished, he came at last to the top of a hill and stopped, ears erect. Below him stretched rows of twinkling lights that, all together, made up the glow in the sky. That was the city with the strange building into which they had carried Tommy Earle!

He could afford to rest, now that he was so near. To the side of the road grew bushes to which coolness and moisture clung. Sides heaving, he sc.r.a.ped his back against them, his heavy tail wagging with inward satisfaction, the glow from those distant lights reflected dimly in his eyes. Then he sank down on his stomach, panting out loud in the sultry stillness.

A roar, a blinding glare were upon him before he sprang wildly to his feet. The wind rushed past as the car flashed by. He glimpsed Earle's tense face.

Again he dashed after the rear light--again it drew away from him. He left the road again--just behind the car. Once more it was leaving him.

In his desperation he began to bark as he ran. Above the roar his frantic, enraged yelps pierced the night. He heard the crunching of brakes.

"Frank!" cried the man.

The door was flung open. He jumped in and up on the padded seat. The car swished smoothly and swiftly over black, moist, oily streets, past interminable lights. Every muscle of the dog began to quiver. He looked with s.h.i.+ning eyes into his master's face, choked, and swallowed.

Suddenly he rose on the seat, feet together. Down the street had come the smell, unlike any that rises from woods or fields, the smell he would never forget. It drew closer. The car turned in toward the curb.

Earle spoke quickly. But the dog had leaped over the door of the car and landed in the middle of the sidewalk. He took the steps three at a time. Down the dim, silent corridor floated the pungent smell. Earle was at his side, had caught him by the mane, had opened the door, was holding him back.

"Steady, old man!" he said. "Steady!"

They hurried together down the s.h.i.+ning hall. They turned into a strange room. Over there, lips parted, his mistress had sprung to her feet.

There were others in here--a man, a woman in white--but he hardly saw them. For on white sheets, face upturned and crimson, eyes half closed, lay little Tommy Earle.

The mother was on her knees now, leaning far over the boy. Her face was flushed like his face. She was smiling down eagerly into the strange, up-turning eyes. "Look!" she was pleading. "Look at Mother, darling. Be quiet--listen! Here's Frank--come to see you!"

She caught the dog convulsively to her, so close he could feel the pounding of her heart. "Help me, Steve!" she panted.

She picked the boy's hand up and placed it on the s.h.a.ggy head. She pressed the little fingers together. She slipped her arm under the pillow and turned the burning face toward the dog. "Now!" she smiled.

"You see him, don't you, dear! Mother told you he would come, didn't she? Mother told you---- Ah!" she gasped.

Long after the boy had gazed in recognition into the deep, longing eyes of the dog, then with a wistful little smile up into the mother's face; long after his eyes had closed in that profound sleep which marks the breaking up of delirium and fever, Frank sat on his haunches beside the bed, his patient head on the covers.

He licked the hand of the boy, then glanced up inquiringly into the face of the mother who sat beside him. She shook her head and he licked it no more.

Later she whispered to him that he could lie down now, and nodded at the floor at her feet. He understood, but he did not move.

The muscles of his haunches were cruelly cramped when the nurse snapped off the light. In the pale light growing luminous and pink and gradually suffusing the room Tommy Earle opened his eyes. First they looked up into the happy face of the mother, then at Steve Earle standing at the foot of the bed, then straight and clear into the faithful eyes of his friend.

The cramped muscles quivered and jerked, the long tail beat the floor.

He wanted to leap on the bed, to rush round the room. The mother caught him by the mane. He must be still, she said.

The voice of Tommy Earle when he spoke was as gentle and clear as the chirp of half-awakened birds out of the window.

"F'ank?" he said.

Steve Earle had to hold the dog now--had to drag him away from the bed.

They brought him a pan of water. They made him lie down. They came softly in, nurses and internes, and looked at him. He lay beside the bed, relaxed now, but panting slightly, his eyes still aglow. They said it was a wonderful thing he had done. And one of them, she was young and radiant, gazed long and steadily, as if fascinated, into his gentle, brave eyes, upraised to hers.

"He knows what he's done!" she said.

VIII

THE TRIAL IN TOM BELCHER'S STORE

It was a plain case of affinity between Davy Allen and Old Man Th.o.r.n.ycroft's hound dog Buck. Davy, hurrying home along the country road one cold winter afternoon, his mind intent on finis.h.i.+ng his ch.o.r.es before dark, looked back after pa.s.sing Old Man Th.o.r.n.ycroft's house to find Buck trying to follow him--_trying_ to, because the old man, who hated to see anybody or anything but himself have his way, had chained a heavy block to him to keep him from doing what nature had intended him to do--roam the woods and poke his long nose in every briar patch after rabbits.

At the sight Davy stopped, and the dog came on, dragging behind him in the road the block of wood fastened by a chain to his collar and trying at the same time to wag his tail. He was tan-coloured, lean as a rail, long-eared, a hound every inch; and Davy was a ragged country boy who lived alone with his mother, and who had an old single-barrel shotgun at home, and who had in his grave boy's eyes a look, clear and unmistakable, of woods and fields.

To say it was love at first sight when that hound, dragging his prison around with him, looked up into the boy's face, and when that ragged boy who loved the woods and had a gun at home looked down into the hound's eyes, would hardly be putting it strong enough. It was more than love--it was perfect understanding, perfect comprehension. "I'm your dog," said the hound's upraised, melancholy eyes. "I'll jump rabbits and bring them around for you to shoot. I'll make the frosty hills echo with music for you. I'll follow you everywhere you go. I'm your dog if you want me--yours to the end of my days."

And Davy, looking down into those upraised, beseeching eyes, and at that heavy block of wood, and at the raw place the collar had worn on the neck, then at Old Man Th.o.r.n.ycroft's bleak, unpainted house on the hill, with the unhomelike yard and the tumble-down fences, felt a great pity, the pity of the free for the imprisoned, and a great longing to own, not a dog, but _this_ dog.

"Want to come along?" he grinned.

The hound sat down on his haunches, elevated his long nose, and poured out to the cold winter sky the pa.s.sion and longing of his soul. Davy understood, shook his head, looked once more into the pleading eyes, then at the bleak house from which this prisoner had dragged himself.

"That ol' devil!" he said. "He ain't fitten to own a dog. Oh, I wish he was mine!"