back.

"What I tell you, Sam! One thousand----"

The door closed. The merriment would go on till morning. And old Frank,
muscles limbering as he ran, soreness passing out of his side, was
galloping through the night, toward the railroad--and home.

Morning found him loping easily along the railroad, nose pointed north
like a compass. Now and then he left the track to let a train pass,
looking at it, if it went north, with wistful eyes, then keeping in
sight of it as far as he could. He passed a few small stations with big
water tanks, he crossed long, low trestles over boundless marshes, he
came at dusk to a village.

Hungry, lonely, he approached an unpainted cottage on its outskirts. Two
dogs rushed at him; he faced them and they turned back. He trotted on,
hair risen in an angry tuft down his back. He slept curled up in an
abandoned shed, but not for long. The morning stars lingering low over
the flat horizon kept pace with him, then a sea of mottled pink clouds,
then the huge red face of the rising sun.

At midday he pounced on an animal like a muskrat that tried to cross the
track--a tough thing to kill, a tougher to eat. At dusk he drew near a
farmhouse, where a man was chopping wood. The man picked up a stick,
ordered him away, then went on chopping.

He made no more overtures after this, but many a farmer thought a fox
had been among his chickens. Habits of civilization had given way
perforce to habits of outlawry. Only as he galloped north day after day
his eyes still shone with the eager light of the bird dog's craving for
human companionship and love.

The number of tracks that branched out from the city whose environs he
skirted bewildered him for a minute; then he took the one that pointed
due north. All the days he travelled, part of the nights. Sometimes at
first he had wondered why he did not reach home, at last to travel
always north had become a habit, and he wondered no more.

But the time came when he could not keep on going as fast and as long as
formerly. There were days when he found hardly anything at all to eat.
The endless ties passing under him began to make him dizzy and faint.
His long hair was matted; his ribs showed; his eyes grew haggard. It was
a wonder the young man knew him for what he was.

He had come into the freight yards of a town at nightfall, in a cold,
driving rain, a bedraggled, forlorn figure, a stray dog. A passenger
train had just passed him, stopped at the stati