His forbidding disposition had probably stood between Sergeant Moore and
further promotion. His contemporaries, the older men of the corps, knew
he had once been married. His juniors had never seen the sergeant in
converse with a woman. Withal it was believed that Sergeant Moore had
one weakness, one soft spot in his armor. It was said that when he
believed himself to be quite alone with his dog Sourdough he indulged
himself in some of the tendernesses of a widowed father who lavishes all
his heart upon a single child.

There was little enough about Sourdough to remind one of a human child,
lovable or otherwise. If the master was grim and forbidding in manner
and appearance, the dog exhibited a broadly magnified reflection of the
same attributes. His color was a sandy grayish yellow without markings.
His coat was coarse, rather ragged, and extraordinarily dense. His
pricked ears were chipped and jagged from a hundred fights, and in a
diagonal line across his muzzle was a broad white scar, gotten, men
said, in combat with a timber-wolf in the Athabasca country.

It was a part of Sourdough's pose or policy in life to profess
short-sightedness. He would walk past a group of dogs as though unaware
of their existence. Yet let one of those dogs but cock an eye of
impudence in his direction, or glance with lifting eyebrow at one of his
fellows, with a sneer or jeer in his heart for Sourdough, and in that
instant Sourdough would be upon him like an angry lynx, with a bitter
snarl and a snap that was pretty certain to leave its scar. This done,
Sourdough would pass on, with hackles erect and a hunch of his shoulders
which seemed to say:

"When next you are inclined to rudeness, remember that Sourdough knows