Page:Weird Tales volume 38 number 03 CAN.djvu/81

 with which Grut had been working. Tsan-Lo, with the brain of a killer, was bigger than the biggest Percheron stallion! Desperately I gauged my chances of doing anything at all. And then the dog moved.

He reached down to rip my pajama coat from me, and a scrape of his immense paw carried away the trousers. I lay stark naked, and he dipped his head to gather me in his jaws. I felt his hot tongue on my belly, the roof of his mouth gritted on my back. I was to Tsan-Lo what a rabbit is to an ordinary Springer or Labrador. Had he so desired he might have bitten me in half and swallowed me in six gulps.

But he didn't. He hardly more than pinched, and it was not difficult to understand the reason for that. He was a retriever, undoubtedly one which had had some training, and they are taught to be tendermouthed. Even though this one had reverted four hundred thousand years, he still was unable to forget the training that had been drummed into his brain.

With my head, shoulders, and arms dangling from one side of his jaws, and my thighs and legs from the other, Tsan-Lo began to trot away. I was half numb with terror, but still noticed hazily what went on about me. There was Buck, leaping against his run and trying to tear it down as he strove to close with this monstrous thing. A half dozen of the other dogs, the braver ones, were likewise snarling and barking. But most of them cowered in their kennels. I saw Tsan-Lo's shattered run.

Paying not the least attention to the other dogs, Tsan-Lo threaded his way among the kennels and started for the lake. Still only half-conscious, but thinking with the detached clarity that a numbed man sometimes will achieve, I tried to fathom his design. Tsan-Lo entered the lake, waded out far beyond the depth where an ordinary dog would have been swimming, and struck across the deep water. It was then that I knew his intent. There was a woods on the other side of the lake. Tsan-Lo was a wild thing, and like all such wanted to eat his captured prey in solitude. We were three-quarters of the way across the lake when he suddenly opened his jaws to drop me. I heard a high-pitched, excited voice:

"Buck, fetch!"

SWAM groggily, trying to keep my head above water, and turned to gaze at the shore. My blood froze in my veins. Standing on the shore, trim and slender and unafraid was Sally. Tsan-Lo swam toward her with his head high, churning the water and leaving a curling wake behind. I screamed:

"Sally, run! For God's sake, run!"

Buck's silky black coat shone like a polished mirror as he sprang into the lake, I saw Tsan-Lo gain the bank, bear down on Sally. I tried, with all the strength I had left, to swim toward them, to reach her side before that horror did. But even as I swam I knew that it was hopeless. And something seemed to have hold of me now, something that gripped my limbs and dragged me back into the water. The bright morning faded into night.

...When I awakened I was lying on the lake shore, with my head pillowed on Sally's lap. I looked up into her eyes, and saw tears there.

"Clint! Darling!" she moaned.

I moved then. I think that word from