CHAPTER IX 
RASTUS EARNS HIS SLEEP 
‘HE story of Rastus really begins with the 
arrival of Wolf under the mountain. If 
you ask me what kind of a dog Wolf was, I can- 
not tell you. His master said he was a short- 
haired collie (which sounds like a contradiction in 
terms), but there was more than one bar sinister 
on his family coat of arms, and one of them meant 
a hound’s nose and another tremendous endur- 
ance. We'll let the sagacity come from the 
collie strain, if you like, though all my own collies 
have been more ornamental than sagacious. At 
any rate, the advent of Wolf was distinctly an 
event, and a disturbing event, in the life of Rastus 
and all his fellow ’coons on the mountain. 
Before Wolf’s arrival, the only dogs in the im- 
mediate neighborhood were two magnificent and 
costly Saint Bernards. These two amiable crea- 
tures roamed the mountainside at will, to be sure, 
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