the bitter cold and the snow to the house of any neighbour; there to
tell his woful tale of oppression. The semblance of martyrdom, without
its bothersome actuality, was quite enough for his purpose. Once before,
at home, when his father had administered a mild and much-needed
spanking, Cyril had made a like threat; and had then gone to hide in a
chum’s home, for half a day; returning to find his parents in agonies of
remorse and fear, and ready to load him with peace-offerings. The child
saw no reason why the same tactics should not serve every bit as
triumphantly, in the present case.
He knew the maids were in the kitchen and at least one man was in the
stables. He did not want his whereabouts to be discovered before he
should have been able to raise a healthy and dividend-bringing crop of
remorse in the hearts of the Mistress and the Master, so he resolved to
go farther afield.
In the back of the meadow, across the road, and on the hither side of
the forest, was a disused cattle-barrack, with two stalls under its
roofpile of hay. The barrack was one of Cyril’s favourite playhouses. It
was dry and tight. Through his thick clothing he was not likely to be
very cold, there; for an hour or two. He could snuggle down in the warm
hay and play Indians, with considerable comfort; until such time as the
fright and penitence of his hosts should have come to a climax and make
his return an ovation.
Meanwhile, it would be fun to picture their uneasiness and fear for his
safety; and to visualise their journeyings through the snow to the
houses of various neighbours, in search of the lost child.
Buoyed up by such happy thoughts as these, Cyril struck out at a lively
pace for the highroad and into the field beyond. The barrack, he knew,
lay diagonally across the wide meadow, and near the adjoining woods.
Five minutes of tramping through the snow ought to bring him to it. And
he set off, diagonally.
But, before he had gone a hundred yards, he lost his first zest in the
adventure. The darkness had thickened; and the vagrant wind-gusts had
tightened into a steady gale;—a gale which carried before it a blinding
wrack of stingingly hard-driven snow.
The grey of the dying dusk was blotted out. The wind smote and battered
the spindling child. Mechanically, he kept on for five or six minutes,
making scant and irregular progress. Then, his spirit wavered. Splendid
as it would be to scare these hateful people, there was nothing splendid
in the weather that numbed him with cold and took away his breath and
half-blinded him with snow.
What was the fun of making others suffer; if he himself were suffering
tenfold more? And, on reaching the barrack, he would have all that
freezing and blast-hammering trip back again. Aw, what was the use?
And Cyril came to a halt. He had definitely abandoned his high
enterprise. Turning around, he began to retrace his stumbling steps.
But, at best, in a large field, in a blizzard and in pitch darkness, and
with no visible landmarks, it is not easy to double back on one’s route,
with any degree of accuracy. In Cyril’s case, the thing was wholly
impossible.
Blindly he had been travelling in an erratic half-circle. Another minute
of walking would have brought him to the highroad, not far from the
Place’s gateway. And, as he changed his course, to seek the road, he
moved at an obtuse angle to his former line of march.
Thus, another period of exhausting progress brought him up with a bump
against a solid barrier. His chilled face came into rough contact with
the top rail of a line fence.
So relieved was the startled child by this encounter that he forgot to
whine at the abrasion wrought upon his cheek by the rail. He had begun
to feel the first gnawings of panic. Now, at once, he was calm again.
For he knew where he was. This was the line fence between the Place’s
upper section and the land of the next neighbour. All he need do was to
walk along in the shelter of it, touching the rails now and then to make
certain of not straying, until he should come out on the road, at the
gate lodge. It was absurdly easy; compared to what he had been
undergoing. Besides, the lee of the fence afforded a certain shelter
from wind and snow. The child realised he had been turned about in the
dark; and had been going in the wrong direction. But now, at last, his
course seemed plain to him.
So he set off briskly, close to the fence;—and directly away from the
nearby road.
For another half-hour he continued his inexplicably long tramp; always
buoyed up by the hope of coming to the road in a few more steps; and
doggedly sure of his bearings. Then, turning out from the fence, in
order to skirt a wide hazel thicket, he tripped over an outcrop of rock,
and tumbled into a drift. Getting to his feet, he sought to regain the
fence; but the fall had shaken his senses and he floundered off in the
opposite direction. After a rod or two of such futile plunging, a
stumbling step took him clean off the edge of the world, and into the
air.
All this, for the merest instant. Then, he landed with a jounce in a
heap of brush and dead leaves. Squatting there, breathless, he stretched
out his mittened hand, along the ground. At the end of less than another
yard of this exploring, his fingers came again to the edge of the world
and were thrust out over nothingness.
With hideous suddenness, Cyril understood where he was; and what had
happened to him and why. He knew he had followed the fence for a full
mile, _away_ from the road; through the nearer woods, and gradually
upward until he had come to the line of hazels on the lip of the
ninety-foot ravine which dipped down into a swamp-stretch known as
“Pancake Hollow.”
That was what he had done. In trying to skirt the hazels, he had stepped
over the cliff-edge, and had dropped five feet or more to a rather
narrow ledge that juts out over the ravine.
Well did he remember this ledge. More than once, on walks with the
Mistress and the Master, he had paused to look down on it and to think
what fun it would be to imprison some one there and to stand above,
guying the victim. It had been a sweet thought. And now, he, himself,
was imprisoned there.
But for luck, he might have fallen the whole ninety feet; for the ledge
did not extend far along the face of the cliff. At almost any other spot
his tumble might have meant—
Cyril shuddered a little; and pursued the grisly theme no further. He
was safe enough, till help should come. And, here, the blast of the wind
did not reach him. Also, by cuddling low in the litter of leaves and
fallen brush, he could ward off a little of the icy cold.
He crouched there; shaking and worn out. He was only eleven. His fragile
body had undergone a fearful hour of toil and hardship. As he was
drawing in his breath for a cry to any chance searchers, the boy was
aware of a swift pattering, above his head. He looked up. The sky was a
shade or two less densely black than the ravine edge. As Cyril gazed in
terror, a shaggy dark shape outlined itself against the sky-line, just
above him.
Having followed the eccentric footsteps of the wanderer, with great and
greater difficulty, to the fence-lee where the tracing was much easier,
Lad came to the lip of the ravine a bare five minutes after the child’s
drop to the ledge.
There, for an instant, the great dog stood; ears cocked, head
inquiringly on one side; looking down upon the ledge. Cyril shrank to a
quivering little heap of abject terror, at sight of the indistinct
animal shape looming mountain-high above him.
This for the briefest moment. Then back went Lad’s head in a pealing
bark that seemed to fill the world and to re-echo from a myriad
directions at once. Again and again, Lad gave clamorous voice to his
discovery of the lost child.
On a clear or windless night, his racket must have penetrated to the
dullest ears at the Place, and far beyond. For the bark of a dog has
more carrying power than has any other sound of double its volume. But,
in the face of a sixty-mile gale laden with tons of flying snow, the
report of a cannon could scarce have carried over the stretch of
windswept ground between the ravine and the Place.
Lad seemed to understand this. For, after a dozen thunderous barks, he
fell silent; and stood again, head on one side, in thought.
At first sound of the barking, Cyril had recognised the dog. And his
terror had vanished. In its place surged a peevish irritation against
the beast that had so frightened him. He groped for a rock-fragment to
hurl up at the rackety collie.
Then, the child paused in his fumbling. The dog had scant reason to love
him or to seek his society. Of late, Lad had kept out of his way as much
as possible. Thus it was not likely the collie had come here of his own
accord, on such a night; for the mere joy of being with his tormentor.
His presence must mean that the Master was close behind; and that the
whole Place was in a ferment of anxiety about the wanderer. By stoning
Lad away and checking the barks, Cyril might well prevent the searchers
from finding him. Too weak and too numb with cold to climb up the
five-foot cliff-face to the level ground above, he did not want to miss
any chance for rescue.
Hence, as Lad ceased to bark, the child set up a yell, with all his
slight lung-power, to attract the seekers’ notice. He ordered Lad to
“Speak!” and shook his fist angrily at the dog, when no answering bark
followed.
Despairing of making any one hear his trumpeting announcement that he
had found the child, Lad presently made up his mind as to the only
course that remained. Wheeling about, head down, he faced the storm
again; and set off at what speed he could compass, toward home, to lead
the Master to the spot where Cyril was trapped. This seemed the only
expedient left. It was what he had done, long ago, when Lady had caught
her foot in a fox-trap, back in the woods.
As the dog vanished from against the grey-black skyline, Cyril set up a
howl of wrathful command to him to come back. Anything was better than
to be in this dreary spot alone. Besides, with Lad gone, how could Lad’s
Master find the way to the ledge?
Twice the child called after the retreating collie. And, in another few
steps, Lad had halted and begun to retrace his way toward the ledge.
He did not return because of Cyril’s call. He had learned, by ugly
experience, to disregard the child’s orders. They were wont to mean much
unpleasantness for him. Nevertheless, Lad halted. Not in obedience to
the summons; but because of a sound and a scent that smote him as he
started to gallop away. An eddy of the wind had borne both to the dog’s
acute senses.
Stiffening, his curved eyeteeth baring themselves, his hackles
bristling, Lad galloped back to the ravine-lip; and stood there sniffing
the icy air and growling deep in his throat. Looking down to the ledge
he saw Cyril was no longer its sole occupant. Crouched at the opening of
a crevice, not ten feet from the unseeing child, was something bulky and
sinister;—a mere menacing blur against the darker rock.
Crawling home to its lair, supperless and frantic with hunger, after a
day of fruitless hunting through the dead forest world, a giant wildcat
had been stirred from its first fitful slumber in the ledge’s crevice by
the impact of the child upon the heap of leaves. The human scent had
startled the creature and it had slunk farther back into the crevice.
The more so when the bark and inimical odour of a big dog were added to
the shattering of the ravine’s solitude.
Then the dog had gone away. Curiosity,—the besetting trait of the cat
tribe,—had mastered the crevice’s dweller. The wildcat had wriggled
noiselessly forward a little way, to learn what manner of enemy had
invaded its lair. And peering out, it had beheld a spindling child; a
human atom without strength or weapon.
Fear changed to fury in the bob-cat’s feline heart. Here was no
opponent; but a mere item of prey. And, with fury, stirred
long-unsatisfied hunger; the famine hunger of midwinter which makes the
folk of the wilderness risk capture or death by raiding guarded
hencoops.
Out from the crevice stole the wildcat. Its ears were flattened close to
its evil head. Its yellow eyes were mere slits of fire. Its claws
unsheathed themselves from the furry pads,—long, hooked claws, capable
of disembowelling a grown deer at one sabre-stroke of the muscular
hindlegs. Into the rubble and litter of the ledge the claws sank, and
receded, in rhythmic motion.
The compact yellow body tightened into a ball. The back quivered. The
feet braced themselves. The cat was gauging its distance and making
ready for a murder-spring. Cyril, his head turned the other way, was
still peering up along the cliff-edge for sight of Lad.
This was what Lad’s scent and hearing,—and perhaps something else,—had
warned him of, in that instant of the wind’s eddying shift. And this was
the scene he looked down upon, now, from the ravine-lip, five feet
above.
The collie brain,—though never the collie heart,—is wont to flash back,
in moments of mortal stress, to the ancestral wolf. Never in his own
life had Sunnybank Lad set eyes on a wildcat. But in the primal forests,
wolf and bob-cat had perforce met and clashed, a thousand times. There
they had begun and had waged the eternal cat-and-dog feud, of the ages.
Ancestry now told Lad that there is perhaps no more murderously
dangerous foe than an angry wildcat. Ancestry also told him a wolf’s one
chance of certain victory in such a contest. Ancestry’s aid was not
required, to tell him the mortal peril awaiting this human child who had
so grievously and causelessly tormented him. But the great loyal heart,
in this stark moment, took no thought of personal grudges. There was but
one thing to do,—one perilous, desperate chance to take; if the child
were to be saved.
The wildcat sprang.
Such a leap could readily have carried it across double the space which
lay between it and Cyril. But not one-third of that space was covered in
the lightning pounce.
From the upper air—apparently from nowhere—a huge shaggy body launched
itself straight downward. As unerringly as the swoop of an eagle, the
down-whizzing bulk flew. It smote the leaping wildcat, in mid-flight.
A set of mighty jaws,—jaws that could crack a beef-bone as a man cracks
a filbert,—clove deep and unerringly into the cat’s back, just behind
the shoulders. And those jaws flung all their strength into the ravening
grip.
A squall—hideous in its unearthly clangour—split the night silences. The
maddened cat whirled about, spitting and yowling; and set its foaming
teeth in the dog’s fur-armoured shoulder. But before the terrible curved
claws could be called into action, Lad’s rending jaws had done their
work upon the spine.
To the verge of the narrow ledge the two combatants had rolled in their
unloving embrace. Its last lurch of agony carried the stricken wildcat
over the edge and out to the ninety-foot drop into the ravine. Lad was
all-but carried along with his adversary. He clawed wildly with his toes
for a purchase on the smooth cliff wall; over which his hindquarters had
slipped. For a second he hung, swaying, above the abyss.
Cyril, scared into semi-insanity by sight of the sudden brief battle,
had caught up a stick from the rubbish at his feet. With this, not at
all knowing what he did, he smote the struggling Lad over the head with
every atom of his feeble force.
Luckily for the gallant dog, the stick was rotten. It broke, in the
blow; but not before its impact had well-nigh destroyed Lad’s precarious
balance.
One clawing hindfoot found toe-room in a flaw of rock. A tremendous
heave of all his strained muscles; and Lad was scrambling to safety on
the ledge.
Cyril’s last atom of vigour and resistance had gone into that panic blow
at the dog. Now, the child had flung himself helplessly down, against
the wall of the ledge; and was weeping in delirious hysterics.
Lad moved over to him; hesitated a moment, looking wistfully upward at
the solid ground above. Then, he seemed to decide which way his duty
pointed. Lying down beside the freezing child, he pressed his great
shaggy body close to Cyril’s; protecting him from the swirling snow and
from the worst of the cold.
The dog’s dark, deep-set eyes roved watchfully toward the crevice, alert
for sign of any other marauder that might issue forth. His own shaggy
shoulder was hurting him, annoyingly, from the wildcat’s bite. But to
this he gave no heed. Closer yet, he pressed his warm, furry body to the
ice-cold youngster; fending off the elements as valorously as he had
fended off the wildcat.
The warmth of the great body began to penetrate Cyril’s numbed senses.
The child snuggled to the dog gratefully. Lad’s pink tongue licked
caressingly at the white face; and the collie whimpered crooning
sympathy to the little sufferer.
So, for a time the dog and the child lay there; Cyril’s numb body
warming under the contact.
Then, at a swift intake of the windy air, Lad’s whimper changed to a
thunder of wild barking. His nostrils had told him of the search party’s
approach, a few hundred yards to the windward.
Their dispiritingly aimless hunt changing into a scrambling rush in the
direction whence came the faint-heard barks, the searchers trooped
toward the ledge.
“Here we are!” shrilled the child, as the Master’s halloo sounded
directly above. “Here we are! Down here! A—a lion tackled us, awhile
back. But we licked him;—I and Laddie!”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FIVE: “Youth Will Be Served!”
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[Illustration]
FIVE: “Youth Will be Served!”
Bruce was a collie—physically and in many other ways a super-collie.
Twenty-six inches at the shoulder, seventy-five pounds in weight, his
great frame had no more hint of coarseness than had his classic head and
foreface.
His mighty coat was black-stippled at its edges, like Seedley
Stirling’s, giving the dog almost the look of a “tricolour” rather than
of a “dark-sable-and-white.” There was an air of majesty, of perfect
breeding, about Bruce—an intangible something that lent him the bearing
of a monarch. He was, in brief, such a dog as one sees perhaps thrice in
a generation.
At the Place, after old Lad’s death, Bruce ruled as king. He was no mere
kennel dog—reared and cared for like some prize ox—but was part and
parcel of the household, a member of the family, as befitted a dog of
his beauty and brain and soul.
It was when Bruce was less than a year old that he was taken to his
first A.K.C. bench show. The Master was eager that the dog-show world
should acclaim his grand young dog, and that the puppy—like the youthful
knights of old—should have fair chance to prove his mettle against the
paladins of his kind. For it is in these shows that a dog’s rating is
determined; that he is pitted against the best in dogdom, before judges
who are almost always competent and still oftener honest in their
decisions.
The goal of the show dog is the championship, whose fifteen points must
be annexed under no less than three judges, at three different times; in
ratings that range from one point to five points, according to the
number of dogs exhibited. To only the show’s best dog of his or her
special breed and sex are points awarded.
The Master took Bruce to his first A.K.C. show with much trepidation. He
knew how perfect was this splendid young collie of his. But he also knew
that the judge might turn out to be some ultra-modernist who preferred
daintiness of head and smallness of bone and _borzoi_ fore-face, to
Bruce’s wealth of bone and thickness of coat and unwonted size.
Modestly, therefore, he entered his dog only in the puppy and novice
classes, and strove to cure his own show-ague by ceaseless grooming and
rubbing and dandy-brushing of the youngster, whose burnished coat
already stood out like a Circassian beauty’s hair and who was fit in
every way to make the showing of his life.
In intervals of polishing the bored puppy’s coat, the Master spent much
time in studying covertly the collie judge, who was chatting with a
group of friends at the ring’s edge, waiting for his breed’s classes to
be called.
The Master was partly puzzled, partly reassured, by the aspect of the
little judge.
Angus McGilead’s Linlithgow birth was still apparent in the very
faintest burr of his speech and in the shrewd, pale eyes that peered,
terrier-like, above his lean face and huge thatch of grizzling red
beard. He was a man whose forebears had known collies as they knew their
own children, and who rated a true collie above all mere money price.
From childhood McGilead had made a life study of this, his favourite
breed. As a result, he was admittedly the chief collie authority on
either side of the grey ocean. This fact, and his granite honesty, made
him a judge to be looked up to with a reverent faith which had in it a
tinge of fear.
Such was the man who, at this three-point show, was to pass judgment on
Bruce.
After an eternity of waiting, the last airedale was led from the judging
ring. The first collie class, “Puppies, male,” was chalked on the
blackboard. The Master, with one final ministration of the dandy-brush,
snapped a ring-leash on Bruce’s collar, and led him down the collie
section into the ring.
Four other puppies were already there. McGilead, his shrewd pale eyes
half shut, was lounging in one end of the enclosure, apparently
listening to something the ring-steward was saying, but with his
seemingly careless gaze and his keen mind wholly absorbed in watching
the little procession of pups as it filed into the ring. Under the sandy
lashes, his eyes caressed or censured all the entrants in turn, boring
into their very souls.
Then, as the last of the five walked in and the gate was shut behind
them, he came to life. Approaching the huddle of dogs and their
handlers, he singled out a shivering little puppy whose baby fur had not
yet been lost in the rough coat of maturity and whose body was still
pudgy and formless.
“How old is this pup?” he asked the woman who was tugging at the
boundingly excited baby’s leash.
“Six months, yesterday!” was the garrulous answer. “Isn’t he a little
beauty, Judge? Two days younger and he’d have been too young to show. He
just comes in the law. It’s lucky he wasn’t born two days later.”
“No,” gently contradicted McGilead, petting the downy little chap. “It’s
unlucky. Both for you and for him. The rules admit a pup to the show
ring at six months. The rules are harsh, for they make him compete with
dogs almost double his age. The puppy limit is from six to twelve months
in shows. I don’t want you to feel bad when I refuse to judge this
little fellow. It isn’t your fault, nor his, that he hasn’t begun to
develop. But it would be like putting a child of five into competitive
examination at school with a lad of twenty.”
Motioning her gently to a far corner, he rasped at the others. “Walk
your dogs, please!”
The procession started around the ring. Presently, McGilead waved the
Master to take Bruce to one side. Then he placed one after another of
the remaining dogs on the central block and went over them with infinite
care. At the end of the inspection, he beckoned the worried Master to
bring Bruce to the block. After running his hands lightly over and under
the pup, he turned to the ring-steward, who stood waiting with a ledger
and a handful of ribbons.
Writing down four numbers in the book, McGilead took a blue and a red
and a yellow and a white ribbon and advanced again toward the waiting
exhibitors.
(And this, by the way, is the Big Moment, to any dog handler—this
instant when the judge is approaching with the ribbons. For sheer
thrill, it makes roulette and horse-racing seem puerile.)
To the Master, the little judge handed the blue ribbon. Then he awarded
the red “second” and the yellow “third” and the white “reserve” to three
others.
The recipient of the reserve snorted loudly.
“Say!” he complained. “Better judges than you have said this pup of mine
is the finest collie of his age in America. What do you mean by giving
him a measly reserve? What’s the matter with him?”