At the sight Davy stopped, and the dog came on, dragging behind him in
the road the block of wood fastened by a chain to his collar, and trying
at the same time to wag his tail. He was tan-coloured, lean as a rail,
long-eared, a hound every inch; and Davy was a ragged country boy who
lived alone with his mother, and who had an old single-barrel shotgun at
home, and who had in his grave boy's eyes a look, clear and
unmistakable, of woods and fields.
To say it was love at first sight when that hound, dragging his prison
around with him, looked up into the boy's face, and when that ragged boy
who loved the woods and had a gun at home looked down into the hound's
eyes, would hardly be putting it strong enough. It was more than
love--it was perfect understanding, perfect comprehension. "I'm your
dog," said the hound's upraised, melancholy eyes. "I'll jump rabbits and
bring them around for you to shoot. I'll make the frosty hills echo with
music for you. I'll follow you everywhere you go. I'm your dog if you
want me--yours to the end of my days."
And Davy looking down into those upraised beseeching eyes, and at that
heavy block of wood, and at the raw place the collar had worn on the
neck, then at Old Man Thornycroft's bleak, unpainted house on the hill,
with the unhomelike yard and the tumble-down fences, felt a great pity,
the pity of the free for the imprisoned, and a great longing to own, not
a dog, but _this_ dog.
"Want to come along?" he grinned.
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