The child's parents were going to Europe for three months, that winter.
The child himself was getting over a nervous ailment. The doctors had
advised he be kept out of school for a term; and be sent to the country.
His mother was afraid the constant travel from place to place, in
Europe, might be too much for him. So she asked leave of the Mistress
and the Master,--one of whom was her distant relative,--for the
convalescent to stay at the Place during his parents' absence.
That was how it all started.
The youngster was eleven years old; lank and gangling, and blest with a
fretful voice and with far less discipline and manners than a
three-month collie pup. His name was Cyril. Briefly, he was a pest,--an
unspeakable pest.
For the first day or two at the Place, the newness of his surroundings
kept Cyril more or less in bounds. Then, as homesickness and novelty
alike wore off, his adventurous soul expanded.
He was very much at home; far more so than were his hosts, and
infinitely more pleased than they with the situation in general. He had
an infinite genius for getting into trouble. Not in the delightfully
normal fashion of the average growing boy; but in furtively crafty ways
that did not belong to healthy childhood.
Day by day, Cyril impressed his odd personality more and more on
everything around him. The atmosphere of sweet peace which had brooded,
like a blessing, over the whole Place, was dispersed.
The cook,--a marvel of culinary skill and of long service, gave tearful
warning, and departed. This when she found the insides of all her
cooking utensils neatly soaped; and the sheaf of home-letters in her
work-box replaced by cigar-coupons.
One of the workmen threw over his job with noisy blasphemy; when his
room above the stables was invaded by stealth and a comic-paper picture
of a goat's head substituted for his dead mother's photograph in the
well-polished little bronze frame on his bureau.
And so on, all along the line.
The worst and most continuous sufferer from Cyril's loathed presence on
the Place was the massive collie, Lad.
The child learned, on the first day of his visit, that it would be
well-nigh as safe to play with a handful of dynamite as with Lad's
gold-and-white mate, Lady. Lady did not care for liberties from anyone.
And she took no pains to mask her snappish first-sight aversion to the
lanky Cyril. Her fiery little son, Wolf, was scarce less formidable
than she, when it came to being teased by an outsider. But gallant old
Lad was safe game.
He was safe game for Cyril, because Lad's mighty heart and soul were
miles above the possibility of resenting anything from so pitifully
weak and defenseless a creature as this child. He seemed to realize, at
a glance, that Cyril was an invalid and helpless and at a physical
disadvantage. And, as ever toward the feeble, his big nature went out
in friendly protection to this gangling wisp of impishness.
Which was all the good it did him.
In fact, it laid the huge collie open to an endless succession of
torment. For the dog's size and patience seemed to awaken every atom of
bullying cruelty in the small visitor's nature.
Cyril, from the hour of his arrival, found acute bliss in making Lad's
life a horror. His initial step was to respond effusively to the
collie's welcoming advances; so long as the Mistress and the Master
chanced to be in the room. As they passed out, the Mistress chanced to
look back.
She saw Cyril pull a bit of cake from his pocket and, with his left
hand, proffer it to Lad. The tawny dog stepped courteously forward to
accept the gift. As his teeth were about to close daintily on the cake,
Cyril whipped it back out of reach; and with his other hand rapped Lad
smartly across the nose.
Had any grown man ventured a humiliating and painful trick of that sort
on Lad, the collie would have been at the tormentor's throat, on the
instant. But it was not in the great dog's nature to attack a child.
Shrinking back, in amaze, his abnormally sensitive feelings jarred, the
collie retreated majestically to his beloved "cave" under the
music-room piano.
To the Mistress's remonstrance, Cyril denied most earnestly that he had
done the thing. Nor was his vehemently tearful denial shaken by her
assertion that she had seen it all.
Lad soon forgave the affront. And he forgave a dozen other and worse
mal-treatments which followed. But, at last, the dog took to shunning
the neighborhood of the pest. That availed him nothing; except to make
Cyril seek him out in whatsoever refuge the dog had chosen.
Lad, trotting hungrily to his dinner dish, would find his food
thick-strewn with cayenne pepper or else soaked in reeking gasoline.
Lad, seeking peace and solitude in his piano cave, would discover his
rug, there, cleverly scattered with carpet tacks, points upward.
Lad, starting up from a snooze at the Mistress's call, would be deftly
tripped as he started to bound down the veranda steps, and would risk
bruises and fractures by an ugly fall to the driveway below.
Wherever Lad went, whatever Lad did, there was a cruel trick awaiting
him. And, in time, the dog's dark eyes took on an expression of puzzled
unhappiness that went straight to the hearts of the two humans who
loved him.
All his life, Lad had been a privileged character on the Place. Never
had he known nor needed whip or chain. Never had he,--or any of the
Place's other dogs,--been wantonly teased by any human. He had known,
and had given, only love and square treatment and stanch friendliness.
He had ruled as benevolent monarch of the Place's Little People; had
given loyal service to his two deities, the Mistress and the Master;
and had stood courteously aloof from the rest of mankind. And he had
been very, very happy.
Now, in a breath, all this was changed. Ever at his heels, ever waiting
to find some new way to pester him, was a human too small and too weak
to attack;--a human who was forever setting the collie's high-strung
nerves on edge or else actively hurting him. Lad could not understand
it. And as the child gained in health and strength, Lad's lot grew
increasingly miserable.
The Mistress and the Master were keenly aware of conditions. And they
did their best,--a useless best,--to mitigate them for the dog. They
labored over Cyril, to make him leave Lad alone. They pointed out to
him the mean cowardice of his course of torture. They even threatened
to send him to nearer relatives until his parents' return. All in vain.
Faced with the most undeniable proofs, the child invariably would lie.
He denied that he had ever ill-used Lad in any way; and would weep, in
righteous indignation, at the charges. What was to be done?
"I thought it would brighten up the house so, to have a child in it
again!" sighed the Mistress as she and her husband discussed the
matter, uselessly, for the fiftieth time, after one of these scenes. "I
looked forward so much to his coming here! But he's--oh, he isn't like
any child I ever heard of before!"
"If I could devote five busy minutes a day to him," grunted the Master,
"with an axe-handle or perhaps a bale-stick--"
"You wouldn't do it!" denied his wife. "You wouldn't harm him; any more
than Lad does. That's the trouble. If Cyril belonged to us, we could
punish him. Not with a--a balestick, of course. But he needs a good
wholesome spanking, more than anyone else I can think of. That or some
other kind of punishment that would make an impression on him. But what
can we do? He isn't ours--"
"Thank God!" interpolated the Master, piously.
"And we can't punish other people's child," she finished. "I don't know
what we CAN do. I wouldn't mind half so much about the other sneaky
things he does; if it wasn't for the way he treats Laddie. I--"
"Suppose we send Lad to the boarding kennels, at Ridgewood, till the
brat is gone?" suggested the Master. "I hate to do it. And the good old
chap will be blue with homesickness there. But at least he'll get kind
treatment. When he comes over to me and looks up into my eyes in that
terribly appealing way, after Cyril has done some rotten thing to
him,--well, I feel like a cur, not to be able to justify his faith that
I can make things all right for him. Yes, I think I'll send him to the
boarding kennels. And, if it weren't for leaving you alone to face
things here, I'd be tempted to hire a stall at the kennels for myself,
till the pest is gone."
The next day, came a ray of light in the bothered gloom. And the
question of the boarding kennels was dropped. The Mistress received a
letter from Cyril's mother. The European trip had been cut short, for
business reasons; and the two travelers expected to land in New York on
the following Friday.
"Who dares say Friday is an unlucky day?" chortled the Master in glee,
as his wife reached this stage of the letter.
"And," the Mistress read on, "we will come out to the Place, on the
noon train; and take darling Cyril away with us. I wish we could stay
longer with you; but Henry must be in Chicago on Saturday night. So we
must catch a late afternoon train back to town, and take the night
train West. Now, I--"
"Most letters are a bore," interpolated the Master. "Or else they're a
bother. But this one is a pure rapture. Read it more slowly, won't,
you, dear? I want to wallow in every blessed word of hope it contains.
Go ahead. I'm sorry I interrupted. Read on. You'll never have such
another enthusiastic audience."
"And now," the Mistress continued her reading, "I am going to ask both
of you not to say a single word to precious Cyril about our coming home
so soon. We want to surprise him. Oh, to think what his lovely face
will be like, when he sees us walking in!"
"And to think what MY lovely face will be like, when I see him walking
out!" exulted the Master. "Laddie, come over here. We've got the
gorgeousest news ever! Come over and be glad!"
Lad, at the summons, came trotting out of his cave, and across the
room. Like every good dog who has been much talked to, he was as adept
as any dead-beat in reading the varying shades of the human voice. The
voices and faces alike of his two adored deities told him something
wonderful had happened. And, as ever, he rejoiced in their gladness.
Lifting his magnificent head, he broke into a salvo of trumpeting
barks; the oddly triumphant form of racket he reserved for great
moments.
"What's Laddie doing?" asked Cyril, from the threshold. "He sounds as
if he was going mad or something."
"He's happy," answered the Mistress.
"Why's he happy?" queried the child.
"Because his Master and I are happy," patiently returned the Mistress.
"Why are YOU happy?" insisted Cyril.
"Because today is Thursday," put in the Master. "And that means
tomorrow will be Friday."
"And on Friday," added the Mistress, "there's going to be a beautiful
surprise for you, Cyril. We can't tell you what it is, but--"
"Why can't you tell me?" urged the child. "Aw, go ahead and tell me! I
think you might."
The Master had gone over to the nearest window; and was staring out
into the gray-black dusk. Mid-winter gripped the dead world; and the
twilight air was deathly chill. The tall naked treetops stood gaunt and
wraithlike against a leaden sky.
To the north, the darkness was deepest. Evil little puffs of gale
stirred the powdery snow into myriads of tiny dancing white devils. It
had been a fearful winter, thus far; colder than for a score of years;
so cold that many a wild woodland creature, which usually kept far back
in the mountains, had ventured down nearer to civilization for forage
and warmth.
Deer tracks a-plenty had been seen, close up to the gates of the Place.
And, two days ago, in the forest, half a mile away, the Master had come
upon the half-human footprints of a young bear. Starvation stalked
abroad, yonder in the white hills. And need for provender had begun to
wax stronger among the folk of the wilderness than their inborn dread
of humans.
"There's a big snowstorm coming up," ruminated the Master, as he
scanned the grim weather-signs. "A blizzard, perhaps. I--I hope it
won't delay any incoming steamers. I hope at least one of them will
dock on schedule. It--"
He turned back from his musings, aware for the first time that a right
sprightly dialogue was going on. Cyril was demanding for the eighth
time:
"WHY won't you tell me? Aw, I think you might! What's going to happen
that's so nice, Friday?"
"Wait till Friday and see," laughed the Mistress.
"Shucks!" he snorted. "You might tell me, now. I don't want to wait and
get s'prised. I want to know, NOW. Tell me!"
Under her tolerant smile, the youngster's voice scaled to an impatient
whine. He was beginning to grow red.
"Let it go at that!" ordained the Master. "Don't spoil your own fun, by
trying to find out, beforehand. Be a good sportsman."
"Fun!" snarled Cyril. "What's the fun of secrets? I want to know--"
"It's snowing," observed the Mistress, as a handful of flakes began to
drift past the windows, tossed along on a puff of wind.
"I want to KNOW!" half-wept the child; angry at the change of subject,
and noting that the Mistress was moving toward the next room, with Lad
at her heels. "Come back and tell me!"
He stamped after her to bar her way. Lad was between the irate Cyril
and the Mistress. In babyish rage at the dog's placid presence in his
path, he drew back one ungainly foot and kicked the astonished collie
in the ribs.
At the outrage, Lad spun about, a growl in his throat. But he forbore
to bite or even to show his teeth. The growl had been of indignant
protest at such unheard-of treatment; not a menace. Then the dog
stalked haughtily to his cave, and lay down there.
But the human witnesses to the scene were less forbearing;--being only
humans. The Mistress cried out, in sharp protest at the little brute's
action. And the Master leaned forward, swinging Cyril clear of the
ground. Holding the child firmly, but with no roughness, the Master
steadied his own voice as best he could; and said:--
"This time you've not even bothered to wait till our backs were turned.
So don't waste breath by crying and saying you didn't do it. You're not
my child; so I have no right to punish you. And I'm not going to. But I
want you to know you've just kicked something that's worth fifty of
you."
"You let me down!" Cyril snarled.
"Lad is too white and clean and square to hurt anything that can't hit
back," continued the Master. "And you are not. That's the difference
between you. One of the several million differences,--all of them in
Lad's favor. When a child begins life by being cruel to dumb animals,
it's a pretty bad sign for the way he's due to treat his fellow-humans
in later years,--if ever any of them are at his mercy. For your own
sake, learn to behave at least as decently as a dog. If--"
"You let me down, you big bully!" squalled Cyril, bellowing with
impotent fury. "You let me down! I--"
"Certainly," assented the Master, lowering him to the floor. "I didn't
hurt you. I only held you so you couldn't run out of the room, before
I'd finished speaking; as you did, the time I caught you putting red
pepper on Lad's food. He--"
"You wouldn't dare touch me, if my folks were here, you big bully!"
screeched the child, in a veritable mania of rage; jumping up and down
and actually foaming at the mouth. "But I'll tell 'em on you! See if I
don't! I'll tell 'em how you slung me around and said I was worsen a
dirty dog like Lad. And Daddy'll lick you for it. See if he don't! He--"
The Master could not choke back a laugh; though the poor Mistress
looked horribly distressed at the maniac outburst, and strove
soothingly to check it. She, like the Master, remembered now that
Cyril's doting mother had spoken of the child's occasional fits of red
wrath. But this was the first glimpse either of them had had of these.
Hitherto, craft had served Cyril's turn better than fury.
At sound of the Master's unintentional laugh the unfortunate child went
quite beside himself in his transport of rage.
"I won't stay in your nasty old house!" he shrieked. "I'm going to the
very first house I can find. And I'm going to tell 'em how you hammered
a little feller that hasn't any folks here to stick up for him. And
I'll get 'em to take me in and send a tel'gram to Daddy and Mother to
come save me. I--"
To the astonishment of both his hearers, Cyril broke off chokingly in
his yelled tirade; caught up a bibelot from the table, hurled it with
all his puny force at Lad, the innocent cause of the fracas; and then
rushed from the room and from the house.
The Mistress stared after him, dumfounded; his howls and the jarring
slam of the house door echoing direfully in her ears. It was the Master
who ended the instant's hush of amaze.
"Whenever I've heard a grown man say he wished he was a boy again," he
mused, "I always set him down for a liar. But, for once in my life, I
honestly wish I was a boy, once more. A boy one day younger and one
inch shorter and one pound lighter than Cyril. I'd follow him out of
doors, yonder, and give him the thrashing of his sweet young life.
I'd--"
"Oh, do call him back!" begged the Mistress. "He'll catch his death of
cold, and--"
"Why will he?" challenged the Master, without stirring. "For all his
noble rage, I noticed he took thought to grab up his cap and his
overcoat from the hall, as he wafted himself away. And he still had his
arctics on, from this afternoon. He won't--"
"But suppose he should really go over to one of the neighbors," urged
the Mistress, "and tell such an awful story as he threatened to? Or
suppose--"
"Not a chance!" the Master reassured her. "Now that the summer people
are away, there isn't an occupied house within half a mile of here. And
he's not going to trudge a half-mile through the snow, in this bitter
cold, for the joy of telling lies. No, he's down at the stables or else
he's sneaked in through the kitchen; the way he did that other time
when he made a grandstand exit after I'd ventured to lecture him on his
general rottenness. Remember how worried about him you were, that time;
till we found him sitting in the kitchen and pestering the maids? He--"
"But that time, he was only sulky," said the Mistress. "Not insanely
angry, as he is now. I do hope--"
"Stop worrying!" adjured the Master. "He's all right."
Which proved, for perhaps the trillionth time in history, that a
woman's intuitions are better worth following than a man's saner logic.
For Cyril was not all right. And, at every passing minute he was less
and less all right; until presently he was all wrong.
For the best part of an hour, in pursuance of her husband's counsel,
the Mistress sat and waited for the prodigal's return. Then,
surreptitiously, she made a round of the house; sent a man to ransack
the stables, telephoned to the gate lodge, and finally came into the
Master's study, big-eyed and pale.
"He isn't anywhere around," she reported, frightened. "It's dinner
time. He's been gone in hour. Nobody's seen him. He isn't on the Place.
Oh, I wonder if--"
"H'm!" grumbled her husband. "He's engineering an endurance contest,
eh? Well, if he can stand it, we can."
But at sight of the deepening trouble in his wife's face, he got up
from his desk. Going out into the hall, he summoned Lad.
"We might shout our heads off," he said, "and he'd never answer; if
he's really trying to scare us. That's part of his lovable nature.
There's just one way to track him, in double time. LAD!"
The Master had been drawing on his mackinaw and hipboots as he spoke.
Now he opened the front door.
"Laddie!" he said, very slowly and incisively to the expectantly eager
collie. "Cyril! Find CYRIL! FIND him!"
To the super-wise collie, there was nothing confusing in the command.
Like many another good dog, he knew the humans of the household by
their names; as well as did any fellow-human. And he knew from long
experience the meaning of the word, "Find!"
Countless times that word had been used in games and in earnest. Its
significance, now, was perfectly plain to him. The Master wanted him to
hunt for the obnoxious child who so loved to annoy and hurt him.
Lad would rather have found anyone else, at the Master's behest. But it
did not occur to the trained collie to disobey. With a visible
diminishing of his first eager excitement, but with submissive haste,
the big dog stepped out on to the veranda and began to cast about in
the drifts at the porch edge.
Immediately, he struck Cyril's shuffling trail. And, immediately, he
trotted off along the course.
The task was less simple than ordinarily. For, the snow was coming down
in hard-driven sheets; blotting out scent almost as effectively as
sight. But not for naught had a thousand generations of Lad's
thoroughbred ancestors traced lost sheep through snowstorms on the
Scottish moors. To their grand descendant they had transmitted their
weird trailing power, to the full. And the scent of Cyril, though faint
and fainter, and smothered under swirling snow, was not too dim for
Lad's sensitive nostrils to catch and hold it.
The Master lumbered along, through the rising drifts, as fast as he
could. But the way was rough and the night was as black dark as it was
cold. In a few rods, the dog had far outdistanced him. And, knowing how
hard must be the trail to follow by sense of smell, he forbore to call
back the questing collie, lest Lad lose the clew altogether. He knew
the dog was certain to bark the tidings when he should come up with the
fugitive.
The Master by this time began to share his wife's worry. For the trail
Lad was following led out of the grounds and across the highway, toward
the forest.
The newborn snowstorm was developing into a very promising little
blizzard. And the icy lash of the wind proved the fallacy of the old
theory, "too cold to snow." Even by daylight it would have been no
light task to steer a true course through the whirling and blinding
storm. In the darkness, the man found himself stumbling along with
drunkenly zigzag steps; his buffeted ears strained, through the noise
of the wind for sound of Lad's bark.
But no such sound came to him. And, he realized that snow and adverse
winds can sometimes muffle even the penetrating bark of a collie. The
man grew frightened. Halting, he shouted with all the power of his
lungs. No whimper from Cyril answered the hail. Nor, at his master's
summons, did Lad come bounding back through the drifts. Again and
again, the Master called.
For the first time in his obedient life, Lad did not respond to the
call. And the Master knew his own voice could not carry, for a single
furlong, against wind and snowfall.
"I'll go on for another half-hour," he told himself, as he sought to
discern the dog's all-but obliterated footsteps through the deepening
snow. "And then I'll go back and raise a search party."
He came to a bewildered stop. Fainter and more indistinguishable had
Lad's floundering tracks become. Now,--by dint of distance and
snow,--they ceased to be visible in the welter of drifted whiteness
under the glare of the Master's flashlight.
"This means a search-party," decided the man.
And he turned homeward, to telephone for a posse of neighbors.
Lad, being only a dog, had no such way of sharing his burden. He had
been told to find the child. And his simple code of life and of action
left him no outlet from doing his duty; be that duty irksome or easy.
So he kept on. Far ahead of the Master, his keen ears had not caught
the sound of the shouts. The gale and the snow muffled them and drove
them back into the shouter's throat. Cyril, naturally, had not had the
remotest intent of laboring through the bitter cold and the snow to the
house of any neighbor; there to tell his woeful 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
roof-pile of hay. The barrack was one of Cyril's favorite 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 visualize their journeyings through the snow to the
houses of various neighbors, 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 gray 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 traveling 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 neighbor.
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 realized 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 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
fun it would be to imprison someone 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 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.
This for the briefest moment. Then back went Lad's head in a pealing
bark that seemed to fill the world and to reecho 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 recognized 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 anyone 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 gray-black sky-line, 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, supper-less 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 odor 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 mid-winter 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 disemboweling 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 clangor,--split the night silences.
The maddened cat whirled about, spitting and yowling; and set its
foaming teeth in the dog's fur-armored 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 carped the stricken wildcat
over the edge and out 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 with every atom of
his feeble force, over the head.
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 vigor 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!"