Buff a collie Author:Albert Payson Terhune Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: achieve this Heaven-sent miracle, the lives of thousands of brave men were needed. And at the terrible blast of the bugle-call these men responded in millions. ... more » Dick Snowden was one of them. There were tears at the Snowden home when Dick first went thence to the officers' training- camp. There was dire loneliness after he had gone. But there were no tears when, at the end of his last furlough, Captain Richard Snowden said good-bye to his family and embarked for France. There were no tears, then. There was a hero- smile on Klyda's drawn lips. Baby Marise tried to smile, too. And at least she did not cry— which was very brave indeed. Jock looked long and gravely up into Snowden's forcedly gay face; and laid his splendid head against his master's khaki knee as Dick said to him: "Good-bye, old chap! Take care of them till I come back. You're the man of the house, remember, while I'm gone." No, there were no tears when Captain Dick Snowden sailed gallantly away to fight the grey- clad pests which were engulfing the world. But there was a deadly and bitter loneliness that swooped down on the once-merry little household and gripped it by the throat—a lonelinessthat deepened and grew more cruelly hard to bear as the dreary weeks sagged on. Jock, with his queer collie sixth sense, felt acutely the changed atmosphere of the place. He sought, in a thousand unobtrusive ways, to console and cheer his mistress and Marise. And he seemed to have understood Dick's parting charge to him to assume the responsibilities of "the man of the house." Always Jock had been a fiery guardian of the home in the matter of warding off intruders. Nowadays his jealous guardianship became an obsession. Voluntarily abandoning his lifelong nightly resting-place on the rug outside the door of Kl...« less