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.