Oh, that story brings back childhood nightmares. Our sweet beagle Sam disappeared one day while the family was gone; we lived on a 200 acre farm far from town, so Sam had the run of the place.
About a week after he vanished, my father was driving to work, and saw Sam tied up to a doghouse, along with a dozen other dogs in the yard. He stopped, called Sam's name....knowing immediately it was our beloved boy by his markings, AND the tremors that Sam always had in his left front leg.
A man appeared from the house, but when dad told him that Sam was our lost dog, the nasty man told my father that Sam was his, and always had lived there!! When my dad got to work, he called the local sheriff, who told my dad that the awful nasty man was a suspected supplier of fighting dogs and bait dogs!!!
We had to have proof that we owned Sam, but by the time my parents had produced pictures and vet records, Sam was no longer there. In his place were other dogs totally different from the dozen or so dogs my father had seen several days earlier.
He never told us kids what he suspected happened to Sam; not until we were much much older. Just reading that story makes me nauceous!! My father said he never got over the guilt of letting Sam down.
