y down into
his dark eyes.

"Gun-shy?" asked the guest. "Or perhaps he's never heard a gun fired?"

"He's heard hundreds of guns fired," said the Master. "I never allow a
gun to be fired on The Place, of course, because we've made it a bird
refuge. But Bruce went with us in the car to the testing of the Lewis
machineguns, up at Haskell. They made a most ungodly racket. But
somehow it didn't seem to bother the Big Dog at all."

"H'm!" mused the guest, his professional interest vehemently roused.
"He would be worth a fortune over there. There are a lot of collies in
the service, in one capacity or another--almost as many as the
Airedales and the police dogs. And they are doing grand work. But I
never saw one that was better fitted for it than Bruce. It's a pity he
lives on the wrong side of the Atlantic. He could do his bit, to more
effect than the average human. There are hundreds of thousands of men
for the ranks, but pitifully few perfect courier-dogs."

The Mistress was listening with a tensity which momentarily grew more
painful. The Master's forehead, too, was creased with a new thought
that seemed to hurt him. To break the brief silence that followed the
guest's words, he asked:

"Are the dogs, over there, really doing such great work as the papers
say they are? I read, the other day--"

"'Great work!'" repeated the guest. "I should say so. Not only in
finding the wounded and acting as guards on listening posts, and all
that, but most of all as couriers. There are plenty of times when the
wireless can't be used for sending messages from one point to another,
and where there is no telephone connection, and where the firing is too
hot for a human courier to get through. That is where is the war dogs
have proved their weight in radium. Collies, mostly. There are a
million true stories of their prowess told, at camp-fires. Here are
just two such incidents--both of them on record, by the way, at the
British War Office

"A collie, down near Soissons, was sent across a bad strip of
fire-scourged ground, with a message. A boche sharpshooter fired at him
and shattered his jaw. The dog kept on, in horrible agony, and
delivered the message. Another collie was sent over a still hotter and
much longer stretch of territory with a message. (That was during the
Somme drive of 1916.) He was shot at, a dozen times, as he ran. At last
two bullets got him. He fell over, mortally wounded. He scrambled to
his feet and kept on f