Over the brow of a ridge, across the winding high road, flashed a tawny and white shape that was silhouetted for an instant on the pulsing sky-line—the shape of a large collie running as no dog but a collie or a greyhound can run. Close to earth, in his sweeping stride, Buff was coming at full speed in response to the far-heard whistle.
As he breasted the ridge-crest, the dog took in the scene below him in a single glance. He saw the milling and straggling sheep, and his distracted master in the centre of the panic throng. Thus, he did not wait, as usual, for the signals Trent had taught him in “working” sheep. Instead, he went into action on his own account.
Through the waves of greyish-white a tawny and wedge-shaped head clove its way at express-train speed. With seeming aimlessness, Buff swirled through the mass, sheering now to right, now to left, now wheeling, now halting with a menace of thundered barks. Yet not one move was thrown away, not one step was without definite purpose.
As by miracle, the charging sheep began to shape up, in the field’s centre; and while they were still following this centrifugal impulse, Buff was gone from among them. Out into the high road he flew, not waiting to find either of the openings; but taking the tall hurdles in his stride.
And in another second or so he had caught up with the rearmost of the stragglers, had passed it and flashed on toward the more distant strays. Before the sheep in the paddock had shaken off their Buff-given impulse to crowd to the centre of the enclosure, the collie had rounded up the scampering and bleating strays and was driving them in a reluctant huddle through the gateway and in among their fellows once more.
Then, without resting, he swung shut the gate—an easy trick long since taught to him, as to many another working collie—and was guarding with his body the gap made by the overset hurdle.
Trent ran up, fixed the hurdle in place, and then turned to pet and praise his exultant dog.
“Buff,” he declared, taking the collie’s fluffy head between his two gnarled hands, “you’re worth ten times your weight in hired men, and you’re the best side-partner and chum a lonely chap ever had!”
Buff grinned, licked his master’s hand in quick friendliness, then lay down at Trent’s feet for an instant’s rest. And, for the thousandth time in the past three years the man noted something in the collie’s pose that baffled him.
For, though Buff was lying upright and not on his side, both hind legs were stretched straight out behind him. Normally no collie lies thus, nor does any other canine that is not the possessor of a strong strain of bulldog. It was Buff’s favourite posture. And Buff had every point of a pure-bred collie—indeed, of the highest type of “show collie.”