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Still, Sourdough was a veritable wolf in combat, and for so long as he could prevent a breach of the peace Dick decided he would do so. Accordingly, while in barracks, Jan was kept pretty closely to sentinel duty in Paddy's stall.
Some time afterward, when madam attempted to put a floor into her tent, "Sourdough" again put in an appearance. He threatened, but she held out, when the obstinate and perverse old man trotted off down town and secured an officer and four soldiers to come and put her off.
He rolled his bed in the tarp and tied it securely, put flour, bacon, coffee, salt and various other small necessities of life into a box, inspected his sour-dough can, and decided to empty it and start over again if hard fate drove him to sourdough. "Might bust down and have to sleep out," he meditated.
And the latest thing he had done was always on men's lips, whether it was being first in the heartbreaking stampede to Danish Creek, in killing the record baldface grizzly over on Sulphur Creek, or in winning the single-paddle canoe race on the Queen's Birthday, after being forced to participate at the last moment by the failure of the sourdough representative to appear.
But Jan's triumph earned him the mortal hatred of one man, and the deference shown to him in barracks added bitterness to the jealous antipathy already inspired by him in the hard old heart of Sourdough. Sergeant Moore said nothing, but hate glowed in his somber eyes whenever they lighted upon Jan's massive form. "I believe he'd stick a knife in Jan, if he dared," said French, the man of Devon.
As O'Malley rushed forward to protect his pet the game little beast, instead of slinking back from tyrant Sourdough, a tribute that hard case demanded from every dog he met, sprang forward with a snarl and a plucky attempt to return the unsolicited bite he had received. "Come in, come in, ye little fool!" yelled O'Malley. But he was too late.
Sourdough stopped at the store one morning for tobacco. He had a pair of boots tied to his saddle and when Ida Mary stepped to the door to hand him the tobacco, a rattlesnake slithered out from one of the boots. He jumped off his horse and killed it. "Damn my skin," Sourdough exclaimed, "and here I slept on them boots last night for a pillow. I oughta stretched a rope."
There was little enough about Sourdough to remind one of a human child, lovable or otherwise. If the master was grim and forbidding in manner and appearance, the dog exhibited a broadly magnified reflection of the same attributes. His color was a sandy grayish yellow without markings. His coat was coarse, rather ragged, and extraordinarily dense.
Clearly there was to be no sympathy between these two. Suddenly, and without apparently having looked in Jan's direction, Sourdough leaped sideways at him, with an angry snarl. "Keep in Jan; keep in boy!" said Dick, firmly, as he jumped between the two dogs. "Who gave you permission to bring that dog here?" snapped the sergeant at Dick. "Taking care of him for Captain Arnutt, sir," was the reply.
With painful accuracy they established the exact time and place, "on the Big Onion the winter of the blue snow" or "at Shot Gunderson's camp on the Tadpole the year of the sourdough drive." They elaborated on the old themes and new stories were born in lying contests where the heights of extemporaneous invention were reached.
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