things happened.

Everyone, except movie actors and newly-appointed policemen,
knows that a man on foot cannot shoot straight, unless he is
standing stock still. Yet, as luck would have it, this second
shot found a mark where the first and better aimed bullet had
gone wild.

Lad had leaped the narrow and deep ditch left along the lawn-edge
by workers who were putting in a new water-main for the Place. On
the far side of this obstacle he had stopped, and had waited for
his friend to follow. But the friend had not followed. Instead,
he had been somehow responsible for a spurt of red flame and for
a most thrilling racket. Lad was more impressed than ever by the
man's wondrous possibilities as a midnight entertainer. He
waited, gayly expectant, for more. He got it.

There was a second rackety explosion and a second puff of
lightning from the man's out-flung hand. But, this time,
something like a red-hot whip-lash smote Lad with horribly
agonizing force athwart the right hip.

The man had done this,--the man whom Laddie had thought so
friendly and playful!

He had not done it by accident. For his hand had been out-flung
directly at the pup, just as once had been the arm of the
kennelman, back at Lad's birthplace, in beating a disobedient
mongrel. It was the only beating Lad had ever seen. And it had
stuck, shudderingly, in his uncannily sensitive memory. Yet now,