It happened toward four o’clock of a late autumn day that Dick Vaughan was engaged in Regina in attendance upon a great personage from Ottawa.  O’Malley, having borrowed Jan’s services as helper, was busy giving tracking lessons to Micky Doolan on the prairie, half a mile from barracks.  Chancing to look up from his work, O’Malley saw Sergeant Moore approaching on foot, with Sourdough (as ever) at his heels.  He did not know that the sergeant had been watching him through binoculars from the barracks, and that he had spent a quarter of an hour in carefully devised efforts to exacerbate the never very amiable temper of Sourdough.

O’Malley swore afterward that as the sergeant drew level with little Micky Doolan (a dozen paces or so from the Irishman), he whispered to Sourdough, and “sooled him on.”

“Tsss—­sss!  To him, then, lad,” is what O’Malley vowed the sergeant said.

Be that as it may, Sourdough did wheel aside, as his way was, and administer a savage slash of his fangs upon poor little Micky’s neck.  As O’Malley rushed forward to protect his pet the game little beast, instead of slinking back from tyrant Sourdough, a tribute that hard case demanded from every dog he met, sprang forward with a snarl and a plucky attempt to return the unsolicited bite he had received.

“Come in, come in, ye little fool!” yelled O’Malley.

But he was too late.  A light of malevolent joy gleamed in the big husky’s red eyes as he plunged upon the terrier.  One thrust of his mighty shoulder sent the little chap spinning on his back, and there was the throat-hold exposed to Sourdough’s practised fangs.  His bitter temper had been carefully inflamed in advance, and demanded now the sacrifice of blood, warm life-blood.  His wide jaws flashed in upon the terrier’s throat just as O’Malley’s boot took him in the rear.

“If ye touch that dog again, my man, I’ll break your jaw for you,” came from the sergeant in a hoarse growl.

Now O’Malley was a disciplined man, and the sergeant was his official superior.  But, as it happened, the matter was now taken out of his hands.  Jan, who, before the sergeant’s arrival, had been lying stretched in the dust thirty paces distant, had risen then and stood stiffly, watching Sourdough with raised hackles.  At the moment that the husky’s fangs touched the skin of Micky’s throat, Jan was upon him like a battering-ram, shoulder to shoulder, with an impact that sent the husky rolling, all four feet in the air, a position in which no barracks dog had ever before seen Sourdough, and one in which any of them would have given a day’s food to find him.  For that is the one position in which even a Sourdough may with safety be attacked.

But Jan apparently (and very recklessly) scorned to avail himself of this splendid opportunity.  His own great weight and swiftly silent movement had been responsible for Sourdough’s complete downfall.  And now, while O’Malley grabbed his terrier in both arms, thankful the little beast’s throat was whole, Jan stood stiff-legged, with stiffly arched neck and bristling hackles, glaring down at Sourdough, with the expression which, among pugilistic school-boys, goes with the question, “Have you had enough?”