Bruce

MP3 Audio CD. Bruce

CHAPTER I. The Coming Of Bruce

She was beautiful. And she had a heart and a soul--which were a curse.
For without such a heart and soul, she might have found the tough
life-battle less bitterly hard to fight.

But the world does queer things--damnable things--to hearts that are so
tenderly all-loving and to souls that are so trustfully and forgivingly
friendly as hers.

Her "pedigree name" was Rothsay Lass. She was a collie--daintily
fragile of build, sensitive of nostril, furrily tawny of coat. Her
ancestry was as flawless as any in Burke's Peerage.

If God had sent her into the world with a pair of tulip ears and with a
shade less width of brain-space she might have been cherished and
coddled as a potential bench-show winner, and in time might even have
won immortality by the title of "CHAMPION Rothsay Lass."

But her ears pricked rebelliously upward, like those of her earliest
ancestors, the wolves. Nor could manipulation lure their stiff
cartilages into drooping as bench-show fashion demands. The average
show-collie's ears have a tendency to prick. By weights and plasters,
and often by torture, this tendency is overcome. But never when the
cartilage is as unyielding as was Lass's.

Her graceful head harked back in shape to the days when collies had to
do much independent thinking, as sheep-guards, and when they needed
more brainroom than is afforded by the borzoi skull sought after by
modern bench-show experts.

Wherefore, Lass had no hope whatever of winning laurels in the
show-ring or of attracting a high price from some rich fancier. She was
tabulated, from babyhood, as a "second"--in other words, as a faulty
specimen in a litter that should have been faultless.

These "seconds" are