After a particularly fierce blow he crawled to his feet, too dazed to rush.
He staggered limply about, the blood flowing from nose and mouth and ears,
his beautiful coat sprayed and flecked with bloody slaver. Then the man
advanced and deliberately dealt him a frightful blow on the nose. All the pain
he had endured was as nothing compared with the exquisite agony of this. With
a roar that was almost lionlike in its ferocity, he again hurled himself at
the man. But the man, shifting the club from right to left, coolly caught him
by the under jaw, at the same time wrenching downward and backward. Buck
described a complete circle in the air, and half of another, then crashed to
the ground on his head and chest.
For the last time he rushed. The man struck the shrewd blow he had purposely
withheld for so long, and Buck crumpled up and went down, knocked utterly
senseless.
"He's no slouch at dog-breakin', that's wot I say," one of the men on the wall
cried enthusiastically.
"Druther break cayuses any day, and twice on Sundays," was the reply of the
driver, as he climbed on the wagon and started the horses.
Buck's senses came back to him, but not his strength. He lay where he had
fallen, and from there he watched the man in the red sweater.
"'Answers to the name of Buck,'" the man soliloquized, quoting from the
saloon-keeper's letter which had announced the consignment of the crate and
contents. "Well, Buck, my boy," he went on in a genial voice, "we've had our
little ruction, and the best thing we can do is to let it go at that. You've
learned your place, and I know mine. Be a bad dog, and I'll whale the stuffin'
outa you. Understand?"
As he spoke he fearlessly patted the head he had so mercilessly pounded, and
though Buck's hair involuntarily bristled at touch of the hand, he endured it
without protest. When the man brought him water he drank eagerly, and later
bolted a generous meal of raw meat, chunk by chunk, from the man's hand.