“We couldn’t have shipped her by mistake, either,” he went on, confused.  “For we’d sold her, that same day, to a kid in our town.  I ought to know.  Because the kid kept on pestering us every day for a month afterward, to find if she had come back to us.  He said she ran away in the night.  He still comes around, once a week or so, to ask.  A spindly, weak, sick-looking little chap, he is.  I don’t get the point of this thing, from any angle.  But we run our kennels on the square.  And I can promise the boss’ll either send back your check or send Rothsay Princess to you and take Lass back.”

Two days later, while all The Place was still mulling over the mystery, a letter came for the Master from Lass’s home town.  It was signed “Edw’d Hazen,” and it was written on the cheap stationery of his employer’s bottling works.  It read: 

Dear Sir: 

“Six months ago, my son bought a dog from the Rothsay Kennels.  It was a she-dog, and his ma and I didn’t want one around.  So I put it aboard a freight-car on the sly.  My boy went sick over losing his dog.  He has never rightly got over it, but he peaks and mopes and gets thinner all the time.  If I had known how hard he was going to take it, I would of cut off my hand before I would of done such a thing.  And my wife feels just like I do about it.  We would both of us have given a hundred dollars to get the dog back for him, when we saw how bad he felt.  But it was too late.  Somehow or other it is most generally too late when a rotten thing has been done.

“To-day he went again to the Rothsay Kennels to ask if she had come back.  He has always been hoping she would.  And they told him you have her.  Now, sir, I am a poor man, but if one hundred dollars will make you sell me that dog, I’ll send it to you in a money order by return mail.  It will be worth ten times that much, to my wife and me, to have Dick happy again.  I inclose a stamp.  Will you let me know?”

Six weeks afterward The Place’s car brought Dick Hazen across to receive his long-lost pet.

The boy was thinner and shakier and whiter than when he had gone to sleep with his cherished puppy curled against his narrow chest.  But there was a light in his eyes and an eagerness in his heart that had not been there in many a long week.

Lass was on the veranda to welcome him.  And as Dick scrambled out of the car and ran to pick her up, she came more than half-way to meet him.  With a flurry of fast-pattering steps and a bark of eager welcome, she flung herself upon her long-vanished master.  For a highbred collie does not forget.  And at first glimpse of the boy Lass remembered him.

Dick caught her up in his arms—­a harder feat than of yore, because of her greater weight and his own sapped strength,—­and hugged her tight to his breast.  Winking very fast indeed to disperse tears that had no place in the eyes of a self-contained man of twelve, he sputtered rapturously: