Not for some minutes did Buff recover consciousness from the bullet graze that had rapped his skull so hard as to stun him and to gash the silken fur above his eye.
He woke in decided discomfort; his head was still in dire pain, and he was fastened securely in one spot.
When Michael Trent had had his farm drinking water tested, a year earlier, he had learned that the well showed strong traces of stable drainage. Wherefore, the well had been filled up, to within two yards of the surface, and a new well had been dug on higher ground behind the house.
Thus it was that Buff woke to find himself sprawling on a pile of rubble, with a short rope attaching him to a large stone.
Indignantly the collie set to work gnawing the rope in two. This accomplished, he got dizzily to his feet. A rush and a scramble, and he was up the stone-lined wall of the well and on firm ground above.
Straight to the house he ran, his teeth gleaming, his ruff abristle. At the kitchen door he halted. The door was shut; he could not get in. But his scent told him Trent was no longer there. His scent told him more—much more. It confirmed his memory of his master’s two assailants, and stamped their odour for ever in his mind. Their steps led him to the barn whither they had carried Trent. The senseless man’s clothing had brushed the lintel of the barn door as they had lifted him into the car. Buff looked wildly about him, sniffing the air, his tense brain telling him much.
Then a red light began to smoulder in his deep-set eyes. Out into the high road he dashed, not running now like a collie, but like a timber wolf. As he ran he paused but once, and then he waited only long enough to throw his head aloft and shatter the night silences with a howl as hideous and discordant as it was ear-splitting.
A mile away a drowsy farmer dropped his weekly paper with a shiver.
“If I was back on the frontier,” he mused to his startled wife, “I’d say that was a mad wolf a-howlin’—and I’d say the hunt was up!”