Adventure Magazine, December 10, 1924 — page 91: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Snowzer “Brock’s” universally accepted trade mark. Snowzer felt more happy after that. It wasn’t the sort of thing, the ten-mile-out-of town, back-garden-pig-stye-market-garden- fenced - coppice - full - of - tame-reared-pheas- ants sort of business he had been used to, but it was exhilarating. It stretched his long legs, breathed his deep lungs, and warmed him up. He felt that life without Young Bill, the lightweight, might after all be just, if only just, bearable. He had one last loping look along shore for the aforesaid pug-nosed Young Bill, or his cap, or his belt—especially his belt—and then hied him inland to the abodes of men. And that, many will say, is just like a dog. Can’t last alone in the wild without starv- ing; must have man. Different than cats. But wait. Snowzer’s business with the abodes of men was strictly of a nocturnal and professional character. He did not, except for the slum home of Young Bill, enter ’em, and he did not enter that very much even. He may have been, and was, one top-hole house dog, but not a housy dog. He preferred God’s fresh air, though for the first time in his life he was really breathing it quite free of soot and factory fumes. a that he covered five miles before he struck a house—a whitewashed little farm perched on the middle of a mighty slope. He had never before been half-a- mile from any house. One rigid nose inspection from behind the hedge of the kitchen-garden told him all he wanted to know, and through a fowl- made gap he entered in. In the black in- tervals, when racing clouds put out the moon, he got the hang of the place—marked hutches full of what Young Bill called “drummers,” and more ordinary people rabbits, examined a shed full of “‘red un’s,”’ according to Young Bill, but fowls accord- ing to us, and located one big black re- triever, attached to one kennel by one chain. There was no guarantee that he might keep so attached, truly, but Snowzer did not worry over him. Snowzer had dealt, always in the way o’ business and circumspectly of course, with dogs on chains before. More than once he had stepped over the chain without waking the dog. He was an expert among experts and his finesse at this game was superb. SNOWZER may have felt surprize 69 He moved, and nobody would have sworn that it was not a cloud-shadow slid- ing among the cabbage-stumps. A dark period followed, and there was the very faintest of faint sounds in the region of the rabbit-hutches. That sound was the stifled death-squeal of a rabbit; and when, half a minute later, the moon cascaded down it just revealed the tip of Snowzer’s whippy tail slithering through the hedge, and Snowzer had a drummer in his long lean jaws. Snowzer shifted as these long dogs alone can, almost unnoticeably and almost, it seemed, without touching the ground, down three hedges, stopped, deposited his rabbit under a clawey brier bush in a ditch, and fleeted back to the garden again. Heaven knows, however, how he got into the fowl house and silently, but he did. Only one fowl heard him, a cockerel, a red un. He opened his beak to complain, and— kept it open for good. With one leap— again I cannot say how the dog could see— Snowzer had him by the throat, strangling all sound. Snowzer left the fowl house with no more noise than an owl leaving a barn, and negotiated garden and hedge all in one streaky glide. The cockerel went with him. A momentary passing patter down ditches, a flash of something in the dark over gate- ways, and once the green glass illumined brain-windows as his eyes turned sideways, was all there was to be seen or heard of Snowzer before, almost before you could realize it, he was standing again beside the dead rabbit. And the big, black retriever slept on; but the farm cat returning from some most illegitimate business in the poaching line did not sleep. She was examining the dead rabbit under the brier-bush when Snowzer arrived like a spent shell. Then she was a flame-eyed, spitting, sparking, sizzling, swearing apparition going down that hedge like several furies; that is, after she had picked herself up from the double somersault that Snowzer’s fangs had shocked her into. | Snowzer, however, was fetched up all standing. He had, in fact, arrived at an impasse. He was, that is, up against the wild, and was at a loss how to act, He took up the drummer and looked round, dropped it, and repeated the evolution with the red un. His eyes were wide and Comicbool A) CO =