te--quiet--quiet--steady--steady!"

The frantic panting was growing less; but still the wild fire blazed in
the amber-brown eyes. Once he started to rise, but she pushed him gently
back. Again she lifted his head, and looked at him long, pleadingly.

"Can't you see?" she said. "Can't you see?"

And now there came a change, visible to Burton, and to them all. The
panting stopped altogether, the dog choked and swallowed. The pricked,
eager ears fell back gently against the long thoroughbred head. The
wildness faded out of the eyes that stared into the girl's face, and in
them came the light of love, the dawn of understanding.

"You see now, don't you?" she said quietly.

She rose to her feet. He did not move, but lay there looking up at her
humbly, wonderingly. She stood above him a moment and still he did not
move.

"Time's up!" said one of the men tensely.

She nodded to show she had heard. It was as if she might break the
spell if she spoke. The man led the pony to her. With no haste, now, she
got into the saddle.

"Heel!" she commanded.

The pointer rose and looked up at her.

"Heel!" she repeated.

When she rode out of the woods, across the sunlit fields toward the
judges, at her pony's heels trotted the pointer, obedient now, as if he
had left behind him, in that patch of woods, his wild heritage.

No man or woman who saw the work of Arnold's Drake the rest of that
morning can ever forget it. Fast as ever, yet he kept the course. Bold,
independent, aggressive, yet at every shrill whistle he turned, and
according to the wave of her handkerchief went to right or left.

Ten coveys of birds, in the hour and a half that remained to him, he
found. From terrific speed men saw him flash ten times into the
statuesque immobility of a point. They forgot even so steady and
painstaking a fellow as Count Redstone. It was the pointer who captured
their imaginations.

On Saturday night, while the crowd was at supper, the decision of the
judges, who always stopped at Freedom Hill, was telephoned in. And the
decision showed them to be dog men, not martinets--men who can overlook
a grievous fault in the face of a magnificent accomplishment and a
future full of promise.

A veteran reporter took the message, then stood in the dining-room door
a moment, his eyes twinkling at the faces turned his way.

"Champion," he said, and paused a moment, "Champion, Arnold's Drake."

But when the girl declared she must telegraph