Read Lad: A Dog for Free Online

the drying ground at The Place, fluttered a large white object. It was palpably a nurse’s uniform—palpably the nurse’s uniform. And Lad greeted its presence there with a grin of pure bliss.
    In less than two seconds the uniform was off the line, with three huge rents marring its stiff surface. In less than thirty seconds, it was reposing in the rich black mud on the verge of the lake, and Lad was rolling playfully on it.
    Then he chanced to remember his long-neglected enemies, the squirrels, and his equally neglected prey, the rabbits. And he loped off to the forest to wage gay warfare upon them. He was gloriously, idiotically, criminally happy. And, for the time, he was a fool.
    All day long, complaints came pouring in to the Master. Lad had destroyed the whole “set” of cream. Lad had chased the red cow till it would be a miracle if she didn’t fall sick of it. Lad had scared poor dear little Peter Grimm so badly that the cat seemed likely to spend all the rest of its nine lives squalling in the treetop and crossly refusing to come down.
    Lad had spoiled a Sunday leg of mutton, up at the Lodge. Lad had made a perfectly respectable horse run madly away for nearly twenty-five hundred feet, and had given the horse’s owner a blasphemous half-mile run over a plowed field after a cherished and ravished lap robe. Lad had well-nigh killed a neighbor’s particularly killable dog. Lad had wantonly destroyed the nurse’s very newest and most expensive uniform. All day it was Lad—Lad—Lad!
    Lad, it seemed, was a storm center, whence radiated complaints that ran the whole gamut from tears to lurid profanity; and, to each and every complaint, the Master made the same answer:
    â€œLeave him alone. We’re just out of hell—Lad and I! He’s doing the things I’d do myself, if I had the nerve.”
    Which, of course, was a manifestly asinine way for a grown man to talk.
    Long after dusk, Lad pattered meekly home, very tired and quite sane. His spell of imbecility had worn itself out. He was once more his calmly dignified self, though not a little ashamed of his babyish pranks, and mildly wondering how he had come to behave so.
    Still, he could not grieve over what he had done. He could not grieve over anything just yet. The Mistress was alive! And while the craziness had passed, the happiness had not. Tired, drowsily at peace with all the world, he curled up under the piano and went to sleep.
    He slept so soundly that the locking of the house for the night did not rouse him. But something else did. Something that occurred long after everyone on The Place was sound asleep. Lad was joyously pursuing, through the forest aisles of dreamland, a whole army of squirrels that had not sense enough to climb trees—when in a moment, he was wide awake and on guard. Far off, very far off, he heard a man walking.
    Now, to a trained dog there is as much difference in the sound of human footfalls as, to humans, there is a difference in the aspect of human faces. A belated countryman walking along the highway, a furlong distant, would not have awakened Lad from sleep. Also, he knew and could classify, at any distance, the footsteps of everyone who lived on The Place. But the steps that had brought him wide awake and on the alert tonight did not belong to one of The Place’s people; nor were they the steps of anybody who had a right to be on the premises.
    Someone had climbed the fence, at a distance from the drive, and was crossing the grounds, obliquely, toward the house. It was a man, and he was still nearly two hundred yards away. Moreover, he was walking stealthily; and pausing every now and then as if to reconnoiter.
    No human, at that distance, could have heard the steps. No dog could have helped hearing them. Had the other dogs been at home instead of at the boarding kennels, The Place would by this time have been re-echoing with barks. Both scent and sound would have given