shoulder, with a jar which sent the
poor beast sprawling into the red flickering edge of the fire. And in
the same moment Jan let out a most singular cry as he reared up on his
hind feet, allowing his fore paws, very gently and without pressure, to
rest on the man's chest.

His cry had something of a bark in it, but yet was not a bark. It had a
good deal of a kind of crooning whine about it, but yet was not a whine.
It was just a cry of almost overpowering joy and gladness; and it was so
uncannily different from any dog-talk she had ever heard, that the
singed and frightened husky bitch by the fire stood gaping open-mouthed
to harken at it.

And the man--long-practised discipline made him lay down his gun,
instead of dropping it; and then he voiced an exclamation of
astonishment scarcely more articulate than Jan's own cry, and his two
arms swung out and around the hound's massive shoulders in a movement
that was an embrace.

"Why, Jan--dear old Jan! Jan, come back to me--here! Good old Jan!"

It was with something strangely like a sob that the bearded sergeant,
Dick Vaughan, sank down to a sitting position on the log, with Jan's
head between his hands.

His beard was evidence of a longish spell on the trail; and the weakness
that permitted of his catching his breath in a childlike sob--that was
due, perhaps, to solitude and the peculiar strain of his present
business on the trail, as well as to the great love he felt for the
hound he had thought lost to him for ever.

"How d'ye do, Devil! How d'ye do! We were just hurryin' on for your
place. Will ye take a drop o' rye? I'm boss here. That's only my
chore-boy you're slobberin' over, Mister Devil. Eh, but it's hunky down
to Coney Island, ain't it?"

These remarks came in a jerky sort of torrent from the second man, one
of whose peculiarities was that his arms above the elbow were lashed
with leather thongs to his body. There were leather hobbles about his
ankles, and on the ground near by him lay a pair of unlocked handcuffs,
carefully swathed in soft-tanned deerskin.

Sergeant Dick Vaughan's companion may possibly have accentuated the
solitude in which he traveled; such a companion could hardly have
mitigated it as a source of nervous strain, for he was mad as a March
hare. But there was nothing else harelike about him, for he was
homicidally mad, and had killed two men and half killed a third before
Sergeant Vaughan laid hands upon him. And his was not the on