he himself had just had a like experience.

In an instant, the pup's trustful friendliness was gone. The man
had come on the Place, at dead of night, and had struck him. That
must be paid for! Never would the pup forget,--his agonizing
lesson that night intruders are not to be trusted or even to be
tolerated. Within a single second, he had graduated from a little
friend of all the world, into a vigilant watchdog.

With a snarl, he dropped the bag and whizzed forward at his
assailant. Needle-sharp milk-teeth bared, head low, ruff
abristle, friendly soft eyes as ferocious as a wolf's, he
charged.

There had been scarce a breathing-space between the second report
of the pistol and the collie's counterattack. But there had been
time enough for the onward-plunging thief to step into the narrow
lip of the water-pipe ditch. The momentum of his own rush hurled
the upper part of his body forward. But his left leg, caught
between the ditch-sides, did not keep pace with the rest of him.
There was a hideous snapping sound, a screech of mortal anguish;
and the man crashed to earth, in a dead faint of pain and
shock,--his broken left leg still thrust at an impossible angle
in the ditch.

Lad checked himself midway in his own fierce charge. Teeth bare,
throat agrowl, he hesitated. It had seemed to him right and
natural to assail the man who had struck him so painfully. But
now this same man was lying still and helpless under him. And the
sporting instincts of a hundred generations of thoroughbreds