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Updated: May 22, 2025
Old Sourdough's been boss dog around here a goodish while now, you know. He won't stand for having this chap put his nose out of joint. And, mind you, there's no dog in Regina can cock his tail at Sourdough.
The warning came not a second too soon. Almost the hound had sprung. "Would you call your dog off, sir?" said Dick. "I guess Sourdough'll call himself off when he's good an' ready," replied the sergeant; and himself strode on across the yard. Once more Jan had to submit to the bitter ordeal of being slashed at by Sourdough's teeth, as the big husky snarlingly passed him in the sergeant's wake.
"H'm! Well, see you take care of him, then, and keep him out of the way. Sourdough's boss here, and if this one is to stay around, the sooner he learns it the better." "Yes, sir. He's thoroughly good-tempered and obedient, though he is such a big fellow," said Dick, still manoeuvering his legs as a barrier betwixt the two dogs. "It's little odds how big he is," growled the sergeant.
"By hivens, sergeant!" he spluttered, "if ye'll meet me afterwards, without your stripes on, I'll I'll give ye what Jan here'd give your bloody wolf, if ye had the honesty to l'ave 'em to ut." Jan dragged back momentarily, and in justice to Sourdough's gameness, be it said the husky struggled hard from his master's entwining arms to be at the enemy again on three legs.
For that is the one position in which even a Sourdough may with safety be attacked. His own great weight and swiftly silent movement had been responsible for Sourdough's complete downfall.
At the psychological fraction of a moment he changed his position, and, instead of passing on comfortably through space after his attack, Sourdough's shoulder met another bigger shoulder, braced like a granite buttress to receive the impact, and the husky reached earth on his side.
The position of a few seconds earlier had been practically reversed. Jan's blood was running between Sourdough's fangs now a fiery tonic, and veritable eau-de-vie to the husky. Sourdough's catlike tactics perhaps the best and safest in such a case were not adopted by Jan, who never yet had used such a method. Then Jan concentrated his whole being into the service of his jaws.
"Surly old devil, Sourdough," men had been wont to say of him; "but, by gee! there's no getting around him; you can't fool Sourdough. He'd go for a grizzly, if the grizzly wouldn't give him the trail. Aye, he's a hard case, all right, is Sourdough. You can't faze him." He hugged them to him. He gloried in all such tributes to Sourdough's dourness.
It might have been better tactics on Sourdough's part to have made direct for some killing hold, instead of administering these instructive preliminary chastenings. Seeing clearly Jan's inferiority in wolf tactics, Sourdough underrated the forces of his size, weight, endurance, power, and quite indomitable bravery. In fact, the cunning Sourdough was very thoroughly deceived by Jan.
Yet Sergeant Moore, for all the glow of hatred in his eyes as he watched Dick Vaughan's departure, nodded his grizzled head with the air of a man quite satisfied. "So long, Tenderfoot," he growled. "You'll maybe find Sourdough's reach a longer one than you reckon for, I'm thinking."
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