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.