Buff: A Collie and Other Dog-Stories — The Foul Fancier, Part 3
But next morning, after a night of less continuous slumber than he could recall in many a year, he dressed and started down to breakfast with a brand-new and granite-hard resolve in his tired mind.
For once in his life he had solved a problem--had solved it all himself.
As he opened the door of his bedroom Jeff leaped eagerly up from his nightly vigil post across the outer threshold.
Stiff as he was from his shoulder hurt, the dog gambolled gleefully round his master, patting at Dan’s knees with his flying white paws, wriggling himself into an ecstatic interrogation mark, and whimpering with delight at the wonderful fact that his adored demigod was once more with him after ten whole hours of absence.
Thus, the world over, do the average run of collies give morning salute to the man or woman they have accepted as their deity.
And, as ever, the greeting warmed Dan Rorke’s long-loveless heart.
He stooped over and patted the silken head.
The collie growled in horrific menace and caught Dan’s big hand between his mighty jaws as if to crush it.
But the jaws did not exert the pressure of a fraction of an ounce on the firm flesh they had so playfully imprisoned.
And the throaty growls were belied by a furious wagging of the plumed tail.
This was Jeff’s favourite game with his master.
With no one else would he deign to play.
Dan rumpled the dog’s soft ears, and looked with a queer new timidity into the deep-set dark eyes of his chum.
At the unquestioning joyous devotion he saw there, he felt a tiny twinge of relief.
Something he had let himself fear, in the long night’s meditations, had not yet begun to happen.
There was still time, plenty of time.
And, his resolve firmer than ever, he ran down to the breakfast room, where Red Keegan was already seating himself at the table.
“_Chron’cle’s_ got a spread on your match with Feltman!
” was the manager’s morning salutation.
“First page; and again, under Kampfmuller’s sign’ture, on the sporting page.
We’ve got a good start, all right.
Now----” “If it isn’t too late,” said Dan hesitantly, “I kind of wish you’d cancel the match.
I don’t honest think I c’n stop Kid Feltman; for all you say I’ve gone ahead this half year.
And it’s more’n an even bet he c’n stop me inside the limit.
So I’ve been thinking it over, and I guess you’d best call it off; or get ’em to subst’toot some easier guy than Felt----” “Good Lord!
” snorted Keegan.
“Do you set there and tell me you don’t even remember from yesterday the layout for that fight?
Of all the----” “Yep,” answered Rorke, sullenly playing with his food and glancing down for encouragement at the collie lying on the floor beside him.
“Yep.
I remember it all right, all right, Red.
I remember it.
But it won’t work.
That’s why I----” “Won’t _work_?
” thundered Keegan, glaring across at his embarrassed star.
“Why the blue hell won’t it work?
It’s the prettiest set-up we’ve ever handled.
There ain’t a flaw to it.
Won’t work, hey?
Why the----” “Because,” replied Dan sheepishly, yet firm as stone, as he glowered back at his manager, “because that set-up of yours calls for a heap of fancy fouling.
And--and I’m--I’m off fouling.
Off it for keeps.
That’s----” Red Keegan broke in on the halting announcement with a sound that a turkey might have produced had its tail feathers been pulled violently at the moment it chanced to be gobbling.
The result was a noise that brought Jeff to his feet with a jump; his tulip ears cocked, his eyes aglow with excited inquiry; a series of staccato barks racketing from his furry throat.
“Lay down, Jeffie!
” ordered Dan.
“He ain’t going to bite me.
He’s only----” “Are you plumb crazy, Dan?
” sputtered the manager.
“Or is it a bum little joke?
Off fouling, hey?
What’s going to keep you from the hungry house if----” “If clean scrapping won’t keep me fed,” answered Rorke, “I’ll go get back my job in the puddling gang.
Anyhow, it goes like I said.
I’m off fouling.
Now go ahead and swear!
” But Red Keegan did not go ahead and swear.
Profanity was a very present help to the nerves, in the event of stepping on a tack or mashing one’s thumb with a hammer or on hearing that one’s wife had eloped.
But this matter lay too deep for swearing.
Blusteringly, then flatteringly, then coaxingly and at last with the tremolo stop pulled far out, he pleaded with Dan.
He painted in glowing colours the middleweight’s comfortable rise from the ranks and the golden future that awaited him under Keegan’s guidance, if only he would have the intelligence to stick to his manager’s tuition and not get fool ideas that he could fight on the square well enough to keep himself warm.
He foretold a future of failure and gutter poverty should the fool hold to this suicidal new plan.
To all of which Dan Rorke answered not a word; but sat glumly frowning at the spotty tablecloth and occasionally letting his fidgety hand rest for a second on Jeff’s head.
When at last Keegan had run down and was bereft equally of breath and vocabulary and emotion, Dan began to speak.
He did not look at the puffingly apoplectic manager, but rambled on as if addressing the hole in his napkin.
“A feller told me once,” he began, “that there’s mighty little a collie dog don’t know.
And I’ve seen enough of Jeff, here, to find out that’s so.
Jeff c’n tell when I’m blue and when I’m tickled, just by looking at me.
It--it’d be funny, wouldn’t it, if he c’d get to telling, by looking at me, that I’m not on the square?
A dog with Jeff’s breeding and Jeff’s sense would sure be too high-toned to pal with a crook, if he knowed it.
And he knows a lot of things I’d never s’posed a animal c’d know.
” He looked down again at the collie as if for moral support.
At the worry in his master’s glance, Jeff’s dark eyes took on a glint of eager concern.
He laid one white little forepaw on Dan’s muddy boot, and whined softly, far down in his throat.
Thus encouraged, Rorke went on: “That’s only one end of it.
Here’s another: A man’s pretty low down in the list, ain’t he, if he can’t even fight as square as his dog c’n fight?
A clean dog’s sure got a right to a clean master.
Them folks yesterday was all praising Jeff.
They wasn’t praising him so much for licking the big feller as for licking him, _clean_; and for not fouling when he had a chance to.
I c’d see that myself.
Well, I sh’d think folks would feel that way about a man that fights clean.
Anyhow,” he finished defiantly, “no poor dog’s going to have the right to say he’s a whiter man than what I am.
I been thinking it all over.
And that’s the answer.
I’m off fouling.
Like I said.
” For the next twenty-four hours the bungalow and the gym were vibrant with the sounds of argument and vituperation.
Keegan exhausted his every battery.
And--like most men who think slowly and seldom--Dan Rorke grew more and more firmly set in his queer resolution, the more he discussed it.
Even stolid Bud Curly, his sparring partner and general handy man round the gym, was moved to bewilderment by the once-docile fighter’s firmness in resisting the all-powerful boss.
Only once, in a day and night of abusive exhortation on Red’s part, did Dan lose for an instant his sullen calm.
That was when Keegan grumbled: “It’s all the damn’ dog’s fault.
It’s him that’s turned you loony.
I’ve got a good mind to shoot him.
Then maybe you’ll----” “You shoot that dog,” flared Rorke, striding up to the little manager, his thick fingers working convulsively, “and, by the good Lord, I swear I’ll break your neck over my knee; if I go to the chair for it.
That goes for _you_, too, Curly!
If you think I’m bluffing, you’d best change your mind--unless you’re sick of staying alive.
It goes!
” To Bud Curly’s surprise the irascible Red did not retort.
Instead, he stood looking long and earnestly at the raging fighter.
Then he said with conciliatory calm: “Nobody wants to hurt the purp, Dan.
Climb down off the ceiling.
And if you’re so dead set on playing the fool--well, I s’pose I’ll have to trail my bets along with yours.
You can’t lick Feltman on the square.
But it won’t be my fault if you don’t put up the best fight of your life ag’in him.
It’s too late to cancel the match now.
All me and Curly c’n do is to train you to the minute and trust to luck for the rest.
” Glad to have won his sorry point, Dan settled down with grim energy to the task of training.
He knew how slight were his chances of victory.
Yet he was ready to meet the suddenly reconciled Keegan halfway, by training at his level best.
Feltman and a little retinue came to Pitvale, in order to be on the ground, and to avoid travel before the fight.
They set up training quarters scarce two blocks away from Keegan’s bungalow.
For nearly a month the two rivals wrought at their preparations for the battle.
Once or twice on hike or sprint they chanced to meet in street or highroad.
And such well-rehearsed chance meetings, with their mutual scowling frigidity, served Kampfmuller as splendid “grudge-fight” copy for the _Chronicle_.
The fight was to be held in the Pitvale Coliseum, a vast and barnlike structure originally built for state conventions and for summer Chautauqua lectures.
It was scheduled for ten o’clock on the night of April second.
On the morning of April second Dan Rorke awoke from a ten-hour sleep, ran under the shower, rubbed down, slipped into his clothes, and started for breakfast with the appetite of a longshoreman.
His nerves as well as his physique had profited by his hard and wise training.
If he was due to end the day in defeat, at least the thought of it had not marred his night’s rest or his appetite.
Outside his bedroom door he paused as usual for his morning frolic with Jeff.
But Jeff was not there.
In all their long months of chumship this was the first morning that Jeff had not been on hand to greet with noisy delight his new-awakened master.
And the dog’s absence perplexed Rorke.
Downstairs he went, hoping to find the collie waiting for him in the dining-room.
The room was empty.
Whistling for the missing Jeff, Dan went out on the tiny front porch.
No dog was in view.
But he saw Keegan and Bud working with scrambly haste at a far end of the yard, piling shovelfuls of fresh dirt into what looked like a new-dug hole under the yard’s one fruit tree.
Before Dan could call out, Curly happened to look up from his toil;
and caught sight of him as he stood on the porch steps.
Curly nudged Keegan and said something out of the corner of his mouth.
The two exchanged nervous whispers; then Red dropped his spade and came hurrying towards the house, a labouredly artificial smile of greeting on his bothered face.
“Seen Jeff, anywhere?
” asked Rorke, his puzzled eyes still on Curly, who was now patting the crumbly earth smooth over the filled excavation.
“Sure, I’ve seen him!
” babbled Keegan with forced joviality, and looking anywhere rather than at Dan.
“He was frisking round here just a minute ago.
Must ‘a’ run down street, a ways.
He’ll be back soon.
Come on in and eat!
Sleep all right?
I wasn’t expecting you down for another ten minutes.
” He had mounted the steps and almost forcibly was propelling Dan indoors.
“Looking for Jeff?
” hollowly queried Bud Curly, coming up the steps behind him.
“He’s all right.
Good old Jeff’s all right.
He was playing round in the gym just now.
” Dan Rorke was the least subtle of men; and his brain was too small to hold suspicion.
But a five-year-old child would have been keenly aware of the guilt and furtiveness in the manner of the two.
Dan stopped short.
He looked from one to the other of them; then at the fresh earth under the fruit tree.
“Red, you told me Jeff went down street!
” he accused.
“And now Bud says he’s out in the gym.
Which of you is lying?
And why is either of you lying?
And what were you burying out there?
Speak up, one of you;
or I’ll go there and dig till I find out!
” He spoke with rising excitement.
As he finished he made as if to start across the yard towards the tree.
Both men seized him and both began speaking at once.
“Jeff’s all right!
” insisted Red.
“And we was just spading up the earth to make that tree grow better.
It’s too spindly.
And----” “Yes,” declared Bud in the same breath, “Jeff’s feeling fine.
He’ll be back pres’n’ly.
We was trying to see could we bury some garbage out yonder, ’stead of bothering to burn it.
We----” “Jeff is dead!
” interrupted Dan, his voice all at once lifeless and flat.
“You been burying him.
You don’t want me to know.
He----” The two others fidgeted guiltily.
Then, clearing his throat, Keegan said: “I wanted to keep it from you, till after to-night, Danny.
I’m sorry.
Sorry, right down to the ground.
But since you’ve guessed that much of it I’d best tell you the whole thing.
Buck up and take it like a he-man, son.
After all, he was only just a dog.
I’ll buy you another one and----” “There ain’t any other one!
” denied Rorke chokingly.
“There was only just Jeff!
Him and me.
And he was the chum I-- What happened to him?
” he demanded fiercely, swallowing very hard and trying to keep his voice steady and his eyes dry.
“Spill it!
” “Then take it!
” cried Keegan harshly.
“Take it straight, like a he-man had ought to take rotten news.
This morning, when I went apast your door, there lay Jeff.
He was stone-dead.
I picked him up and brang him down on the porch.
I knowed how it’d queer your nerve to find out he was gone.
So I aimed to bury him and tell you he’d just strayed off, like; and that he would come home by and by.
When I got him out on the porch I noticed he was all strained backward.
And I’d seen dogs poisoned by strychnia before.
There ain’t any other poison that makes ’em look that way.
He----” “Poisoned!
” yelled Dan in blind fury, catching at the word.
“I’ll find the swine that did it, if it takes every cent I got.
And when I once get hold of him----” “I beat you to it, Danny,” continued Red’s sorrowing tones.
“I got Curly, here, to start digging a grave; and I piked down to Reuter’s drug store.
I had a sneaking s’spicion, already.
Reuter was just opening up for the day when I got there.
I asked him who had bought strychnia of him lately.
The only strychnia he’s sold in the past week was what he sold to a man yesterday; a feller who had a doctor’s p’scription for it, and said he wanted it to poison cats that kep’ him awake by yowling under his window.
He got Reuter to tell him how to fix it up in a piece of meat----” “Who was he?
” broke in Rorke, his eyeteeth showing, his deep voice a half-coherent growl.
“Who----” “The doctor that gave the man the p’scription,” said Keegan slowly, “was that old down-and-out M. D.
slob that Feltman has for a handy man.
The feller that bought the poison and asked Reuter how to fix it was--Kid Feltman.
He----” The manager got no further.
Dan Rorke was out of the door and down the steps at one bound.
It was only as he stopped to yank madly at the gate latch that Red and Curly overtook him and threw themselves bodily on the raging man.
Even then it was a matter of minutes before their combined strength and Bud’s wrestling grip, from behind, could quell him.
“Let me go!
” he snarled, straining and biting at the detaining arms.
“I’ll settle with him before Jeff’s cold!
I’ll----” “You’ll settle with him a heap better’n by trying to beat him up now, with his handlers and them to keep you from doing it,” promised Keegan.
“There’s better ways.
Lots better ways.
You listen to me, Danny boy!
” Momentarily spent with his own fury, Rorke suffered himself to be dragged indoors.
There Keegan faced him and said: “You want to square yourself with Feltman--and more’n square yourself?
Good.
Then here’s the way: Feltman’s always hated you, ever since he lost to you that time.
He’s told fifty folks he’d get even.
He’s seen, and he’s heard, how much store you set by Jeff.
So he poisoned him to get back at you.
Now here’s how you’ll get back at _him_: You was going to fight him clean.
And he’d ‘a’ most likely won.
So that ain’t the way to fight him, if you want to settle with him for poor Jeff.
The way to do is to sail in with every foul that can git past Kampfmuller.
And a hay load of ’em c’n git past that ivory mine.
Foul him from the start, with the murderingest set of fouls I’ve ever learned you.
Cripple him so he’ll be in the hosp’tal a year.
Foul him into a dead one; and then punch his head off’n him and win as early in the fight as you want to.
Git the idee?
Foul him to death if you like.
It’s no worse’n he treated Jeff.
The ring’s the place to finish him.
Not now, where you’d likely land up in the hoosgow before you’d more’n half hit him.
Go to it!
” Dan grunted avid assent.
And after breakfast careful rehearsing of old foul tactics and a study of new ones began.
As Dan Rorke, stripped and eager, sat in his hot dressing room under the auditorium that night, waiting for the summons to enter the ring, he had his first minute of solitary reflection throughout the whole Keegan-infested day.
His manager was upstairs, wrangling with the carnival treasurer.
Curly had gone to the ring to watch the wind-up of the second preliminary bout.
Dan was alone.
In his heart still raged black hate and a craving for revenge.
And he was sick with grief over his chum’s murder.
While he sat there, the faint challenge bark of a dog--a collie, perhaps--from nowhere in particular, drifted to him through the ill-boarded dressing-room walls.
At the sound Dan started violently.
“_Jeff?
_” he whispered under his breath.
As if in answer to his call, the room all at once seemed athrob with the presence of his loved dog.
In superstitious awe Dan peered about him.
Then he straightened his bent body.
And to an unseen Something he began to speak.
“We’re going to pay up the bill in a few minutes now, Jeffie!
” he promised.
“Watch me!
” The foolish words started a new train of thoughts in the tormented brain.
Watch him?
The clean-fighting dog watch his master put up the foulest fight of his career?
With the vision came sharp revulsion.
“Watch me, Jeff!
” he repeated aloud.
“Watch me do it!
Watch me do it, square!
_Square_, Jeffie, boy!
” While the odd exaltation was still upon him Keegan and Curly came back to the dressing room to escort him to the arena.
The Pitvale Athletic Carnival crowd that night witnessed the bloodiest and most spectacularly ferocious battle in the annals of the local ring.
From the sound of the gong Dan Rorke was at his antagonist, forcing the fight at every point.
Never once for the fraction of a second did he abandon the aggressive.
Feltman showered upon him an avalanche of scientific punishment.
But it failed to slow down that homicidal attack.
To Red Keegan’s goggle-eyed dismay and despite his dumfounded inter-round pleas, Rorke fought as clean as a Galahad.
Not once would he make use of even the safest foul.
Not once would he seek to elude the dull referee by using the easiest of Keegan’s carefully taught ruses.
He fought like a wild beast, but he fought like a fair one.
Buoyed up by his insane hate for his enemy and by his stark craving for vengeance, he was as a man in delirium.
The hideous punishment meted out to him had no visible effect on his maniac strength or speed.
His madness did not preclude the use of all the skill he could muster, but it made him impervious to pain and to shock.
Round after round the fight slashed on, while the crowd screamed and pounded in delight and while Red Keegan and Curly watched their madman with anguished eyes.
Willing to take the heaviest blow, if only he might land as heavy a smash in return, Dan tore away at his foe.
Four times he was knocked down.
Once he was unconscious for five seconds.
But borne ever onward by that wild urge of revenge he came flying back to the combat with undiminished fury.
Flesh and blood could not stand the fearful tax indefinitely.
Through all his mania Rorke began dimly to realise that there was a trifle less crushing vehemence in his own punches and less whirlwind speed in his onslaught.
With every atom of will and of rage and of resolve in his whole cosmos, he scourged himself to renewed effort.
The welter of blows avalanched upon him, unfelt.
Over and over in his hot brain he was saying: “Watch me do it, Jeff!
Watch me do it, _square_!
” And he fought on.
As Dan reeled back to his corner at the end of the hammer-and-tongs ninth round he heard, as from miles off, Keegan’s voice whispering to him: “Try out the good old stunts, Danny!
’Tain’t too late, even yet.
He’s groggy.
