Buff: A Collie

And Other Dog-Stories

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• Publisher: The Floating Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781776532377

Dog lovers, rejoice. Buff: A Collie is another of Albert Payson Terhune's beloved volumes of stories about dogs. They run the gamut from silly to heartwarming, and everything in between. Endlessly entertaining, the stories also offer keen insight into why these fuzzy fellows have earned the honor of being man's best friend. You'll come back to this charming collection of canine antics again and again.

The Foul Fancier

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In the sixth round of his fight with Kid Feltman, the end came. And it was not at all the end that anybody but Dan Rorke and Keegan, his manager, looked for.

For the outclassed and battered and wabbling Rorke won.

Two minutes earlier, no one in the Pastime Athletic Club auditorium would have bet a cancelled lottery ticket on Rorke's chances. And the result left the crowd as puzzled as was the raging Feltman himself.

No; Rorke did not see one sweet face in the throng—a face that nerved him to superhuman effort and victory. Nor did he spur himself to a Herculean last stand that won him the fight. That was not Dan Rorke's way. And most assuredly it was not the way of his manager and mentor, Red Keegan. The victory was won by subtler and less hackneyed methods.

Here, in brief, was the procedure:

At the end of the fifth round Dan had slumped back to his corner, dizzy and gone. Red Keegan's practised eye summed up his condition as it had summed up his chances during the past two rounds. And he whispered:

"Time's come for it, Danny boy! He's too many for you."

Danny boy needed no further amplifying of the order. Twenty times in the gym, under Keegan's shrewd tutelage, he had rehearsed what now he was about to do.

Rorke rose sluggishly, groggily, staggeringly, to the summons for the sixth round. He swayed drunkenly towards the centre of the ring. Seeing which, the crowd screeched to Feltman to sail in and finish him. Obligingly, Feltman prepared to obey the behest of his patrons. He took no chances of a possible trick by laying himself open. But, with all the zest that could include caution, he went for his worn-down opponent.

Rorke met the onslaught right gamely. He called on all his waning strength for one last desperate rally. And the crowd did homage to his gameness by howling approval.

Feltman was a wise man. He knew this false burst of power could not last. Sooner than waste himself in fighting back he covered and waited for the momentary flash to burn out.

But the cheering of the fickle crowd was too much for him. And after an instant of blocking and retreating he met the pathetically brief rally, foot to foot.

There was a flurrying exchange of close-quarters blows, Rorke spinning about so that his back was towards the referee. And, as he spun, Rorke screamed out in mortal agony. His gloved hands flew heavenward, pawing the air.

He sank to the canvas floor, doubled up like a jack-knife; his hands clutching spasmodically at his abdomen some two or three inches below the belt.

Feltman stepped back in astonishment. He had not struck below the belt. He could not account for Rorke's posture of anguish. But for the fallen man's face both Feltman and the perplexed referee would have branded the squirming and groaning antics as a pure fake. But there was nothing fakelike in the face that twitched above the writhing body. Rorke's swarthy visage had gone green white. It had the ghastly hue of death.

On the instant Red Keegan was leaning over the ropes, shaking his fist in Feltman's face, and squalling shrilly:

"Foul! Did y'see that, Mister Referee? Y'saw it! Y'couldn't miss seeing it! FOUL! Look at the poor lad, will you? He's dying!"

The referee, Honest Roy Constantin, lived up to the record that had given him his nickname. Rorke was rolling about the floor in torment. His face was better indorsement of his condition than would have been fifty doctors' certificates. Only by a foul could such agony have been caused.

Not alone was Rorke's manager claiming it, but fifty voices from boxes and bleachers were taking up the yell in the wontedly sheeplike fashion of fight fans. Honest Roy himself had been behind Rorke at the moment the blow was struck. But he had seen that Feltman was leading for the body. And he could deduce the rest.

While Kid Feltman frothed at the mouth with impotent fury, Honest Roy Constantin thereupon awarded the fight to Rorke—on a flagrant foul. And the whole thing was done on the strength of Rorke's facial aspect. If Constantin had chanced to be an actor instead of a poolroom czar he would never have been taken in by so simple a trick. For even in those days it was a common ruse on the stage.

Dan Rorke, at the outset of the round, had drawn in a deep breath; and he had held it. This, together with his wild exertions, had turned his complexion to a purple red. Then, suddenly, as he fell, he had relaxed his muscles and his breath; and had at once taken another breath and had rolled his eyes upward. The receding blood had left his face a chalky green. Long rehearsed acting had done the rest. After that first frenzied glare at the referee he had let his head droop and had hidden his slowly incarnadining cheeks from further view. The one glimpse of his corpse-like face was enough for Honest Roy.

"You see, Danny," apologised Keegan, when he had half carried his principal to the dressing room, "it was the only way out. We either misjudged that Feltman bird wrong or else we overplayed the big improvement you've been making these past few months. One or the other. It don't matter which. The way it lays, you ain't good enough—not yet—to go up against a top-notcher like him. I seen that before you'd been in the ring two rounds. He was a-eating you up. It was either pull the good old foul claim or stand for a knock-out. I didn't dast give you the office for any funny business. Not with Honest Roy refereeing. He's a crank on square fighting, Roy Constantin is. He'd 'a' spotted any of our best ones. So I had to frame it, other way round. But it was a close call, at that!"

When Red Keegan picked Dan Rorke out of the night-shift puddler crew at the Pitvale Steel Works he did so after a long psychological study. This study dealt much with the young middleweight's rugged strength and gameness and his natural skill as a fighter. But it concerned itself equally with Rorke's innate gifts for more subtle things; among the rest, a certain crude ability for acting. Then he had moulded the ignorant boy according to his own wily plans.

As a man, Keegan was not a marked success. As a crooked diplomatist, he had sparks of genius. Too fragile and too timid to hit a blow himself, he was a born ring general. And it was his joy and his talent to study out more foul tactics than occur to the normal fighter's bovine brain in the course of a life-time.

None of these manoeuvres came under the head of "rough stuff" or even of "coarse work." There was a finesse to them all. They could be pulled—rightly learned by the right man—under the very nose of the average referee.

Not once, but six times, had Dan Rorke gone into the ring, coached by Keegan, and bested men who were his superiors. He had done it by a succession of crafty and murderous fouls, which the referee failed to bring home to him.

Twice, by unobtrusive butting, in the course of a clinch, he had ripened his half-stunned antagonist for an easy knock-out. Again, he had driven his specially shod heel down on the instep of Spider Boyce with such scientific force as to make the sufferer drop his guard long enough to let in a haymaker to the jaw. Surreptitious kneeing was another of his arts.

All these tricks seem broad and obvious in the telling. So would a full description of the method whereby a conjurer hauls a kicking rabbit out of an empty hat. It is all in the way it is done. And, thanks to Red Keegan's tireless rehearsing and to his own peculiar talents, Rorke did it in a way to defy casual detection.

When an overkeen referee happened to be the third man in the ring there were other tactics to fall back on. In such event and with a too formidable opponent, there were still divers means for wooing victory—the claim of foul and the white-faced anguish, for example. Twice before, in other sections of the fight map, had Rorke and Keegan worked this bit of acting.

As a result Dan Rorke was rising fairly fast in his profession. He was not of championship timber. He would never develop into such a contender; nor does one real-life fighter in fifty. But he was good enough to do all manner of things to dozens of fairly good men in the rank and file of the middleweight army. And the dollars were drifting in.

To Dan Rorke himself—fresh from the puddling gang, and seeing the fight game only through Red Keegan's gimlet eyes—there was nothing wrong or even doubtful in his own methods. He took his orders from Keegan; and his share of the cash profits. He did not bother his thick head about ethics.

It was a week after the Rorke-Feltman battle, and while Kid Feltman was still making the sporting world ring with his cries of trickery and his clamour for a return match. Rorke and his manager had gone back to their home town of Pitvale; not only for a needed rest, but to let certain unjust and cruel accusations blow over. Rorke, some months earlier, had been installed in the biggest room of the manager's Pitvale bungalow; and had settled thus in the first semblance of a home he had ever known since his graduation from the orphan asylum, twelve years agone. Behind the bungalow was the rickety barn which served as his training quarters.

Dan's old fellow toilers of the Pitvale Steel Works had bet loyally on their former associate in his fight with the redoubtable Feltman. Even though their paladin had won on a foul, still he had won, and they had cashed in on their bets. Gratitude welled high in their souls. And it took a practical form.

On the morning of the eighth day after the match, a delegation of five puddlers invaded the Keegan bungalow at breakfast time; escorting among them a big young collie dog, gold and white in hue, classic in outline, kingly in bearing.

The pup had belonged to the foreman of the night shift, who was taking a job somewhere out West and could not carry his pet along. So the boys had bought him cheap; and now presented him in due and ancient form to Dan Rorke, as a pledge of their hero worship.

In all his twenty-four years Rorke never before had had a dog of his very own. Such luxuries had not been encouraged at the orphan asylum, nor at any of the steel-works boarding houses where he had since lived.

Now, at sight of the splendid beast, the friendship of a normal man for a good dog woke within him. In spite of Keegan's sour protests, the pup was installed in the bungalow as a permanent member of the household. In honour of the champion who just then was the idol of Rorke's profession, the newcomer received the historic name of "Jeff."

An instant and perfect liking sprang up between Jeff and his middleweight master. From the first the two were inseparable. For some reason best known to himself, the young collie accepted the fighter as his one and eternal lord; and lavished on him a single-hearted devotion he had never granted to his former uninterested owner.

To Rorke the dog was a revelation. His starved heart went out to the collie's staunch friendliness. His sluggish imagination was stirred to unguessed depths by the dog's flashes of cleverness and of gay loyalty. His vanity—and something deeper—was touched to the quick by the deathless worship in his pet's eyes.

If Dan Rorke strayed through the town, for the sake of giving the Pitvalians the privilege of gazing on their foremost citizen, Jeff was always trotting gravely at his side. If he suppled his hard muscles by a ten-mile hike through woodland and over mountain, the collie's plumed tail was ever just ahead, as pacemaker for the trip.

At meals Jeff stretched himself out on the floor beside Rorke's chair, scorning to beg, but eagerly receptive of such food bits as were tossed to him. At night the dog slept outside Rorke's door, a keenly alert sentinel over his master's rest.

Once, down on Main Street, a Rorke fan swatted the fighter applaudingly on the back. In practically the same instant the swatter was on his own back in the street, with Jeff's teeth menacing him. The collie had misunderstood the motive of the blow, and, after the manner of his kind, had sprung to his demigod's defence.

This sealed once and forever Rorke's love for Jeff. The dog had risked dire punishment to ward off a fancied danger from him. It was wonderful—tremendous! Dan told of it, for the next six weeks, whenever he could find anyone to listen to his marvellous yarn. And he added so many unconscious details in the repeated telling that late comers in the succession of listeners were left with a vague impression that Jeff had beaten off fully a dozen armed men who had assailed the fighter.

Keegan used to groan in spirit whenever Dan pointed out Jeff to some chance caller and began the oft-told saga. One dog man earned Rorke's lifelong hatred and the many-adjectived appellation of liar by his tactlessness in saying:

"Why, most any good purp will do as much as that; if he thinks someone's trying to hurt the feller that owns him."

Dan Rorke was calmly certain that no other dog on earth would have had the pluck and the loyalty to do it. And gradually Jeff became to him a sort of fetish for everything that was noblest. Which perhaps was quite as natural as that a high-bred collie should deem Dan Rorke worthy of adoration.

On a slippery and slushy morning in early spring, some six months after dog and man formed their lifepartnership, Dan started through a corner of Pitvale for his daily hike. He had just won a foul-incrusted battle and had not yet signed up for another. In the interval before hard training should set in, he was keeping in shape by means of these daily tramps and by a little gym work.

He and Jeff came abreast of Vining's livery stable, and were about to swing past it when out through the open doorway flashed something tawny and big and ponderous. In other words, Vining's vile-tempered old mongrel English mastiff had caught scent of the approaching collie and had dashed forth to do battle with the stranger.

That was a cute trick of Vining's dog. He was a terror in the neighbourhood; this huge mastiff with the quarter streak of St. Bernard and the temper of a sick wildcat. And for years he had maintained his repute as local bully.

Even now, when age and weight were beginning to slow him down, he still revelled in the prospect of springing out upon some unwary and less warlike dog as it passed the stable; and doing his industrious best to kill it.

As it chanced, this was a street seldom used by Rorke. And Jeff and the mastiff had never before met. Jeff, mincing along on fastidious white toes through the slush, close behind his m...

Table of contents

• BUFF: A COLLIE
• Contents
• Foreword
• Buff: A Collie
• I - The Fighting Strain
• II - "The Hunt is Up!"
• III - Masterless!
• IV - The End of the Trail
• "Something"
• Chums
• Human-Interest Stuff
• "One Minute Longer"
• The Foul Fancier
• The Grudge
• The Sunnybank Collies