THE LOYALTY OF JIM

If it must be my lot to dream out a life of insubstantial visions, that were well.  But it appeared not unreasonable that I should keep at least one ponderable dog by me, as an emblem of something I had missed through one too many shuffle of the cards before this big game began.  Yet Miss Lansdale had clearly resolved to deprive my dreaming of even this slight support of realness.  I tried always to remember, in her behalf, that she did not know the circumstances, and she herself very soon discovered that she did not know Jim.  The assaults she made upon his fidelity proved her to be past-mistress of tactics and strategy.  No possible approach to his heart did she leave untried.  She flattered and petted, lured, cajoled, entreated; she menaced, commanded, stormed, raged.  Drawing inspiration from a siege celebrated in antiquity, she sought to secrete her forces—­not in a horse of wood, but within the frames of numerous fowl, picked to the bone but shredded over so temptingly with fugitive succulence as to have made a dog of feelings less fine her slave for life.

It was not until the desperate woman had, in the terminology of Billy Durgin, been “baffled and beaten at every turn,” that I could get into communication with her on a basis at all acceptable to a free-necked man.  Having proved to the last resource of her ingenuity that Jim was more than human in his loyalty, she seemed disposed to admit, though grudgingly enough, that I myself might be not less than human to have won him so utterly.  And thereafter I found it often practicable to associate with her on terms of apparent equality.

She surrendered, I believe, on a day when she had thought to lure Jim into her boat,—­fatuously, for was I not a distinguishable figure in the landscape?  Her hopes must have been high, for she had but lately repleted him with chicken-bones divinely crunchable, and then bestowed upon him a charlotte russe, an unnatural taste for which she had succeeded in teaching him.

With something of a swagger,—­she swaggered in a rather starchy white dress that day, and under a garden hat of broad rim,—­she had enticed him to the water’s edge, so that I must have been nervous but for knowing the dog through and through.

Her failure was so crushing, so swift, so entire, that for an instant I almost failed to rejoice in her open humiliation.  Seated in the boat, oars poised, she invited Jim with soft speech and a smile that might have moved an iron dog without occasioning any remark from me; but Jim, noting, with one paw already in the boat, that I was not to be of the party, turned quickly from her and came to me with his head down.  His informing and well-feathered tail signalled to Miss Lansdale that she seemed to have forgotten herself.

At that moment, I think, the woman abandoned all her preposterous hopes; then, too, I think, she learned the last and bitterest lesson which great fighters must learn, to embellish defeat with an air of urbane acceptance.  Miss Lansdale relaxed—­she melted before my eyes to an aspect that no victor who knew his business could afford to despise.