"The Captain."
A soldier and his girlfriend spend weekends at their cottage, leaving a greyhound in the care of a sixteen-year-old boy during the week. While the woman establishes a light and warm rapport with the boy, the Captain dislikes him intensely and reacts violently when he brings first a snake and then an otter to show her. When the Captain throws the otter to the greyhound, which tears it "to pieces, throwing it about, ripping it in lust, until it was like a blood-soaked swab," the boy exacts revenge by starving the dog. But the couple return before the dog has died and, at story's end, the boy is about to be confronted by the Captain. In its treatment of control, repression, anger, violence, and with overtones of sexuality, this story represents a new direction for Bates, far from either comic sketches or atmospheric rural vignettes. In Something Short and Sweet (1937), Country Tales (1940), Twenty Tales (1951), Elephant's Nest in a Rhubarb Tree & Other Stories (1989).