BUFF: A COLLIE
AND OTHER DOG-STORIES

By
Albert Payson Terhune
Author of LOCHINVAR LUCK, LAD, A DOG

GROSSET & DUNLAP
Publishers
New York

COPYRIGHT, 1921,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

FOREWORD

CONTENTS

BUFF: A COLLIE

CHAPTER ONE: THE FIGHTING STRAIN

SHE was a mixture of the unmixable. Not one expert in eighty could have guessed at her breed or breeds.

Her coat was like a chow’s, except that it was black and white and tan—as is no chow’s between here and the Chinese Wall. Her deep chest was as wide as a bulldog’s; her queer little eyes slanted like a collie’s; her foreface was like a Great Dane’s, with its barrel muzzle and dewlaps. She was as big as a mastiff.

She was Nina, and she belonged to a well-to-do farmer named Shawe, a man who went in for registered cattle, and, as a side line, for prize collies.

To clear up, in a handful of words, the mystery of Nina’s breeding, her dam was Shawe’s long-pedigreed and registered and prize-winning tricolour collie, Shawemere Queen. Her sire was Upstreet Butcherboy, the fiercest and gamest and strongest and most murderous pit-terrier ever loosed upon a doomed opponent.

Shawe had decided not to breed Shawemere Queen that season. Shawemere Queen had decided differently. Wherefore, she had broken from her enclosure by the simple method of gnawing for three hours at the rotting wood that held a rusty lock-staple.

This had chanced to befall on a night when Tug McManus had deputed the evening exercising of Upstreet Butcherboy to a new handy-man. The handy-man did not know Butcherboy’s