in his face, sweaty and grimed, was a grin of pride.

"You plucky little devil," he said, contemplating the limp sack as he
loaded his pipe for the first time that afternoon. "You--you plucky
little devil!"

He tied the end of Neewa's rope halter to a sapling, and began
cautiously to open the grub sack. Then he rolled Neewa out on the
ground, and stepped back. In that hour Neewa was willing to accept a
truce so far as Challoner was concerned. But it was not Challoner that
his half-blinded eyes saw first as he rolled from his bag. It was Miki!
And Miki, his awkward body wriggling with the excitement of his
curiosity, was almost on the point of smelling of him!

Neewa's little eyes glared. Was that ill-jointed lop-eared offspring of
the man-beast an enemy, too? Were those twisting convolutions of this
new creature's body and the club-like swing of his tail an invitation
to fight? He judged so. Anyway, here was something of his size, and
like a flash he was at the end of his rope and on the pup. Miki, a
moment before bubbling over with friendship and good cheer, was on his
back in an instant, his grotesque legs paddling the air and his yelping
cries for help rising in a wild clamour that filled the golden
stillness of the evening with an unutterable woe.

Challoner stood dumbfounded. In another moment he would have separated
the little fighters, but something happened that stopped him. Neewa,
standing squarely over Miki, with Miki's four over-grown paws held
aloft as if signalling an unqualified surrender, slowly drew his teeth
from the pup's loose hide. Again he saw the man-beast. Instinct, keener
than a clumsy reasoning, held him for a few moments without movement,
his beady eyes on Challoner. In midair Miki wagged his paws; he whined
softly; his hard tail thumped the ground as he pleaded for mercy, and
he licked his chops and tried to wriggle, as if to tell Neewa that he
had no intention at all to do him harm. Neewa, facing Challoner,
snarled defiantly. He drew himself slowly from over Miki. And Miki,
afraid to move, still lay on his back with his paws in the air.

Very slowly, a look of wonder in his face, Challoner drew back into the
tent and peered through a rent in the canvas.

The snarl left Neewa's face. He looked at the pup. Perhaps away back in
some corner of his brain the heritage of instinct was telling him of
what he had lost because of brothers and sisters unborn--the
comradeship of babyhood, the play