ivering
nose and swelled his heaving chest. Beyond the baggageman he saw through
the open door, as on a moving-picture screen, sunlit fields and sunlit
woods whirling past. He began to bark at them eagerly, his eyes hungry,
his tail beating against the taut chain an excited tattoo. The
baggageman turned with a grin.

"Birds?" he said.

At the word the dog reared straight up like a maddened horse.
Full-throated angry barks, interspersed with sharp, querulous yaps,
filled his roaring, swaying prison. How long since he had got so much
as a whiff of untainted air, or a glimpse of wild fields and woods! Out
there oceans of such air filled all the space between the gliding earth
and the sky. Out there miles on miles of freedom were rushing forever
out of his life. He began to rage, to froth at the mouth. The baggageman
closed the door.

"Hard, old scout!" The baggageman shook his head.

Resignedly the dog sank on his belly, his long body throbbing, his nose
between his paws. A deep sigh puffed a little cloud of dust from the
slatted floor.

Three years before he had opened his amazed puppy eyes on this man (and
woman) ruled planet. An agreeable place of abode he had found it as long
as he was owned by a man. The Jersey kennels of George Devant had bred
him; Devant had himself overlooked his first season's training, had
hunted him a few times. At Devant's untimely death, Mrs. Devant had sold
the place, the kennels, the mounts. But when, followed by a group of
purchasing sportsmen, the widow came to the kennel where he waited at
the end of his chain, she had clasped her hands together and cried out:

"I won't sell this one!"

Lancaster, bachelor friend of the late Devant, spoke up:

"Why, I had _my_ eyes on him."

"You won't get him," she laughed. "He'll live with me--won't you,
beauty?"

"He's not a lap dog," Lancaster had reminded her.

"Don't you suppose _I_ understand him?" she demanded.

Understand him? What did the woman know of a bird dog's soul? The most
intolerable of burdens is kindness where no understanding is. To Mrs.
Devant it never occurred, even remotely, that her Riverside Drive
apartment was a prison. She never dreamed why it was that on their
afternoon walks the dog, straining at his leash, kept his hungry eyes
fastened always on the cliffs across the Hudson. When they returned, as
she pulled off her wraps, she would look down at him.

"I know," she would say; "you are trying to tell me you l