d commanded:

"COME!"

Up the broad stairs he stamped. Behind him trailed the dumfounded
procession; Laddie still pattering happily along with the Mistress. At
the open door of a large room at the stairhead, the author stood aside
and pointed in silent despair through the doorway.

"What's up?" queried Harmon, for perhaps the tenth time. "Is
anything--?"

His question ended in a grunt. And, like the others, he stared aghast
on the scene before him.

The room, very evidently, was a study. But much of its floor, just now,
was heaped, ankle high, with hundreds of pages of torn and crumpled
paper.

The desk-top and a Sheraton cabinet and table were bare of all
contents. On the floor reposed countless shattered articles of glass
and porcelain; jumbled together with blotters an pastepot and shears
and ink-stand and other utensils. Ink had been poured in grotesque
pattern on rugs and parquetry and window curtains.

In one corner lay a typewriter, its keys twisted and its carriage
broken. Books--some of them in rare bindings,--lay gutted and
ink-smeared, from one end of the place to the other.

Through the daze of general horror boomed the tremblingly majestic
voice of Rutherford Garretse.

"I wanted you to see!" he declaimed. "I ordered everything left as it
was. That mess of papers all over the floor is what remains of the
first draft of my book. The book I have been at work on for six months!
I--"

"And it was the dog, there!" sputtered the maid-servant; emotion riding
over discipline. "I c'n swear the room was neat and all dusted. Not a
blessed thing out of place; and all the paper where Mr. Garretse had
stacked 'em in his portfolio, yonder. I dusted this study and then the
dining room. And then I went out to sweep the veranda; like I always
do, before breakfast. And maybe ten minutes later I see this brute trot
out of Mr. Harmon's place, and along the road, and come, asnuffing up
the steps and into the house. And when I followed him upstairs and
scatted him out, I saw the room looking like it is, now; and I yells to
Mr. Garretse, and he's shaving, and--"

"That will do, Esther!" snapped the author. "And, now, sir--"

"But, Mr. Garretse," put in the Mistress, "Lad never did such a thing
as this, in all his life! He's been brought up in the house. Even as a
puppy, he was--"

"The evidence shows otherwise," interrupted Garretse, with a visible
struggle at self-control. "No human, unless he were a maniac, wou