"No," smiled Earle from his great height down at the little figure in borrowed pyjamas, "I guess you're cured, old man!"
The rug beside Tommy's bed was very soft, and Frank was very tired. But sometime in the silent darkness of that night he barked hoarsely in the agony of a dream. For they were on top of a mountain, and a weird moon had risen, and a woman had screamed.
There must have been something prophetic in Mac's fear of thunder when he was a puppy. For, though all puppies are afraid of it, and most grown dogs for that matter, still, Mac's fear, according to Tom Jennings, his master, was more than that of the ordinary dog. That is, until the blow came. After that it was different with Mac.
Maybe he thought, having smitten him once, that lightning would smite him no more. Maybe some change had taken place in his nature which we humans cannot analyze or understand. Let this be as it may, the fact is that Mac, after his second year, feared thunder no more.
In law a stroke of lightning is known as an Act of God. If such is the case, it seems strange that this stroke should have fallen on Sunday night and in a God-fearing and God-serving household. As a matter of fact, Tom Jennings, his wife and three children had just driven home from church at Breton Junction and Tom, assisted by Frank, his boy of sixteen, had put up the horses. Then, as the cloud was an unusually threatening one, they all gathered in the parlour.
It was the ordinary parlour of country people who are self-respecting but neither well-to-do nor educated. There was a fancy organ, a flowered carpet; there were gaudy vases and solemn-looking enlarged crayon portraits. Near a stiffly curtained window was a sort of family altar--a table on which lay a family Bible. This Bible, a ponderous embossed volume with brass guards and clasps, reposed on a blue-velvet table cover that almost reached the floor. On the cover was worked a cross and a crown with the legend: "He Must Bear a Cross Who Would Wear a Crown."
When, the storm having burst on this household, Mac scratched at the door, Tom Jennings himself, a tall, raw-boned, sunburnt man, rose and let him in with some good-humoured remark. Mac was a young setter, with white, silken, curly coat and black, silken, curly ears. He looked self-consciously into the faces of the family, who were smiling at his fears; then, with a queer expression on his face, as if he, too, knew it was funny, he went to the family altar, pushed aside the embossed velvet cover, and lay down under the table. The children laughed, Tom Jennings and Frank, a lanky, handsome, serious-faced lad smiled. Mac always did this in a thunderstorm.