My Story that I Like Best

Kazan, the quarter-strain wolf-dog, lay at the end of a fine steel chain, watching little Professor McGill mixing a pail of tallow and bran. A dozen yards from him lay a big Dane, his huge jaws drooling in anticipation of the unusual feast which McGill was preparing. The Dane showed signs of pleasure when McGill approached him with a quart of the mixture, and as he gulped it down the little man with the cold blue eyes and the gray-blond hair stroked his back without fear. But his attitude was different when he turned to Kazan. His movements were filled with caution, and yet his eyes and his lips were smiling, and he gave the wolf-dog no evidence of his fear, if it could be called fear.[4]

The little professor was up in the north country for the Smithsonian Institution and had spent a third of his life among dogs. He loved them, and understood them. He had written a number of magazine articles on dog intellect which had attracted wide attention among naturalists. It was largely because he loved dogs, and understood them more than most men, that he had bought Kazan and the big Dane on a night when Sandy McTrigger and his partner had tried to get them to fight to the death in a Red Gold City saloon. The refusal of the two splendid beasts to kill each other for the pleasure of the three hundred men who had assembled to witness the fight delighted the professor. He had already planned a paper on the incident.