me whereabouts I am at all?" asked Bert.

The man regarded him, and more particularly his rubber boots, with
sinister suspicion. Then he replied in a strange outlandish tongue
that was, as a matter of fact, Czech. He ended suddenly at the sight of
Bert's blank face with "Don't spik English."

"Oh!" said Bert. He reflected gravely for a moment, and then went his
way.

"Thenks," he, said as an afterthought. The man regarded his back for a
moment, was struck with an idea, began an abortive gesture, sighed, gave
it up, and went on also with a depressed countenance.

Presently Bert came to a big wooden house standing casually among the
trees. It looked a bleak, bare box of a house to him, no creeper grew on
it, no hedge nor wall nor fence parted it off from the woods about it.
He stopped before the steps that led up to the door, perhaps thirty
yards away. The place seemed deserted. He would have gone up to the
door and rapped, but suddenly a big black dog appeared at the side and
regarded him. It was a huge heavy-jawed dog of some unfamiliar breed,
and it, wore a spike-studded collar. It did not bark nor approach him,
it just bristled quietly and emitted a single sound like a short, deep
cough.

Bert hesitated and went on.

He stopped thirty paces away and stood peering about him among the
trees. "If I 'aven't been and lef' that kitten," he said.

Acute sorrow wrenched him for a time. The black dog came through the
trees to get a better look at him and coughed that well-bred cough
again. Bert resumed the road.

"She'll do all right," he said.... "She'll catch things.

"She'll do all right," he said presently, without conviction. But if it
had not been for the black dog, he would have gone back.

When he was out of sight of the house and the black dog, he went into
the woods on the other side of the way and emerged after an interval
trimming a very tolerable cudgel with his pocket-knife. Presently he saw
an attractive-looking rock by the track and picked it up and put it in
his pocket. Then he came to three or four houses, wooden like the last,
each with an ill-painted white verandah (that was his name for it) and
all standing in the same casual way upon the ground. Behind, through
the woods, he saw pig-stys and a rooting black sow leading a brisk,
adventurous family. A wild-looking woman with sloe-black eyes and
dishevelled black hair sat upon the steps of one of the houses nursing a
baby, but at the sight of Ber