thing at all vague in his recollections of the gorgeous
newcomer.

As Rhuburger reached the topmost step, the collie lifted his head, his
nostrils dilating wide. A thrill went through him. His nearsighted eyes
swept the crowd. They rested at last on Rhuburger. Another deep
inhalation told him all he needed to know. Not in vain had Lad sniffed
so long and so carefully at those faint footprints in the road dust, at
the spot where Lady died. In his throat a deep growl was born.

"Hello, folks!" Rhuburger was declaiming, to a wholly unenthusiastic
circle of acquaintances. "Made another record, just now. The little
boat spun me here from Montclair in exactly nineteen minutes.
That's--that's roughly an average rate of a mile in seventy-five
seconds. Not so bad, eh? That car sure made a hit with ME, all right.
Not so much of a hit, maybe, with a couple of chickens and a fat old
dog that had the bad luck to be asleep in the middle of the--"

His plangent brag was lost in a sound seldom heard on the hither side
of jungle or zoo. From the group of slightly disgusted onlookers, a
huge and tawny shape burst forth; hurtling through the air, straight
for the fat throat of the boaster.

Rhuburger, by some heaven-sent instinct, flung up his arms to shield
his menaced jugular. He had no time to do more.

Lad's fury-driven eighty pounds of muscular weight crashed full against
his chest. Lad's terrible teeth, missing their throat-goal, drove deep
into the uplifted right forearm; shearing through imported tweed
coat-sleeve and through corded silken shirt, and through flabby flesh
and clean to the very bone.

The dog's lion-roar blended with the panic-screeches of the victim.
And, under that fearful impact, Rhuburger reeled back from the
stairhead, and went crashing down the steps, to the broad stone
flagging at the bottom.

Not once, during that meteoric, shriek-punctured downward flight, did
Lad loose his grip on the torn forearm. But as the two struck the
flagging at the bottom, he shifted his hold, with lightning speed;
stabbing once more for the exposed jugular.

He lunged murderously at his mark. Yes, and this time he found it. His
teeth had touched the pudgy throat, and began to cleave their
remorseless way to the very life of the man who had slain Lady.

But, out of the jumble of cries and stamping feet and explosive shouts
from the scared onlookers on the veranda above, one staccato yell
pierced the swirl of rage-mists i