Books: Ghostly Hound

THE VOICE OF BUGLE ANN—MacKinlay Kantor—Coward-McCann ($1.25). MacKinlay Kantor has long revealed a preoccupation with native Midwestern themes and legends of the sort that characterize folk literature. The Jaybird, his novel of a wandering Civil War musician who befriended a Kansas waif, was a sentimental tale for which modern small towns provided an incongruous and unromantic background. Author Kantor now returns to the mood and manner of The Jaybird with a slight, short novel in which a Missouri legend of a wonderful foxhound serves as the frail basis for a story involving revenge, murder and a family feud.

Spring Davis, an aged Missouri farmer, loved one of his dogs, Bugle Ann, because her voice soared with a queer, brassy resonance high above the baying of the pack. Davis and his neighbors, plain, silent men, trained dogs for more fashionable hunters, let the hounds race nightly but never killed a fox. When Jacob Terry put up a fence that endangered the dogs, the old men quarreled, but Spring Davis’ son nevertheless continued to make love to Jacob Terry’s daughter. Bugle Ann disappeared, and Spring Davis, believing that Terry had killed her, shot him and went to jail. Bugle Ann’s collar and bones were found far away, making it clear that Terry had not killed the animal. Suddenly her unmistakable voice rose out over the hills at night, giving rise to stories of a ghostly hound that would race forever. Spring Davis was pardoned, returned to hear the sound he recognized, learned that his son’s sweetheart had been responsible for Bugle Ann’s death. He settled down to a happy, fox-hunting old age, with the nightly song of Bugle Ann’s daughter making music for his undimmed ears.