The dog was growing weary now.  His head was barely above water.  His efforts to clamber up the opposite bank were feeble, frantic.  Yet, each time as he drew near the shore Swygert fired.

He was not using light loads now.  He was using the regular load of the bird hunter.  Time had passed for temporizing.  The sweat was standing out all over his face.  The sternness in his eyes was terrible to see, for it was the sternness of a man who is suffering.

A dog can swim a long time.  The sun dropped over the trees.  Still the firing went on, regularly, like a minute gun.

Just before the sun set an exhausted dog staggered toward an old man almost as exhausted as he.  The dog had been too near death and was too faint to care now for the gun that was being fired over his head.  On and on he came, toward the man, disregarding the noise of the gun.  It would not hurt him, that he knew at last.  He might have many enemies, but the gun, in the hands of this man, was not one of them.  Suddenly old Swygert sank down and took the dripping dog in his arms.

“Old boy,” he said, “old boy.”

That night Comet lay before the fire, and looked straight into the eyes of a man, as he used to look in the old days.

Next season Larsen, glancing over his sporting papers, was astonished to see that among promising Derbys the fall trials had called forth was a pointer named Comet.  He would have thought it some other dog than the one who had disappointed him so by turning out gun-shy, in spite of all his efforts to prevent, had it not been for the fact that the entry was booked as:  “Comet; owner, Miss Marian Devant; handler, Wade Swygert.”

Next year he was still more astonished to see in the same paper that Comet, handled by Swygert, had won first place in a Western trial, and was prominently spoken of as a National Championship possibility.  As for him, he had no young entries to offer, but was staking everything on the National Championship, where he was to enter Larsen’s Peerless II.

It was strange how things fell out—­but things have a habit of turning out strangely in field trials, as well as elsewhere.  When Larsen reached the town where the National Championship was to be run, there on the street, straining at the leash held by old Swygert, whom he used to know, was a seasoned young pointer, with a white body, a brown head, and a brown saddle spot—­the same pointer he had seen two years before turn tail and run in that terror a dog never quite overcomes.

But the strangest thing of all happened that night at the drawing, when, according to the slips taken at random from a hat, it was declared that on the following Wednesday Comet, the pointer, was to run with Peerless II.

It gave Larsen a strange thrill, this announcement.  He left the meeting and went straightway to his room.  There for a long time he sat pondering.  Next day at a hardware store he bought some black powder and some shells.