Ruth Hammerton hurried into her father’s study on her return from the
post-office, whither she had fared for the evening mail.
Her dark face was aglow with a colour that had been foreign to it for
many a long week--a colour that softened and mellowed the new lines of
leanness and of sorrow in cheek and brow. Her eyes were alight with
nervous eagerness.
Mr. Hammerton looked up in surprise from a heap of papers on his desk,
as his daughter burst so unceremoniously in upon him. A month earlier
he had been appointed local justice of the peace. His new duties still
called for much night work, in the way of study and preparation for
the next day’s court duties. So it was with a slight frown that he
greeted this sudden interruption of his labours.
“I’ve just come from the post-office!” began Ruth eagerly. “As I was
coming out two men almost bumped into me. I looked back, as they
slouched into the store and sat down by the stove. They had a huge
bulldog at their heels. I heard one of the loafers there hail them by
name. They were Con Hegan and Billy Gates. A boy told me they had
come back to Boone Lake to-day. He said it was their first visit here
since they got out of prison. He----”
“Pshaw!” fumed Hammerton. “So those two crooks are back here, are
they? That means more lawlessness! Just as I was congratulating myself
that it was becoming a law-abiding and decent community at last! I
wish----”
“You don’t understand!” broke in the girl. “You don’t see what I mean.
You don’t get the significance of it. And yet I’ve been all over it
with you so often! I----”
“Over what?” demanded Hammerton, nettled by her air of excited
mystery. “Please explain what you’re driving at. I’m tremendously busy
to-night and----”
“Michael Trent was the means of Hegan and Gates going to prison,” she
hurried on. “They swore they would get him for it. We have proof of
that. The very night after they were set free Michael disappeared. And
now they are back here again, after four months! Don’t you see----”
“I see you are trying to lure me into that same endless old argument
again,” returned Hammerton with a glance of regret at his piled-up
work. “But really, I can’t see why these two jailbirds’ appearance in
town to-night should have flustered you so. There was no foul play
connected with Trent’s disappearance. I’ve explained that to you,
over and over. Calvin Greer called him up on the telephone that
evening. Trent told Calvin he was sick of Boone Lake and that he was
starting off on a long motor tour up country. He said if he liked it
up there he’d settle somewhere in the north counties and never come
back. Next day he and his automobile were gone. Where is the mystery?”
“Where?” she repeated miserably. “Why, everywhere! The whole thing is
a mystery. In the first place, I rode over to see Calvin Greer, at his
stock farm. He had never met Michael till that day, and he wasn’t at
all familiar with Michael’s voice. But he told me it sounded rougher
and hoarser over the phone than when he talked to him face to face.
And he----”
“That’s no proof. Many people’s voices sound altogether different over
the phone. Or Trent may have had a cold. There’s no mystery about it,
I tell you. Most assuredly there’s nothing to connect Hegan and Gates
with the affair. As to----”
“You knew Michael,” she went on. “You knew him well and you liked him.
Tell me, was he the sort of man to go away like that and not have the
courtesy to say good-bye to us? Was he? He stopped here--he and
Buff--you remember, on his way home from the market square that
evening. He sat and chatted with us for half an hour or so. He didn’t
say a word about going away. Instead, he arranged to go horseback
riding with me the next day. Yet less than half an hour later,
apparently, he tells Calvin Greer he’s leaving Boone Lake--perhaps
forever. Is that----”
“Men do queer things,” said Hammerton, turning back to his papers. “I
can’t agree with you that there’s any mystery about it, daughter.
Certainly no mystery that would justify the law in suspecting----”
“You know what care he took of his livestock,” pursued Ruth. “Is it
likely--is it possible--that he would have left his sheep and cattle
to starve, his cows unmilked and his horses with empty mangers? Would
he have gone away like that, of his own accord, and let all his
livestock starve to death? For they would have starved to death out
there on that solitary farm if you and I hadn’t gone to get them and
bring them here.”
“That’s the only part of the whole thing that I can’t understand,”
assented Hammerton. “He treated his livestock as other people treat
their pets. It wasn’t like him to leave them to starve. Out there they
might have gone hungry till they died before any neighbour would have
been likely to happen in and find them. Even if he hadn’t been so fond
of them, it doesn’t make sense for a man to leave such valuable
property to die of neglect. To say nothing of the ruin of his year’s
crops through his absence. Why, if you hadn’t wheedled me into having
his crops looked after, the year would have been a total loss to his
farm. As it is----”
“Then,” she declared triumphantly, “since you admit he wouldn’t have
done such a thing of his own accord----”
“I don’t admit it. I only say I can’t understand it. But it happened.
We have proof of that. He went away in his car. And he took Buff along
with him. If he had left Buff there I could have seen, perhaps, where
the mystery came in. For he and that collie were chums. But he took
Buff with him. And he took along everything of portable value in his
house, too. No, that doesn’t look like foul play. He did it
deliberately, whatever his motive may have been. Took along his dog
and his valuables and drove away in his own car. The car couldn’t have
been stolen, either. For he told Greer over the phone----”
“If it was Michael who told----”
“We don’t know his motive,” summed up Hammerton. “But we do know he
went of his own accord. There is ample proof of that. As for
connecting Gates and Hegan with----”
“He did not go of his own accord!” announced the girl, deathly white,
her eyes ablaze, as she towered over her wondering father. “And I
have every reason to know he didn’t. I don’t want to tell why I know
it. But I must, if I want you to get the truth out of those two
assassins. I know Michael Trent did not leave here of his own accord.
I know it because he loved me. A man doesn’t run away like that
from----”
“What?” shouted Hammerton in astonishment. “He--you say he----”
“I say he loved me,” reiterated the girl, her sweet voice held steady
by a great effort. “And no man will go away willingly from a woman he
loves as Michael loved me. Most of all, he won’t go away and fail to
send any kind of word.”
“You never told me!” accused her father indignantly. “You never----”
“Michael never told me,” she retorted.
“Then how----”
“He never told me in so many words,” she went on. “Yet I knew it. A
woman always knows. He loved me. And he was waiting until he could put
his farm on a better paying basis before he told me of it. Now,
perhaps, you’ll believe me when I say he’d never have gone away like
that unless he had been kidnapped or killed.”
Long and silently Hammerton stared at his daughter, dazed by the
revelation. Then he said, hesitantly:
“If I’d known--if you had told me--but----”
“But now that you do know,” she persisted, “you’ll get the truth from
Hegan and Gates? You’ll start the machinery of the law to working;
and----”
“Dear,” he said gently, “there’s nothing I can do. There is no shadow
of proof that either of those men was concerned in----”
“As you choose!” she exclaimed, turning to leave the room. “Since you
won’t interrogate them, I am going to. I’m going back to the
post-office to find them. If they aren’t there, I’m going to find
where they live and go----”
“Are you crazy?” stormed Hammerton, jumping up to bar her way. “You
surely can’t mean to do an insane thing like that! I won’t permit it!”
“Then interrogate them yourself, as a magistrate of this county!” she
bade him. “Because if you don’t do it, I shall. If it is insane, let
it be insane. In these past months I have had enough to drive a wiser
woman insane. I love Michael Trent. I _love_ him, I tell you! And if
he is on earth I shall find him, now that I have a clue.”
Hammerton stared wonderingly down upon his wontedly placid daughter.
Then he caught her into his arms and held her close to his heart for a
moment. Releasing her, he crossed to the telephone and called up Roy
Saunders, the Boone Lake chief of police.
“Saunders?” he queried. Then: “Judge Hammerton speaking. Hegan and
Gates are in town again. I want a talk with them. You’ll find them at
the post-office. Will you bring them up here to my study? As soon as
you can, please? No, there’s no warrant out for them. But I don’t
think they’ll be fools enough to refuse to come here. Thanks.”
He set down the telephone and passed his arm again round the girl.
Ruth, her self-control giving way, wept convulsively on his breast.
“There! There!” Hammerton murmured. “Try to get hold of yourself,
darling! They’ll be here in a few minutes. And our one chance is to
keep cool. I--I haven’t much faith in our success with them. It’s only
fair to tell you that, Ruth. And I’ve no legal right to question them
at all. I’m doing it to save you from doing it. Try to be brave, if
nothing comes of our talk with them.”
Airily, not to say jauntily, Con Hegan and Billy Gates strolled up the
village street and into the highroad leading to the Hammerton place.
To one side of the unconcerned pair strode Saunders, the truculent but
puzzled chief of police.
The men had grinned mirthfully at Saunders’ command that they
accompany him to the magistrate’s home. They had complied without a
single demur. And they lightened the tedium of the walk by guying the
pompous police chief in a way that reduced him to sullen homicidal
yearnings.
Marshalled by Saunders, they lounged through the doorway in the wake
of a servant and were ushered into Hammerton’s study at the extreme
rear of the house.
They found Hammerton seated at his desk, looking very magisterial
indeed. At a far end of the room, her face in the shadows, sat Ruth.
“Here they are, Your Honour!” proclaimed the chief of police, ranging
his two grinning charges side by side in front of the desk.
“Yep,” cheerily assented Hegan. “Here we are, Judge. We was planning
to bolt. But this vigilant chief kind of overawed us. We was afraid he
might cry if we stood him on his head and lit out.”
“Or,” supplemented Gates, “he’d maybe have hit one of us a crool slap
on the wrist as we run past him. Or he might go to where we live and
bust one of our umbrellas, to punish us. So we stuck.”
“The judge looks pretty near as terrifyin’ as the chief,” confided
Hegan to his companion in a loud whisper and shaking with simulated
awe. “Most likely he keeps a ’lectric chair in his kitchen. We’d best
be p’lite to him.”
Hammerton checked an angry forward movement on the part of Saunders
and addressed the grinning prisoners.
“I have no legal right to enforce replies to the questions I am going
to ask you,” he said quietly. “But it is only fair to tell you what
rights I do possess. It is within my jurisdiction to commit you both,
here and now, for vagrancy, since you have no visible means of support
in this village. And before the thirty-day vagrancy term can expire
there will be some new charge. So, to avoid these annoyances, I advise
you to wipe those grins off your faces and to drop the attempt to
insult anyone here and to answer the questions I shall put to you.
Otherwise, you will leave here with handcuffs on and will proceed to
the lock-up; thence to come before me in the morning on a vagrancy
charge.”
The men looked at each other uncertainly. Gates seemed to be measuring
the distance to the study door. Unobtrusively, Hammerton took a pistol
from the drawer of his desk and laid it in his lap. Instantly the two
men stiffened and lost their jauntily insolent manner.
“There’s no call to threaten us, Judge,” said Hegan, nervously. “We’re
glad to answer any questions you care to spring on us. As for
vagrancy--well, we’re no vags. We just got home to-day and, of course,
we haven’t had time to look round us for any steady work yet.
But----”
“You were let out of Logan Prison on the twenty-sixth of last July,”
interposed Hammerton. “Where did you go from there? I mean as soon as
you were let out.”
“We went straight to Paterson,” returned Hegan. “We got out of Logan
at ten, on the morning of the twenty-sixth. We took the noon train to
Paterson. We got work there and we stayed on the job till yesterday,
when the works shut down for the winter. Then we come back here.”
“You hadn’t been here since you were sent to prison?”
“Not till we got here this morning from Paterson. No, Judge.”
“H’m! You were not here on the twenty-seventh of July? You are certain
of that?”
“Certain sure, Judge!” declared Gates. “We wouldn’t be likely to
forget if we had. This is our home town. We was kind of ashamed to
come back, right off, after they turned us loose from the hoosgow. So
we----”
“You have not been in or near Boone Lake since you were released from
prison--until to-day?” insisted Hammerton.
“No, Your Honour, we ain’t. And we c’n prove it. We went straight to
Paterson; and there we----”
“Then,” spoke up Ruth, coming forward, “how did two reputable
witnesses happen to see you at Mr. Michael Trent’s farm late on the
afternoon of July twenty-seventh?”
Hegan gulped. Gates, however, answered suavely:
“Flash your witnesses on us, ma’am. If they seen us here or in this
county that day they sure got good eyes. They----”
“Yep!” supplemented Hegan. “Who’s your witnesses? Who are they?”
Hammerton and Saunders were looking at the troubled girl in surprise.
With true feminine quibble for truth, she had put the statement in the
form of a query in speaking of the witnesses whose identity she had
just invented. The failure of her ruse distressed her keenly, even
while the memory of Hegan’s start and his scared gulp made her doubly
certain she was on the right track.
“Guess you never took a course of poker playing, at school, ma’am,”
chuckled Gates, reading her face with all the trained skill of a true
panhandler.
“Shut up, you!” grunted Saunders in wrath.
He glowered upon the suave Gates, who promptly turned his respectful
gaze to the magistrate’s face. Hammerton, frowning perplexedly,
opened his lips for further query, even while he realised the utter
uselessness of trying to catch such skilled offenders by any questions
he might have the wit to frame.
Before he could speak a maid rushed wildly into the room. With a
manifest effort, she came to a halt inside the doorway and stood as
though trying to announce some guest. But the guest himself entered
the room, close at her heels.
* * * * *
Steadily, through the gathering darkness, Buff had run, his first mad
pace settling down into the choppy little mile-eating stride of the
trotting wolf pack. And so he kept on, ever headed for Boone Lake,
moving swervelessly and with deceptive quickness.
Stars came out. A fat moon began to butt its way up over the eastern
horizon mists. Here and there, as the pad-pad-pad of the collie’s
tireless feet pattered along the frozen road, a farm dog would bark
challenge or dart out in pursuit. But no challenge bark checked Buff’s
obsessed flight. Nor did any of the pursuing curs catch up with him.
Now and then, along the state road, motor cars would meet or pass him.
The dog moved aside barely far enough to miss the whirring wheels, but
did not falter in his run.
Once, as he padded through a village, some fool, catching sight of
him, noted his tense pose and the arrow-like straightness of his
course and raised the shout of “Mad dog!”
This asinine cry lurks ever in the back of the human throat, ready and
eager to spring into life at the slightest provocation. And woe to the
harmlessly running or perhaps sick dog at whom it is howled! At once
the hue-and-cry is ready to start in murderous pursuit. No question is
asked. Nobody stops to realise that there are probably not two
actually rabid dogs in any one state in the Union in the course of any
two years, and that a genuinely hydrophobic dog is no more in
condition to chase and attack people than is a typhoid patient.
But in Buff’s case the shout was raised too late. The tawny-and-white
shape sped on through the dim moonlight and out of sight before the
hue-and-cry was fairly up. And he did not so much as glance back to
note the progress of the useless pursuit.
As he turned off the state road, taking the macadam byway which led
towards Trent’s farm, the collie dropped to a wavering halt, his
sensitive nostrils pulsing. A scent had come to him, though it was
still too elusive to register clearly in the eager brain.
Twenty doubtful steps Buff took along the byway, until he came to a
point where a field path from a cross-road a mile away intersected it.
At the intersection the scent struck him with a force that dizzied
him. Nostrils to earth, he found that a man had left this path for the
byroad not ten minutes earlier.
The knowledge did amazing things to the dog. For an instant he
shivered as though with a physical convulsion. His breath came in long
gasps. A whine in his throat shook itself forth in an eerie note that
belonged to no normal beast.
Then, like a whirlwind, he was off, down the byway; nose to earth,
body flat and flying. Half a mile farther on, the rush of his madly
scampering feet came to the ears of a man who was plodding wearily
toward the farm--a man thin and shabby, who walked as though
completing an exhausting journey. In the middle of the road the man
paused and glanced back. Adown the moonlit byway was dashing a
tawny-and-white creature, flat to earth in its speed.
Fifty yards from the man Buff lifted his head as he galloped. The
scent--any dog’s strongest quality--told him he might now rely on
sight, which is the weakest of a dog’s senses. At what he saw, the
collie gave tongue.
Not in the hideous wolf howl or in whimper did Buff speak now, but in
a cry that was human and rending--a cry that tore at the listener’s
heartstrings by reason of its awful intensity.
Delirious--screaming, writhing, panting--Buff flung himself on the man
he had tracked. He was at the end of the trail! And what he found
there drove him quite insane.
Up into Michael Trent’s dusty arms the dog sprang--a vibrant mass of
mad ecstasy. Moaning, crying, sobbing like a human child, Buff sought
to lick his master’s haggard face and to pat him in a hundred places
at once with the whirling paws.
Almost thrown off his balance by the impact, Trent spoke to the collie
in wondering delight. And the sound of the tired voice sent Buff into
a new frenzy of rapture. Dropping to earth, he whizzed round and round
Trent in a bewildering gyroscopic flight, stomach to ground, tongue
and throat clamorous with hoarse joy.
Presently, flinging himself at his master’s feet, the dog lay there,
moaning and sobbing, his swift tongue caressing the man’s dusty shoes,
his furry body quivering from nose to tail in hysterical bliss. There
he lay while Trent leaned over and laid both calloused hands on his
head, stroking him and talking to him in the pleasant, slow tones the
collie loved.
“Buff!” muttered the man, swallowing hard. “_Buff!_ Why, I didn’t
think anyone on earth cared that much about anything! Come up here,
old friend! You’re shaking as if you had ague. How did you find me?
Have you been waiting at home for me ever since? Or have you been
living with--with her?”
Buff, his paroxysm spent, crouched at Trent’s feet, his silken head
pressed against his master’s knee, his upraised eyes scanning the
man’s face in adoration. From time to time he shivered and moaned.
He had come to the end of the trail--the gloriously happy end of the
horrible long trail. And he understood now why his queer sixth sense
had summoned him hither, from the far-off farm where for weeks he had
lived so placidly. The master-call had come to him. He had obeyed it.
For it had been stronger than he.
And it had led him to his god. That was all Buff knew or cared to
know.
And now, still talking to his dog, still petting him, Michael Trent
took up again his homeward trudge. But there was life in his step.
Fatigue seemed to have fallen away from him. The ludicrous worship of
a dog had somehow made life over and had changed depression to hope.
Following his old custom--immemorial among lonely men who own
dogs--Trent talked to Buff as they went along, as though to another
human--knowing the collie could not get the sense of one word in ten,
yet glad to have this vent for his own yearning for expression.
“The start of it all is pretty hazy to me, Buff,” he rambled on, in
the soft monotone that was music to the dog. “I saw Hegan and Gates in
the doorway. One minute I was fighting with them. The next minute I
was in the smelly fo’cas’le of a tramp steamship. I was sick. And I
was aching all over. I had been shanghaied. The next three months were
unadulterated hell. We were bound for Honolulu by way of the Horn,
Buff. And the crew was only one degree better than the captain and the
mate. Let’s let it go at that.
“A chap named Carney and I got to be pals. We broke ship together
at San Francisco on the way back. And we made most of the
transcontinental trip on brake beams. Brake beams aren’t flowery beds
of ease, Buff. Keep off them. Carney had got a bit of the story about
me, from a man who was the mate’s pal between voyages. It seems a
fellow who was in prison down at Logan with Gates and Hegan helped
them engineer my shanghaiing. He told them where to take me. And they
loaded me on a launch of his, down the river to the harbour and sold
me to the captain. He was just weighing anchor. And he was
short-handed.
“Hegan and Gates were planning to keep me out of the way and to let
my stock starve and my crops go to wrack--as most likely they have,
for nobody was likely to get to our out-of-the-way farm in time to
prevent it. Then they were going to lay low for a few months, and
after that they were coming back to Boone Lake and set fire to the
house and barns. Most likely they’ve done it before now. Nice
home-coming, hey, Buff? We’re dead broke, most likely, you and I. But
we’ve got each other, anyhow. And that’s more than I dared hope for.”
He was turning in at the gateway of his farm as he finished the
rambling tale. Buff thrust his nose into his master’s hand and whined
softly. Then, in a trice the collie had stiffened to attention and
darted forward through the shadows towards a patch of white that
emerged from the darkness of the dooryard.
When Gates and Hegan came home to Boone Lake that day they brought
with them a new possession in the shape of a mongrel bulldog of huge
proportions and with a local fame for being one of the “dirtiest”
fighters that ever set upon a weaker foe. Planning to carry out their
amiable intent of firing Trent’s house and barns late in the night,
they had stationed this dog in their victim’s dooryard that evening,
to scare off any possible tramp or other intruder who might be
intending to make the deserted house a resting place. They had no
desire for such witnesses; the penalty for arson being somewhat
drastic in their home state.
It was this guardian dog that came tearing forward now to repel the
two intruders, as Trent and Buff turned into the dooryard. Buff,
guessing his ferocious intent and resenting another and hostile dog’s
presence in his own beloved bailiwick, flew eagerly to meet him. An
instant later the two beasts came together with a clash; and a right
energetic dog fight was raging at Trent’s feet.
Buff, for all his fury, fought with brain as well as brawn, against
his heavier assailant.
There never yet was a bulldog that could, in the open, seize a collie
that was aware of his assault and that wished to elude it.
Buff nimbly sprang aside as the bulldog rushed and let the other
hurtle past him. But the bulldog did not go scatheless. As he lumbered
past, a slash from Buff’s curved eyetooth ploughed a long and deep red
furrow along his shoulder and back. And, as he turned, Buff’s slash
laid open a similar cut at one side of the enemy’s stomach. The collie
danced out of reach of the clashing jaws that sought to grab him
before he could jump back.
When the jaws clamped together the collie’s throat was not there. Even
as his opponent struck a second time Buff flung himself on the ground
and dived for the heavy forelegs in front of him.
Buff’s teeth closed on the bulldog’s right foreleg. And, but for his
own strong strain of collie blood, the fight must have ended then and
there. For a bulldog would have gained this foreleg grip and would
have hung onto it, heedless of the fact that his own spine and the
back of his neck were within easy reach of the foe.
Wherefore, merely giving the forefoot an agonising bite as he went, he
continued his diving rush. Under and between the bowed forelegs of the
bulldog he slipped, eel-like, in swift elusiveness, slashing the
other’s underbody again as he went, and emerged safe on the far side
of the enemy.
Back and forth over the frost-slippery, moon-lit grass raged the
fight, the frantic clawing of feet and Buff’s own staccato snarls and
the thud of clashing bodies alone breaking the night silences. Twice
the bulldog well-nigh secured his coveted throat hold--a hold that
must speedily have left Buff gasping out his life through a severed
jugular.
A third time the bulldog charged for the throat. Buff reared, twisting
sidewise to avoid the charge and at the same time to counter on the
panting and lumbering body. But he did not take account of the
slipperiness of the frosty, dead grass.
The collie’s hind legs slid from under him. Down he went, asprawl on
his back, under this sudden loss of his precarious balance. As quick
as a cat he had spun to his feet again. But the instant of wasted time
had sufficed for the enemy.
The bulldog, lunging murderously for the exposed throat, missed his
mark by reason of Buff’s swirling motion of scrambling to his feet
again. Yet this time the ravening jaws did not close on air or on fur.
Instead they buried themselves in Buff’s upper right foreleg, almost
at the junction of leg and body.
Helpless to break free, Buff ceased to thrash about. He felt the
locked jaws begin to grind, deep and deeper towards the bone. He felt
his enemy’s braced pressure brought to bear upon the imperilled
foreleg.
Then his wolf brain told him what to do. He struck straight for the
nose and upper jaw of the bulldog. He did not slash, as does a collie.
He bent down and secured his grip as would a bulldog.
The bulldog, his own hold secure in the collie’s upper foreleg, was
aware of a terribly painful grip on his tender nose, a grip that waxed
sterner and more tense all the time, a grip also that was shutting off
his breathing power.
In the anguish of choking, the bulldog let go Buff’s foreleg and
shook himself furiously to get free of that encumbering hold. As he
shook he gave tone, emitting a most horrendous yell of pain and rage.
Then for the first time Trent was able in the elusive moonlight and
shadow bars to see how the fight was going or to intervene without
peril of injuring his own dog. But as he bent down to drag the
squirming bulldog away he saw he was too late. Buff’s grinding jaws
had found the jugular. The fight was over. The victor stood up,
panting and weary, and looked down at the inert mass that had so
lately been a mighty fighting machine.
Half an hour later, shaved and clean, Michael Trent set forth for Ruth
Hammerton’s home. Buff, wholly rested from his battle, trotted happily
at his master’s heels. The maid at Hammertons’ gaped wordlessly at
sight of the visitor.
Buff, as politeness bade him, wagged his tail and took a step towards
her. The maid, by nature, was built for endurance rather than speed.
Yet, recovering from her shock, she jumped at least a foot from the
veranda floor; and she made a sound better fitted to a turkey whose
tail feathers have been grabbed than to a decorous household servant.
After which she bolted into the house and down the hall towards the
study. Trent hesitated as to whether or not he ought to follow. But
Buff took matters into his own hands. At the opening of the front door
he caught the scent of Hammerton’s two convict visitors. And down the
long hall he went like a thunderbolt.
Trent, in consternation, dashed after him. But he did not catch up
with the collie until Buff halted, perforce, at the doorway which the
maid’s ample body was just then blocking. As he strove to wriggle past
into the room Trent came alongside and seized the inexplicably excited
dog firmly by the collar. This precaution saved the life of Con Hegan,
who chanced to be standing nearest to the door.
It was Billy Gates who broke the brief spell. Even as Ruth started
forward, with a choking little cry, towards Trent, the convict’s nerve
and brain suddenly collapsed. Waving a tremulous arm at the raging
Buff, Gates babbled in horror:
“Take him away! For the Lord’s sake, take him away! That’s no dog!
It’s a devil! A--a ghost! I--I shot him and I buried him in a--a
forty-foot well with a rope and a stone on his neck! Take him away!
He’s come back for me!”
At a nod from Hammerton the chief of police shoved Hegan into an
adjoining room. Then, wheeling on the gibbering and helpless Gates,
Trent said sternly:
“Now, talk! The whole truth, mind you, unless you want me to let
this--this ghost loose at you! _Talk!_”
And Gates talked. Drunk with superstitious horror, he talked and
continued to talk. Even the sight of Hammerton taking swift notes did
not deter him.
As the chief of police strutted back to the lock-up, propelling his
handcuffed prisoners before him, he tried hard not to look at a shaded
corner of the moonlit veranda--a corner wherein a maid and a man were
seated very close together, with a big collie curled up in drowsy
contentment at their feet.
“SOMETHING”
A dog is only a dog. But a collie is--a collie. Says the Scotch
proverb:
“_A collie has the brain of a man, and the ways of a woman!_”
This is the story of Dick Snowden’s collie, Jock--and of--Something.
You can believe the tale or not, as you choose. But if you know
collies, you will think twice before you pooh-pooh it as rankly
impossible. Moreover, in its chief--and strangest--happenings, it
chances to be true.
It began when Dick Snowden’s pretty girl-wife was lying in the centre
of a huge white bed, and when she was watching the world glide past
her and not much caring how soon it might glide altogether away from
her.
Cuddled close to her in the enormous bed was a white-swathed bundle of
tiny humanity that smelled of talcum powder and of sachet and was a
week old.
The coming of Baby Marise into the ken of mankind had well-nigh cost
the life of Klyda Snowden, her girl-mother. There were no
complications; there was nothing the learned doctors could put a name
to. But Klyda had suffered much and had been through much. She was
very, very tired. So tired was she that it did not seem worth while to
pick up the bulky burden of life again.
It was much easier to lie still, with half-shut eyes, and feel herself
drifting lazily out of life. Dully, she knew the baby was hers, that
it was the precious little daughter for whose advent she and Dick had
for months been planning so happily. She knew, too, that the lean and
bronzed man who spent so many miserable hours at her bedside was her
worshipped husband, Dick.
Yes, she was quite sane. But she was so tired that none of the
real-life things, in which usually she revelled, were worth living
for. Mentally, she knew that the future was bright for her and for
Dick and for their baby. Physically, she was not interested in
anything but drowsing.
It was on the afternoon of the eighth day of Baby Marise’s life that
Dick came into the room carrying a covered wicker basket. Klyda had no
interest in him or in what he was carrying--even when he set down the
basket on the edge of the bed and lifted its cover. Sleepily she
looked at him, ready to drop into another doze.
Into the opened basket went Dick Snowden’s hand, to take out the
contents. But the contents saved him the effort.
Out from the depths of the basket sprang a fluffy gold-and-white ball
of dynamic energy. It wavered dizzily on the wicker edge, then
catapulted clumsily to the counterpane, where it caught sight of
Klyda’s colourless little face set in a halo of tumbled sunlit hair.
With the awkward canter of a badly made patent toy, the ball of fluff
danced sidewise up the counterpane until it reached the white little
face, which it proceeded to lick ecstatically with a very small and
very pink tongue.
By this time Klyda’s weary brain had registered the fact that the new
arrival was a two-months-old collie pup--also that it was doubtless
the same collie pup which Dick had promised, a month ago, to buy for
her.
The gift was one on which Klyda had set her heart; from the day she
and her husband had chanced to pass by some neighbouring collie
kennels and had seen a litter of month-old puppies playing with their
dam in one of the wire runs. Instantly, she had taken a violent fancy
to this particular pup. It was then too young to leave its mother, but
Dick had secured the owner’s promise to sell it to him, as soon as the
youngster should be weaned.
The promise had delighted Klyda. She had named the puppy Jock and had
decreed that he should be Baby’s guardian and chum.
Yet, since then, so many things had happened! And now the arrival of
the once-coveted pup meant nothing to Klyda at all--except that she
did not like to have her wan face licked, nor to be patted at by a set
of clumsy and shapeless white forepaws.
She frowned slightly and hoped Dick would take the obstreperous puppy
away. But at sight of her frown the puppy evidently mistook the slight
facial contortion for an invitation to play, for he braced himself on
all four shapeless legs and made threatening little rushes at the
frowning face, accenting his attacks with ferocious baby barks.
In spite of herself Klyda felt a vague amusement at the pup’s silly
antics. She reached out a weak white hand to pet him. At the touch,
Jock forgot he was a lion or whatever other furious wild beast he was
pretending to be. He remembered only that he was very young and very
far from home and mother, and that the caress of the tired hand was
sweet. With a cluck of contentment, he cuddled close to Klyda’s face
and curled up for a nap.
Dick, glad to have aroused his apathetic wife’s interest to even so
mild an extent, stooped to pick up the puppy and carry him away. But
Jock was in no hurry to go. So piteously did he look to Klyda for
rescue that she bade her husband leave him there for the time.
Whereat, by way of showing his thanks, Jock began again to play with
her hand as it lay idle on the quilt.
Up to this time everybody had moved on tiptoe about the sick-room, and
had talked in undertones. But Jock was no respecter of silence. He
gambolled and barked to his heart’s content. Partly amused and partly
annoyed by his bumptiousness, Klyda found herself for the first time
unable to sink at will into that dreamy apathy of hers. It is hard to
dream, when a tiny furry whirlwind is charging at one or is professing
to believe that one’s white fingers are a mortal foe to be nibbled and
threatened.
Thus it was, against her own will, that Klyda Snowden was shaken from
her semi-coma. After that, youth and nature combined to keep her from
sinking back into it. Probably she would have gotten well, anyhow. And
certainly a noisy collie pup is not to be prescribed as a temporary
roommate for a sick girl. But the fact remained that Klyda “turned the
corner,” that very day, and forthwith grew better.
She had not discovered a new zest in life. Her husband and her
new-born child furnished that. But she had been deprived of the luxury
of drifting away. Action and annoyance and clownish gambols had
chanced to supply the needed impetus to bring her back to normality.
Yet Dick and she always attributed her rally to the arrival of Jock.
And they loved him accordingly. Instead of living in the green-painted
kennel in the garden and seeing his owners for only a casual hour or
so each day, he was brought up in the house and with hourly human
companionship.
That sort of thing has a queerly humanising influence on a dog,
especially if the dog be a thoroughbred collie.
From earliest puppyhood Jock learned to know the human voice in all
its phases, and to read from experience its many shades of meaning. He
learned, too, from constant hearing, the meanings of many simple words
and phrases. He learned still more of human nature--all of which was
wholly natural and has occurred to hundreds of house-bred collies.
From the first, Jock adopted Baby Marise as his particular deity. He
would lie for hours at the foot of her crib, or would walk in sedate
slowness at the side of her perambulator, in preference to a woodland
race or even a romp with Dick or Klyda.
Yet between him and Dick there was a strange bond of sympathy. Dearly
as the dog loved Klyda and Marise, he was closer to Dick than to
either of them. He would lie with his eyes on the man’s face, watching
its every change; and seemed to be studying him to the very soul.
Even as a puppy, Jock used to do this.
A scowl on Dick’s brow would bring him forward with a rush, to offer
canine sympathy or to rub his nose consolingly against his master’s
hand. He would go into ecstasies of joyous excitement when Dick
laughed or smiled. And, as the dog grew older, he seemed able to see
past mere facial expression and to read Dick’s varying moods, even
when those moods gave no visible sign of expression.
All of this seemed nothing short of magic to the Snowdens, though it
is a common enough phenomenon to anyone who has been much with
collies.
It was when Baby Marise was a harum-scarum girl of four, and when Jock
was a stately giant in his early maturity, that something happened
which the Snowdens never tired of talking about.
Dick started at sunrise for a day’s trout-fishing along a brook which
ran through a wild tract of meadow and forest, some three miles above
the Snowden place. Jock, as his master set forth, galloped
enthusiastically ahead, eager for the prospective walk. But Dick
whistled him back. The man did not desire to have wary trout scared
away by the occasional plunges of a seventy-pound collie into the
brook.
“No,” he said, as if talking to a fellow-human. “Not to-day, old man!
Stay here and look after the place.”
Crestfallen yet philosophical, Jock trotted back to the veranda and
lay down, his deep brown eyes following pathetically the receding
figure of his master, hoping against hope that Dick might relent and
summon him to follow. Then Marise came down to breakfast with Klyda,
and Jock proceeded to devote himself to their society.
It was about four o’clock that afternoon when Klyda was awakened from
a nap on the porch by the sudden rising of the collie from his
resting-place on the mat near her. Jock had been asleep; yet something
had startled him in an instant from his repose and had changed a
sedately slumbering collie into a creature of puppylike excitability.
Every hair on the dog’s shaggy ruff was abristle. His eyes were
glinting as with pain. He burst into a salvo of frantic barking and
dashed across to where Klyda lay.
Catching the hem of the astonished woman’s skirt in his teeth, he
tugged at her dress, backing away with a suddenness that all but threw
her to the floor.
“Jock!” expostulated Klyda, recovering her balance and trying to
extricate the skirt from his grip. “Jock, have you gone crazy?”
Jock’s answer was to release his hold on the skirt-hem, and to gallop
off the porch and out onto the drive which led to the highway. There
he halted, barked in imperious summons and darted back to Klyda.
Catching her skirt again between his jaws, he sought to draw her out
onto the driveway with him.
Laughing at her pet’s odd behaviour, Klyda went down the steps to the
drive. Instantly Jock let go of her skirt and ran fifty feet towards
the main road. There, halting again, he turned and barked. As the
woman still did not follow, he ran back, seized her skirt in his teeth
again and tried to draw her onward.
This time Klyda did not refuse to follow. A queer notion had possessed
her--a notion that Jock was not doing these unaccountable things for a
mere lark or to lure her into a romp. It was not at all like the
dignified collie to behave this way. Calling to her brother--who was
reading, indoors--to join her, she set forth in the wake of the dog.
The moment the two humans started toward him, Jock ceased to bark in
that frantic and panic-urged fashion. He wheeled and galloped off,
straight across country. Every few hundred yards he would pause to
make sure the others were still following, and to let them come
nearer. Then he would be off again.
A wearisome walk he led the puzzled Klyda and her grumbling brother.
In a precise line he travelled, turning aside for no hillock or rock
or tangle of undergrowth.
“For goodness’ sake!” panted the brother, once, as he looked ruefully
down at his buckskin shoes which had just plodded through a corner of
swamp-land. “For goodness’ sake, Klyda, let’s stop this fool ramble!
The idiot of a dog will probably halt in front of some oak where he’s
treed a cat, and he’ll want us to dislodge his quarry for him. On a
red-hot day like this, what’s the earthly sense of following a----”
“He hasn’t treed a cat,” was Klyda’s reply. “He hasn’t treed anything.
He’s been with me, all day. I don’t know why he is acting like this.
But I know Jock, and I know he’s got some good reason for being so
eager for me to follow him. If you’re tired----”
“Oh, I’ll trail along, if you’re going to!” grunted her brother.
“Only, if he leads us over into the next county and then turns around
and leads us back, just for fun--well, I warn you I’ll guy you for the
rest of your days for being so silly as to--Hello!” he broke off.
“Here’s where we’ll have to wade!”
They had come out of the woods at the verge of a wide brook. Klyda
gave a little start as she saw it, and lost her colour.
“Why, this is Snake Brook!” she cried. “Dick and I have been here a
dozen times. But we’ve always come by way of the road. I didn’t know
it was in this direction. I----”
“Well?” queried her brother. “Even at that, what’s the excitement?
There’s nothing so very dramatic, is there, in coming upon Snake
Brook? It’s----”
“It’s where Dick came to fish to-day,” said Klyda, her pallor
increasing. “Jock has led us here, and----”
“And that’s the thrilling end of our quest?” interrupted her brother
with a growl of disgust. “Jock got lonely for his master, and he’s
dragged us through marsh and brambles, all this way, just for a sweet
family reunion! Lord!”
“No,” contradicted Klyda, her voice not quite steady, “no! See, he
hasn’t crossed the brook. He’s running along it, on this side. And now
he’s stopped again for us to follow him. Come!”
She set off at a run along the pebbly and winding margin of the brook.
Jock, as she started, wheeled again and vanished into a copse of
shrubbery which ran down from a steep bank to the edge of the water.
Ten seconds later the two heard the collie’s voice upraised once more,
this time in a quavering wolf-howl of anguish. And no longer did the
undergrowth crackle at his charging progress. He had come to a halt
somewhere.
“The cur’s stumbled into a hornets’ nest,” guyed the brother, laughing
loudly to subdue a prickly feeling that ran along his spine at sound
of that eerie cry.
But Klyda did not answer. She was plunging headlong through the
bushes, panting and gasping with her own violent efforts to reach the
spot where Jock awaited her.
Out in a little clearing, beside the brook, and at the base of a
ten-foot cliff-bank, she came upon the dog. He was standing guard over
a body that sprawled inertly, half in the water at the cliff-foot, a
splintered fishing rod at its side.
There lay Dick Snowden, his leg broken in two places by his tumble
from the bank. In falling, his head had struck against a water-edge
boulder. The impact had caused concussion of the brain. Nor did the
victim recover consciousness until an hour after they had gotten him
home.
People who did not understand collies used to smile politely and lift
their brows when the Snowdens told how Jock had brought aid to the
stricken master, of whose plight the dog could not possibly have known
through any explainable channels.
Some of these people agreed with Klyda’s brother, who always insisted
there was nothing mysterious or occult about the matter. They
explained that Jock had waxed lonely for his absent master and had
tried to coax Klyda into going with him to meet the returning
fisherman,--and that the accident to Dick had been a mere coincidence,
quite outside the dog’s calculations.
They did not explain how Jock knew the precise direction in which Dick
had gone that day, nor why, during Snowden’s previous and succeeding
absences from home, the collie made no such effort to follow him.
Klyda and Dick did not bother to argue with these sceptics. They knew
Jock; other people did not.
“It wasn’t coincidence,” was all Klyda would say when outsiders sought
to convince her. “It was--_Something_.”
And so the years went on at the Snowden home, pleasantly and
uneventfully. Baby Marise was a leggy and big-eyed girl of nine, and
Jock was in the full hale prime of latter middle age. Dick and Klyda
were sweethearts, as ever. They and their child and their huge
gold-and-white dog formed a close corporation that made home life very
beautiful for all four of them.
Then, over the smugly complacent land, rang a bugle-call. Half the
world was sick unto death with the Hun pestilence, and America alone
could stay the hideous disease’s assault on humanity. America alone
could cure a dying world. To achieve this Heaven-sent miracle, the
lives of thousands of brave men were needed. And at the terrible blast
of the bugle-call these men responded in millions.
Dick Snowden was one of them.
There were tears at the Snowden home when Dick first went thence to
the officers’ training-camp. There was dire loneliness after he had
gone.
But there were no tears when, at the end of his last furlough, Captain
Richard Snowden said good-bye to his family and embarked for France.
There were no tears, then. There was a hero-smile on Klyda’s drawn
lips. Baby Marise tried to smile, too. And at least she did not
cry--which was very brave indeed. Jock looked long and gravely up into
Snowden’s forcedly gay face; and laid his splendid head against his
master’s khaki knee as Dick said to him:
“Good-bye, old chap! Take care of them till I come back. You’re the
man of the house, remember, while I’m gone.”
No, there were no tears when Captain Dick Snowden sailed gallantly
away to fight the grey-clad pests which were engulfing the world. But
there was a deadly and bitter loneliness that swooped down on the
once-merry little household and gripped it by the throat--a
loneliness that deepened and grew more cruelly hard to bear as the
dreary weeks sagged on.
Jock, with his queer collie sixth sense, felt acutely the changed
atmosphere of the place. He sought, in a thousand unobtrusive ways, to
console and cheer his mistress and Marise. And he seemed to have
understood Dick’s parting charge to him to assume the responsibilities
of “the man of the house.” Always Jock had been a fiery guardian of
the home in the matter of warding off intruders. Nowadays his jealous
guardianship became an obsession.
Voluntarily abandoning his lifelong nightly resting-place on the rug
outside the door of Klyda’s room, he took to sleeping on the veranda.
Nor was his sleep heavy. A dozen times a night the wakeful Klyda could
hear the big dog get to his feet and start off on a thorough patrol of
the grounds.
This sentry-go accomplished, he would circle the porch and return to
his doormat bed for another fitful snooze. But the very slightest
sound was enough to awaken him and to bring him at once to fierce
alertness. The step of a belated wayfarer on the highroad beyond,--the
faintest stir of one of the sleepers within the house,--any of a
hundred negligible noises of the night,--sufficed to rouse him to his
duty.
In the daytime, Jock was seldom more than arm’s-length from Klyda or
Marise. With cold suspicion his melancholy dark eyes would follow the
motions of each casual visitor or tradesman. Yes, Jock was taking his
job seriously.
On the rare occasions when a letter from France reached the place, he
knew of its arrival before the mail was sorted. It would thrill him
and set him to barking wildly and to scampering about the house like a
joy-crazed puppy. He seemed to know the occasion was one of rapture
for them all.
“The minute the letters are handed in at the door,” Klyda boasted to
her brother, “even before any of us have time to look them over, Jock
always knows whether or not there’s a letter from Dick.”
“Why shouldn’t he?” demanded the sceptic. “A collie has a wolf’s power
of scent. He can smell the touch of Dick’s hand on the envelope. It’s
perfectly normal.”
“No,” denied Klyda, musingly, “it isn’t normal. It’s--_Something!_”
Then, late of a September night, the household was jolted from slumber
by a clangour of barking from the porch.
To one who understands collies, there is as much difference in a dog’s
various modes of barking as in the inflections of a human voice. For
example, there is the gay bark of greeting, there is the sharply
imperative bark of challenge, there is the noisily swaggering bark of
sheer excitement, and there is the acute and agonised bark that tells
of stark emotion.
Jock’s bark to-night had the timbre of that with which, long ago, he
had summoned Klyda to the aid of her injured husband at Snake Brook.
And the sound went through the lonely wife’s soul like a knife-thrust.
She sprang out of bed and, in dressing-gown and slippers, ran out to
the porch. As on that earlier day, Jock was awaiting her in fevered
excitement. Catching the hem of her wrapper, he tugged. Then, dropping
the wrapper, he galloped up the driveway and wheeled about to face her
with a bark of summons.
To-night Klyda needed no second invitation to follow him. Bewildered,
trembling, yet trusting to the collie’s intuition, she stumbled along
in the direction Jock led. And, leaving the driveway, he was
travelling due northeast.
Well did Klyda know she was moving northeastward. For, by dint of
compass and maps, she had long since figured out for herself the
approximate direction of France in relation to her home. And always
she faced in that direction when she knelt to pray for Dick.
For perhaps half a mile the dog continued his progress, at first in
mad eagerness, but presently in growing indecision and irresolution.
At last he stopped, sniffed the air through vertically lifted
nostrils, then trotted back to Klyda. Head a-droop, tail dragging,
every line of his grand body expressing the utmost miserable
dejection, he crept up to Klyda and crouched before her, his head on
her foot. He shuddered, as if in pain; and then whimpered softly,
lifting his head for a moment and peering to the northeast.
He had failed. He had awakened with the sudden knowledge of his
master’s peril. He had followed the urge of the call. And all at once
he had realised that for some reason he could not hope to lead his
mistress to the man who so sorely needed her aid. Perplexed,
heartsick, he had crawled back; helpless to do more.
Again, Klyda’s brother scoffed at his sister’s certainty that
something was amiss with Snowden. So did all others to whom the
unhappy woman told the tale. They still scoffed at the idea of any
premonition on the part of the dog--but there was an awed note behind
their scoffing--when, a few weeks later, a shaky scrawl was received
from the absentee; a scrawl written in a base hospital:
“I am laid by the heels for a day or two by a handful of rather
nasty little shrapnel-bites that Herr Fritz sprayed me with
three nights ago during a reconnoitre. Nothing serious--so
you’re not to worry your dear self. I’ll be as good as new in a
week or two. The surgeon says so. He says I’ll be lucky if I’m
able to claim a wound-chevron on the strength of such a piker
injury.
“Here is a funny bit of mental delusion that may amuse you:
When I toppled over and lay there in No Man’s Land,--before my
men could find me and bring me in,--there was an ungodly lot of
racket from the Hun batteries. It almost deafened me. But
through it all I believed I could hear--as distinctly as ever I
heard anything--the wild barking of old Jock.
“Wasn’t that a quaint trick for a wounded man’s brain to play?
Jock has a pretty thunderous bark, but its echo could hardly
travel three thousand miles and reach me above the roar of the
boche batteries. Yet I heard it. It wasn’t his usual bark,
either. It sounded the way it did the time Marise fell down the
well, and as it sounded when the house caught fire in the night
and he roused us barely in time to put out the blaze. I must
have been a bit delirious, of course. But it gave me a queer
homey feeling to hear the dear old fellow’s voice--even if I
didn’t hear it.”
Klyda looked at the date on the letter. Then she subtracted three days
therefrom and computed the time difference between her home and
northern France. Then she turned to the little desk-calendar on which,
superstitiously, she had marked with a cross the date of her awakening
by Jock. After that she showed her brother the letter and the
calendar. As I have said, he still scoffed. But there was something
of awe in his manner.
It was a shock to Klyda to know her adored soldier was wounded. Yet it
was also a joy to know that he was not only in no danger from his
wound, but that he was kept, perforce, out of battle, for a time. This
knowledge, and the relief from her weeks of foreboding, gave Klyda a
curious sense of peace which had not been hers in many a day. Her
spirits rebounded to a lightness which was almost hysterical. As the
day wore on, her unnatural gaiety and her sense of nearness to Dick
increased.
Early in the evening she left the house and strolled out into the
white autumn moonlight. She was restless, and she wanted solitude and
exercise. Jock rose from his bed on the doormat and ranged alongside
her for the anticipated walk.
Crossing the stretch of moon-soaked turf, the two made their way
towards a rustic summer-house that stood on a knoll at the far end of
the grounds. Here, with Dick, they had been wont to sit, daily, to
watch the sunset. And to the old trysting-place, Klyda now strolled.
Jock, like herself, had been gay all day; ever since the arrival of
the pencil scrawl from Dick. It was with difficulty now that he curbed
his exuberant pace to keep time with hers.
They reached the summer-house on the knoll. There, Klyda stood for an
instant in silence, to gaze dreamily over the moon-swept hills. The
night was deathly still.
Then, of a sudden, the silences were shattered by a sound that wailed
forth in hideous cadences from hill to hill; re-echoing until the
placid night fairly screamed with it. Klyda gasped aloud at the horror
of the plangent din, and she spun about to locate its cause.
There in the moonlight twenty feet away from her stood Jock. The dog’s
every muscle was tense, as if with torture. His head was flung back.
From his cavernous throat was issuing a series of long-drawn howls,
slow, earsplitting, raucous,--howls of mortal anguish.
“Jock!” panted Klyda in swift terror. “_Jock!_”
(At the same moment, in a base hospital near Meran-en-Laye, a nurse
was drawing the top of a cotton sheet over a face whose eyes would no
longer need the light of day. The nurse was saying to a fellow-worker,
as she performed the grim duty:
“Poor fellow! He was doing so nicely, too, till the blood poison set
in.... Say, Nora, did I hear a dog howling, just then, or are my
nerves going bad?”)
At the quick appeal in Klyda’s voice Jock ceased his hideous lament
and stood trembling, with head bent almost to the ground. Then,
through her moment of dread, that same strange sense of nearness to
her husband came back upon the woman, but fiftyfold stronger than ever
before since his departure. Through no volition of her own, she heard
herself whisper timidly:
“_Dick?_”
As she spoke, the collie raised his head, as in joyous greeting. He
came swiftly over to where his mistress stood.
But it was not towards her he was moving. Nor was it at her that his
rapturously welcoming gaze was turned.
The dog was hurrying, with eyes aglint and plumy tail waving, toward a
spot directly beside her. Thus had he advanced, many a time, to greet
his master, when Dick had returned from brief absences and when Jock
had seen him standing there with his arm thrown protectingly about his
wife and his eyes smiling down into hers.
To humans, the tensely waiting woman would have seemed to be standing
there in the moonlight, alone. But it was not into empty space that
the advancing dog gazed so eagerly.
No one, seeing the collie then, could have doubted for an instant that
Jock was looking at--_Something!_