The small pellets buzzed, hornetlike, about the Black’s head and shoulders; several of them stinging hotly. But at that distance, the birdshot could do no lasting damage. Nor did any of it chance to reach one of his eyes.
With a yell of pain he wheeled to face the woman. And she let him have the second barrel. Memories of former clashes with gunners seemed to wake in the brute’s crafty brain. Snarling, snapping, shaking his tormented head, he turned and plunged into the narrow river; gaining the farther bank and diving into the waterside bushes before Mildred could think to reload.
The balance of the day had been spent in a vain search of the bank, downstream, for Wisp’s lost body; and in trying to comfort the heart-broken children. Not until she had gotten the babies to bed and had soothed them to sleep did Mildred have scope to think of her own grief in the loss of the gentle dog who had been so dear to her.
“He—he gave his life for them!” she finished her sobbing recital. “He knew,—he must have known,—that he had no chance against that horrible monster. And Wisp had never fought, you know, from the day he was born. He knew that brute would kill him. And he never hesitated at all. He gave his life for the children. And—and we can’t—can’t even say a prayer over his grave!”
But Trask Frayne, just then, was not thinking of prayers. Deep down in his throat, he was cursing:—softly, but with much venom. And the nails of his hard-clenched fists bit deep into his palms.
“Black, with a white scar on the shoulder?” he said, at last, his own harsh voice not unlike a dog’s growl. “Hound ears, and the build of a timber-wolf? Almost as big as a Dane; and bone-thin? H’m! That’s my buckshot-scar on his shoulder,—that zig-zag white mark. To-morrow morning, I’m going hunting. Up in the mountains. Want to come along, Tam?”
But, as before, Tam was not there, when his master turned to speak to him. The collie had waited only long enough to note that the task of comforting the weeping Mildred had been taken over by more expert powers than his. Then he had trotted off towards the house; not only to solve the problem of these sinister scents which hung so heavy on the moist night air, but to find his strangely-absent chum, Wisp.
Circling the house, he caught Wisp’s trail. It was some hours old; but by no means too cold to be followed by a collie whose scenting powers had once tracked a lost sheep for five miles through a blizzard. With Wisp’s trail was mingled that of two of the children. And it led to the river-path.
True, there were other trails of Wisp’s, that the sensitive nostrils caught. But all of them were older than this which led to the water. Therefore, as any tracking dog would have known, Wisp had gone riverward, since he had been near the house. And down the path, nose to ground, followed Tam-o’-Shanter.
He did not move with his wonted stolidity. For, over and above the mere trail scent, his nostrils were assailed by other and more distressingly foreboding smells;—the smells he had caught as he had entered the gate;—the smells which grew ranker at every loping step he took.