Vanishing points Author:Alice Brown 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: THE STORY OF ABE THERE is something that all dogs know and a few men. It is what gives the dog that look in the eyes, of unconquerable love, of hope even agai... more »nst the fact of abuse." This was what the lean gray-headed man with the army button said to the rest of us smoking with him on the hotel veranda. Then he took out his big worn wallet and selected from it a yellowed paper, put on his eye-glasses, and scanned it frowningly. "Yes," said he, "I've got that right. I wrote it down some years ago. I've tried to get a little further with it, but I never did." One of the men had just given a dog—his own dog— a cuff, as he thought righteously. Mac was a sober collie, a one-man dog, with no eye for any but his master, and he had, apparently without provocation, assaulted a nervous fox-terrier and sent him away yapping, with a salutary memory of rough-shod teeth. And then his master had roared out and cuffed him, and he had taken his dose with a faultless bearing and lain down in a pretence at the degag6 "flump" of a dog with nothing to do of a shiny afternoon but snap at flies and dream of battles won. He seemed not to recognize in the least that his dignity had been assailed; but he did give his master, in the one moment of accepting the cuff, a look, half remonstrance and half a divinereproach. Even then there was no resentment in it. We who had seen the foregoing provocation—his master had been back to it—rushed in to say that Mac hadn't been the offender. Foxy had nagged him and taken unwarrantable liberties such as no high-bred person could suffer. Therefore Mac had done justly in his brief reproof. The master upon that bent down and gave MacGregor's forehead an apologetic smooth, and Mac looked up with that same clear faith in the mirror of his eyes—forgetfulness, too: ye...« less