CHAPTER THREE: MASTERLESS!
NOW this is the story of the masterless wanderings of Buff.
Long and unavailingly did Buff follow the track of the car which had borne away the man who was his god. Dizzy from his wound, faint from loss of blood, heart-broken and frantic at the vanishing of his master, the collie sped in pursuit. The scent was fresh in his nostrils—the scent of the kidnapped man and of his abductors, and the familiar odour of Trent’s car.
Mile after mile galloped Buff through the summer night; trusting wholly to his sense of smell. With the peculiar mile-eating canter of his wolf-ancestors, he stuck to the trail, even when the car’s track ceased to furrow the dusty country road and passed clean through a busy little city.
Through the city’s myriad odours and distractions, Buff stuck to the scent of his master’s car. Other cars—hundreds of them—had laced the trail. The asphalt’s smell of gasoline and grease was sickeningly acute in the dog’s nostrils, confusing and sometimes all but blotting out the scent he was following. Yet never quite did Buff lose the track.
Under the lamps of motor-trucks and trolley cars he flashed, swerving barely far enough out of their way to save himself from death; then ever picking up the scent again.
Once a troop of small boys gave chase, realising the chances of reward that lay in the capture of so fine a dog. But Buff, with that odd and choppy wolf-stride of his, soon out-distanced them. And they threw stones, futilely, in the wake of the flying tawny shape.
Again, a Great Dane whirled out of a dooryard and pursued the passing collie. Buff was aware of the larger dog’s presence only when a spring and a snarl warned him to wheel, in bare time to avoid the full shock of the Dane’s charge.
Buff had no time for fighting. Paying no further heed to the attacking giant, he swerved from the assault, caught the trail again, and increased his pace. But the Great Dane would not have it so. His instincts of a bully were aroused by the meek flight of this stranger dog from his onset. And he pursued at top speed.
A motor-bus, whirring out from a side street, checked Buff’s flight for an instant, by barring the way. Before he could get into his stride again, the Dane had hurled himself upon the fugitive, bearing him to the ground, in the slime and mud of the greasy street.
By the time Buff’s tawny back smote the asphalt, he was master of the situation. Furious at this abominable delay he reverted to type—or to two types.
It was his wolf-ancestry that lent him the wit and the nimbleness to spin to his feet, under the big assailant’s lunging body, and to find by instinct the hind leg tendon of the lumbering brute. All this, in one lightning swirl, and before the Dane could slacken his own pace.
But it was his pit terrier strain that made him set his curved eye-teeth deep and firmly in that all-important tendon, and to hold his grip with a vise-like steadfastness and might, while he ground his jaws slowly together.
Almost before the smitten mongrel could shriek forth his agony and fear, before the toppling gigantic body could crash to the ground, the fierce-grinding jaws had met in the centre of the thing they gripped. And, leaving behind him the crippled and howling bully, Buff slipped through the human crowd that had begun to collect; and was casting about once more for the ever-fainter trail of Trent’s car.
In a moment he had found it. And he sped along in renewed zest.
Through the city and out into its straggling suburbs galloped Buff. There, a mile beyond, was a wayside garage, with one or two ramshackle buildings on either side of it. Behind them a rotting dock nosed its way out into the river. Here, at times, tugs and tenders and lighters touched; on their way between the city and the ocean harbour, eight miles to southward.
At the garage the trail ended. Here had halted Michael Trent’s car.
Buff ran twice around the closed garage. His nostrils told him the car was inside that dark and deserted building. He had followed it twenty miles or more. He was worn out from the run. Yet here the scent of his adored master was stronger than it had been anywhere along the way.
The dog scratched imperiously at the garage door. The sagging wood shook and grumbled under the impact. But it held firm. Nor did anyone come from inside to answer the summons. Frightened at the silence, yet certain of the scent he sought, Buff circled the building once more, nose to earth, steps uncertain, head darting from side to side.
The quest did not bring to his senses any trace of Trent. But it did bring to him a dual odour that set the dog’s ruff to bristling, and his teeth to glinting from under his uncurled lip. For here, side by side, had trodden Hegan and Gates. Not more than an hour earlier they had walked here, their heels striking deep in the dirt, as though they carried between them some heavy weight. They had walked thus to the dock and to its outer edge.
Baffled, the collie made his way back to the garage. There, distinct through the reek of gas and oil and dead tobacco and dried grease, he caught again the scent of his master. With a little whimper of eagerness, Buff paused beneath a shut and locked window, some three feet from the ground. He gathered his waning strength for one more effort, and sprang upward.
Through the thin and cracked glass and the rotting sash he clove his way, alighting on the slimy concrete floor of the garage amid a shower of window particles.
The glass, by some minor miracle, scarce cut the dog. Apart from a scratch or two on his pads and a shallow cut on the nose, he was none the worse for his dive through the shaky casement.
The instant he touched ground, Buff was in new search of his master’s scent. And at once he found it.
There were three cars in the garage. Two of them were old and battered and in parlous condition. The third was still new. And to this new car Buff ran.
It was Michael Trent’s car. Empty as it was now—even of cushions and dashboard equipments, and shorn of its license numbers—Buff knew it at a single sniff. He knew more. He knew that in this car’s muddied tonneau, little over half an hour ago, Trent had been lying. Yes, and that Gates and Hegan had been occupying the front seat. Also that the nasty smell of some medicine or drug was strong in the tonneau.
But the one thing that interested Buff was Michael Trent’s recent presence there. Being only a real-life dog and not a story-book detective, it occurred quite naturally to Buff that where Trent had so lately been, he would in time be again.
Trent had left the car. That was evident. But doubtless he would return to it. Every day he used this car. And, of course, he would come back to it, soon or late. Wherefore, as Trent’s trail led no farther, there seemed nothing for Buff to do but to wait for him here.
Accordingly, the collie stepped up on the running board, and through the open doorway of the tonneau. Stretching himself out there, as close as possible to the space where Trent had lain, Buff began his vigil—waiting in worried patience for the return of the man whom he had chosen as his deity.
And so in time he fell asleep; worn-out nature renewing itself in his tired body and building up again the strong young tissues and the wonted vigour of frame and of brain.
Fast as the dog had run, and with as few delays, yet he had arrived far too late to ameliorate or even share his master’s doom. Fast as a collie can run—and no dog but the greyhound can outstrip him—yet a new and desperately driven motor-car can cover thrice the same ground in far less time than can he.
Moreover, Buff had wasted many precious minutes in senselessness, in the waterless well, and many more in gnawing through the rope, and in casting about the farmhouse and in the yard for Trent’s trail. More than an hour ahead of him, Gates and Hegan had reached their destination. They had disposed of the stolen car, borne off the valuables they had taken from Trent’s home and from his body, and did all else they had planned in advance to do. The only creature with a clue to the victim’s whereabouts had come up an hour too late.
It was daylight when Buff awoke. He was stiff and drowsy. The bullet graze and the glass cut on his head were throbbing. He was thirsty, too, and hungry. He did not wake, of his own accord, but through force of habit, as the crunching of human feet reached his sleeping senses.
He lifted his head. Steps were clumping up to the garage door, and a key was at work in the padlock. Buff was keenly interested.
A dog awakens instantly and with all his faculties acute. With him there is none of the owlish stupidity and dazedness which marks the transition from sleep to awake, among humans. At one instant he is fast asleep; at the next he is wide awake. And so it was with Buff.
He was interested now at the sound of steps, because he hoped one of the two men whose tread he heard might be Michael Trent. But at once he knew it was not. Trent’s step was as familiar to Buff as was Trent’s scent. And neither of these two approaching persons had a semblance to Trent’s light, springy stride. Indeed, before the garage door opened more than an inch, Buff’s nostrils told him that these newcomers were total strangers to him.
One of the two men was elderly and disreputable. The other, a mere boy, had not lived long enough to look as thoroughly disreputable as did his companion, but very evidently he had done his best along that line in the few years allotted him.
The older man was approaching Trent’s car, talking over his shoulder to the youth.
“Put them new license plates on this, first thing you do,” he commanded. “Then get a chisel and see what you can do with the motor number. And we’ll have to——”
He stopped with much abruptness. As he had been speaking he had advanced to Trent’s car and had laid a careless hand on the swinging tonneau door. At the same moment he was aware of a tawny shape, bloody of head, that arose from the depths of the tonneau; teeth bared and eyes menacing.
This car belonged to Michael Trent as much as did the Trent farmhouse. Long since, Buff had learned that it was his sacred duty to guard the one as rigidly as the other. And here this stranger was laying an impious hand on the machine!
At the apparition of the threatening head and at the sound of the equally threatening growl, the man recoiled from the car, jerking back his dirty hand from the door as suddenly as if the latter had turned into a snake.
Open-mouthed, the two men surveyed Buff. Quietly, but not at all friendlily, the collie returned their stare. He had no quarrel with either of them. For all he knew or cared, this might be their rightful home. So long as they should abstain from touching or otherwise molesting Trent’s car, he was content to let them alone. But his pose and expression made it very clear that he expected the same sort of treatment from them and that he was calmly ready to enforce such treatment.
“It’s—it’s—why, it’s a dog!” cleverly observed the youth, breaking the momentary silence of surprise. “It’s——”
“It’s a collie,” amended his senior, finding his voice, and his wits together. “A top-notcher, at that. Must have sneaked in here while we was closin’ up last night. A dog like that is worth a big heap of cash. And most likely there’ll be a reward offered for him. See, he’s got a good collar on. And he’s chawed his rope through. He’s worth keepin’ till called for. Go, catch him, sonny. And tie him up yonder, till we c’n take him over to the house.”
The man spoke wheedlingly to his young companion. But the lad had noted his sire’s own reception from Buff. And, modestly, he hung back. At the other’s repeated and sterner mandate, the youth remarked:
“Think I’ll run up home for breakfast. I’ll be back in ten minutes. You might tie him up, yourself, while I’m gone. I ain’t much used to dogs.”
The older man scowled; then his brow cleared.
“We’ll both go up to breakfast,” he decreed. “We’ll lock this feller in here while we’re gone. On the way back I’ll stop for Joe Stears. He’s got a passel of dogs; and he und’stands handlin’ ’em. Come on.”
Compromising thus, they departed, closing and locking the garage door behind them. Neither of them having gone to the far side of the room, they did not see the broken sash and the mess of glass on the floor—a bit of wreckage hidden from their view by the three cars.
For a few minutes after they left him, Buff lay still. Then he got up, stretched fore and aft, collie fashion, and stepped down to the concrete floor. Making his way across to a water-tub, he drank long and deep. Then he stood irresolute.
He had been in this ill-smelling place for many hours. Michael Trent had not returned to his car. Michael Trent’s odour had grown faint—almost imperceptible. There was no reason, after all, to believe that Trent would come back here. A few months ago he had taken his old car to a garage and had never gone back for it. Perhaps that was what he would do in the present case.
Meanwhile, Buff was bitterly homesick for his master. And Buff was worried, to the depths of his soul, as to what might have befallen Trent at the hands of the two men with whom the dog associated his master’s departure—the men he was learning to hate with a mortal hatred because he knew them for his master’s enemies.
By loitering here, he could get no trace of Trent, nor of the men who had carried him away. Refreshed and once more alert, he prepared to take up his quest again.
An easy leap carried Buff out through the smashed window, and to freedom. As he stood in the road, hesitant, he saw bearing down toward him at a run the two men who had just left the garage, and with them a third man, who carried a rope and a club.
As the trio very evidently meant to seize him, and as he had no reason for staying there in the road to be caught, the collie set off across the nearest field at a hard-gallop, heading for a distant patch of woods. The men gave chase. But, without bothering to increase his speed, he soon left them panting and swearing, far in the rear. Presently, they gave up the pursuit.
Midway in the field, Buff scared up an unwary young rabbit. At sight of the pneumatically bouncing cottontail, the collie remembered he himself had eaten nothing in nearly twenty-four hours. Like a furry whirlwind, he was after the rabbit. Fifty yards on, a swirl in the long grass and a few red-stained leaves marked the abrupt end of the race. And Buff found himself supplied with a toothsome breakfast.
Thus began the collie’s first day of utter loneliness; a day of bleak misery and bewilderment, of biting grief. He ranged the country for miles on either side for a trace of his master. He followed several motor-cars, on various highways, because of their vague resemblance to Trent’s.
Once he ran rapturously for a quarter-mile, in pursuit of a well-set-up man who was taking a cross-country tramp; and whom, in the distance, his near-sighted eyes mistook for his master. The wind being in the wrong direction, Buff was not aware of his error until he had careered to within fifty feet of the stranger. Then, head and brush drooping, he slunk away, heavy of heart and heedless of the man’s kindly hail.
Under cover of darkness, that evening, the collie made a detour that brought him back to the garage where last he had seen Trent’s car. Whether he hoped Trent might have come back there, or whether perhaps the desolate dog craved the faint scent of his master on the tonneau door and flooring—in any event, he leaped in through the unmended window of the garage, and sought to locate the stolen car.
The car was no longer there. After the deft underground method employed by professional automobile thieves and receivers of such booty, the car had already been passed along the line to its next resting-place.
A boy, coming home late from the near-by city, chanced to be passing the unlit garage. From the cavernous depths of the building burst forth into the still night a hideous sound—the anguish howl of a wolf or of a masterless and wretched collie.
While the boy still stood shivering in terror at the eerie sound, a dark shape hurtled out through the window and vanished into the surrounding blackness.
And now began Buff’s tortured experience as a stray—as a leal one-man dog whose master is gone. Goaded on ever by that vague hope of somewhere finding Trent, and the scarce lesser hope of finding and wreaking vengeance on the men he associated with Trent’s disappearance, the great collie wandered aimlessly over the face of the countryside.
Unhappiness and the nerve-wrack of his endless quest lent him a strange furtiveness, and made him revert in a measure to the wild. Always searching—always avoiding his own kind and humans—he grew gaunt and lean. Living by his wits, in summer the forests gave him enough food to support life. He became craftily adept in catching rabbits and squirrels, and even occasional young birds. He did not starve, for the wolf-brain lent him the gift of foraging; although his farm training held him aloof from hen-roost and stall and fold, in his food-hunts.
Almost at once he skirted the city and guided himself back to Boone Lake, nearly thirty miles from where the trail had ended. The feat was not difficult, and he consumed less than a single night on the journey.
Reaching his master’s farm at grey of dawn, Buff found the house and outbuildings deserted. The weeds had crept thick among the once trim crops, and there was an air of desolation brooding over the land.
Buff could not know that of all Boone Lake, Ruth Hammerton alone had refused to accept as true the report that Michael Trent had left home of his own accord. She had visited the deserted farm with her father, as soon as the story had been repeated to her, and had prevailed on Mr. Hammerton to send one of his farm-hands to transfer to the Hammertons’ place Trent’s suffering livestock for safe-keeping.
It was enough for the collie to know his master was not at home, and that he had not been at home since the night of his kidnapping. Buff did not belong to the silly and professionally loyal type of dog that curls itself on its owner’s vacant doorstep and starves to death.
There was no time to think of such selfish matters as death, while Michael Trent remained to be found and his two enemies to be tracked down.
So, aimlessly, he took up his search.
That night he circled Boone Lake, investigating every house and path that Trent had been wont to frequent, visiting first the Hammerton place and last the market square—the scene of his triumph over Bayne, the drover.
Dawn found him miles away, ever seeking, ever wandering, living on slain forest creatures, obsessed and haunted by his overmastering impulse to find Trent.
Once, as he trotted along the ridge of a wooded hill, Buff saw in the valley below a farmer trying with pitiable ill-success to round up a flock of sixty sheep that had bolted through the pasture gate and were scattering over the surrounding fields and woods; instead of marching toward their distant fold, whose gate stood invitingly open.
Moved by an instinct he did not stay to define or to resist, the collie swept down the ridge and into the valley below. The harassed farmer beheld descending on his stampeded flock a bolt of tawny-and-white lightning that whirled in and out among the galloping strays as if bent on their wholesale destruction.
While the man was yelling his lungs out and seeking a stone wherewith to brain the marauder, he suddenly came to a foolish halt, and stood gaping at the spectacle before him.
The supposedly rabid and murderous dog was rounding up the scattered flock with uncanny skill and speed, marshalling them into the narrow road, driving strays back into the column and moving the whole woolly throng steadily and decorously toward the fold.
Arrived at the gate, one wether bolted past it, and ten other sheep followed his lead. The wether did not go forty feet before he and his fellow-truants found themselves confronted by a large and indignant collie, who forced them with gentle relentlessness to wheel in their tracks and rejoin the flock.
Tongue out, tail wagging, Buff stood at the gate of the fold, holding his prisoners from passing out again until the puffing and marvelling farmer came running up.
The man paused to fasten the gate before turning his full attention on the wonderful collie. But by the time the gate was made fast the dog was a hundred yards down the road, trotting lazily back toward the ridge. Not by so much as a turn of his classic head did he show he heard the frantic and cajoling shouts the farmer sent after him.
On another late afternoon, ten miles from there, a farmer’s child was piloting her father’s eleven cows and two calves home along the road from pasture. Three men, passing in a small motor-truck, halted, jumped to the ground, seized the pair of calves and prepared to sling them into the truck.
The child screamed in terrified appeal, and caught hold of one of the men by the arm, while the herd of cows ran in panic through fields and woods.
The man shook off the child’s convulsive hold with a vehemence that sent her flat in the dust of the road.
And on the same instant a huge and lean and hairy beast burst through a roadside thicket and flung himself on the man, bearing him to earth by the sheer weight of his assault.
By the time the thief had landed, rolling and yelling, in the roadway, Buff had deserted him, and was at another of the trio. And this was the collie of it. A bulldog secures his grip and holds it till doomsday. A collie, fighting, is everywhere at once. The collie strain in Buff told him his opponents were three, and that there was no sense in devoting himself over-long to any one of them at the expense of the rest. So he was raging at the second man’s throat before the first fairly realised what had attacked him.
The third man, however, had a trifle more time on his hands than had either of his companions. And, wisely, he utilised that second of time in dropping the calf he had caught and in making one flying leap for the seat of the truck.
There, as fast as they could beat off the furry demon that was rending their flesh and clothes, the two others joined him. Leaving the calves to run free, the men set the machine into rapid motion and rattled off down the road.
Buff did not follow. Already he was in the thickets again, rounding up the gawkily galloping cows. And presently he had them back in the highway, in orderly alignment and walking stolidly homeward.
Dropping back beside the still weeping child, Buff licked her frightened face with his pink tongue, wagged his tail and his entire body reassuringly, and then thrust his muzzle into her trembling little hand. Thus, her father, having witnessed the scene from afar, came hurrying up, to find his cattle safe and in the road, and his erstwhile terrified daughter hugging a huge collie frantically and kissing the silken crest of the dog’s head in an agony of gratitude and love.
But, as the farmer himself sought to catch hold of the dog, Buff showed his white teeth in a wild-beast snarl that made the man start back.
Taking advantage of this momentary check, the collie bounded off into the bushes and was gone.
Buff himself could not have explained the unwonted wildness and ferocity that seemed to have taken hold of him in his wanderings. For the first three years or so of his life—indeed, until Gates’s pistol shot had stunned him—he had known nothing but friendliness and good treatment. And, except toward tramps and like prowlers, he had never felt hatred. Though he had always been a one-man dog, he had shown no ill-temper toward those who sought to make friends with him.
Yet now, as evidenced by his snarl at the father of the child who was caressing him, he had neither lot nor part with mankind at large. His every hope and yearning were centred on the finding of his master. And the wolf strain in his make-up thrilled almost as keenly to his longing to encounter the men with whom he associated the disappearance of Trent.
For the rest of humanity he felt no interest. Not even toward Ruth Hammerton, who had reigned second to Trent in his heart.
Twice during his months as a tramp dog, Buff revisited Boone Lake—casting about the farm, trotting at midnight through the village, hanging wistfully around the Hammerton place for nearly an hour. But before dawn he was far away again.
Most of his travelling was done by night or in dusk and at grey daybreak. For experience had taught him that the open ways are not safe for an unattached dog by sunlight.
A lesser dog might readily have attached himself to one of the various friendly folk who chanced to meet him and to give him a kindly word or call. A lesser dog, too, might have chosen a home at one of the farms scattered through the broad stretch of country Buff traversed. At any of a dozen places his beauty and his prowess at herding would have won for the collie a warm and lasting welcome.
But none of this was for Buff. He had known but one master. Losing Trent, he was fated to be forever masterless, unless he should chance to find the man he had lost. And, being only a dog, he knew no better way of finding him than by this everlasting and aimless search.
On a late September afternoon, he was roused from a troubled nap in the long grass and bushes at the verge of a field, by the sound of a mad-galloping horse and of a woman’s brave yet frightened calls to the runaway. Looking over the fringe of grass, towards the road, a furlong distant, he saw a fast-moving cloud of yellow-grey dust, which resolved itself into a hazy screen for a horse and light buggy.
The horse—a young and nervous brute—had taken fright at the running of a woodchuck across the road under his feet, and had sprung forward with a suddenness that snapped his check-rein. The swinging check smote him resoundingly again and again, on the neck and across the face, turning his first fright into panic, and making useless the efforts of the driver to bring him down.
A woman was driving. She was neither young nor beautiful. She had self-possession, and she had a more than tolerable set of driving hands. She was keeping the maddened horse more or less in the road, and was sawing with valorous strength on one rein while she held the other steady. Which was all the good it did her. For the brute had the bit between his teeth.
Buff arrived at the road-edge just as one of the two light reins broke under the undue strain put on it.
Before the driver could lighten the pull on the remaining rein its impulse had jerked the horse’s low-laid head far to one side. His rushing body prepared to follow the lead of his head towards a steep roadside bank some ten feet deep, with a scattering of broken rock at the bottom.
Then it was that the horse became dimly aware of a furry shape which whizzed in front of him on that side, and of a flying head that struck for his nose. A stinging slash on the left nostril sent the runaway veering from the bank-edge, and plunging toward the telegraph pole on the other side of the road. He was met and turned again by a second slash from one of the collie’s curved eye-teeth. On the same moment Buff stopped slashing and let his bulldog ancestry take control.
Thus the horse was assailed by a full double set of teeth that buried themselves in his bleeding nostrils, and that hung on.
The wild steed sought to fling up his head to shake off this anguishing weight of seventy odd pounds. But he could not shake himself free. He checked his furious pace and reared, striking out with his forefeet, and threatening to pitch backward into the buggy.
But a fierce wrench of the hanging jaws and a wriggle of the intolerable weight brought him down on all fours again. At once Buff released his grip and stood in front of the trembling horse. The runaway made as though to plunge forward. But he flinched at the memory of the dog’s attack and at the threat of its renewal.
While he hesitated, dancing, pawing, and in momentary cessation of his run, the woman slipped from the seat to the ground and ran to his head. With practised strength she shook the bit into place and held fast. The horse jerked back. Buff nipped his heel, and instantly was at his bloody nose, again.
The runaway, conquered and shivering, lashed out with one foreleg in a last hopeless display of terrified anger. His shod hoof smote the unprepared collie in the side. With a gasping sound, Buff rolled over into the ditch, two ribs broken and a foot crushed.
Tying the horse to a telegraph pole, the woman went over to where the wounded collie lay. In strong, capable arms, that were wondrous gentle, she lifted him and bore him to the buggy. Laying him tenderly on the floor of the vehicle, she returned to the horse’s head, untied the cowed and trembling steed, and began to lead him homeward.
Ten minutes later she turned in at a lane leading to a rambling, low farmhouse. And in another five minutes Buff was reclining on the kitchen floor, the woman’s husband working skilfully over his injuries, while the matron poured out the tale of his heroism and cleverness.
“I know what dog this is, too,” she finished. “I’m sure I know. It must be the same one that fought those thieves away from Sol Gilbert’s cows over to Pompton, last week, when Sol’s girl was driving them home. Mrs. Gilbert told me about it at the Grange, Monday. And he’s likely the dog that rounded up those sheep for Parkins—or whatever his name was—at Revere. You read me about it in the Bulletin, don’t you remember? The letter Parkins wrote to the editor about it? I know it must be the same one. It isn’t likely there’s more than one dog in Passaic County with the sense to do all three of those things. He must be like those knight-errant folks in Sylvia’s school book, who used to go through the country rescuing folks that were in distress. The best in the house isn’t any too good for him.”
“He’ll get it,” curtly promised her husband, without looking up from his task. “It’s lucky I’ve had experience, though, in patching up busted critters. Because this one is needing a lot of patching. Say! Notice how he don’t even let a whimper out of him? This rib-setting must hurt like fury, too. Acts more like a bulldog than a collie. I’m going to advertise him. And if the owner shows up, I’ll offer him a hundred dollars for the dog. He’ll be worth it, and a heap more, to me, herding and such. So, old feller! Now for the smashed foot. Don’t seem to be any big bones broke there.”
The weeks that followed were more nearly pleasant to Buff than had been any space of time since Trent’s disappearance. He was perforce at rest, while his fractured ribs and then his broken foot slowly mended. And all that time he was fed up and petted and made much of, in a way that would have turned most invalids’ heads.
It was well, after his months of restless searchings, to come to a halt here in this abode of comfort and kindliness; to be petted again by a woman’s soft hand, to eat cooked food once more, to be praised and to feel himself gloriously welcome.
Buff’s craving ambition, to find Trent and to run to earth his two enemies, was less acute in these drowsy days of convalescence. His sick soul seemed to be returning to normal along with his sick body.
By the time Buff could walk with any degree of comfort again, the morning frost lay heavy on the fields. The dog went out for a brief stroll with the farmer and his wife. To their delight, he did not try to run away, but accompanied them home and lay down contentedly on the doorstep.
After that, no further guard was kept over him. It was understood that he would stay with the people who had succoured and healed him.
One cold night in late autumn the dog accompanied his host, as usual, on the evening rounds of barns and outbuildings. As they were returning towards the warm red glow of the lamplit kitchen windows, Buff came to a dead stop.
A slight shudder ran through him. He lifted his delicate nose and sniffed the frosty air. He smelt nothing. He sniffed merely in an effort to corroborate in some way by scent the strange impulse which was taking possession of him—an impulse he could not resist.
“Come along, Shep, old boy!” coaxed the farmer, arriving at the doorstep and turning back towards the collie. “Supper’s ready. What’s the matter?”
Slowly, very slowly, Buff approached the man. Timidly, almost remorsefully, he licked the outstretched hand. Then, throwing back his magnificent head, he made the frost-chilled stillnesses of the autumn night re-echo with a hideously discordant and ear-torturing wolf-howl.
“Why, Shep,” exclaimed the farmer in amaze, “whatever ails you? What’s——”
He broke off in the midst of his bewildered query and raised his voice in a shout of summons to the dog. For, like a streak of tawny light, Buff had whirled out of the dooryard and was fleeing up the road.
He heard the eager call of the man who had cured him and befriended him and given him a happy home. But he heard—far more clearly—a soundless call that urged him forward.
Guided only by mystic collie instinct and by that weird impulse which had taken possession of him, he fled through the night at breakneck speed, headed unswervingly for Boone Lake, full thirty miles away.
On the same night—after a cautious absence of several months—Con Hegan and Billy Gates ventured to return to their former homes in the Boone Lake suburbs.