But in Buff’s case the shout was raised too late. The tawny-and-white shape sped on through the dim moonlight and out of sight before the hue-and-cry was fairly up. And he did not so much as glance back to note the progress of the useless pursuit.
As he turned off the state road, taking the macadam byway which led towards Trent’s farm, the collie dropped to a wavering halt, his sensitive nostrils pulsing. A scent had come to him, though it was still too elusive to register clearly in the eager brain.
Twenty doubtful steps Buff took along the byway, until he came to a point where a field path from a cross-road a mile away intersected it. At the intersection the scent struck him with a force that dizzied him. Nostrils to earth, he found that a man had left this path for the byroad not ten minutes earlier.
The knowledge did amazing things to the dog. For an instant he shivered as though with a physical convulsion. His breath came in long gasps. A whine in his throat shook itself forth in an eerie note that belonged to no normal beast.
Then, like a whirlwind, he was off, down the byway; nose to earth, body flat and flying. Half a mile farther on, the rush of his madly scampering feet came to the ears of a man who was plodding wearily toward the farm—a man thin and shabby, who walked as though completing an exhausting journey. In the middle of the road the man paused and glanced back. Adown the moonlit byway was dashing a tawny-and-white creature, flat to earth in its speed.
Fifty yards from the man Buff lifted his head as he galloped. The scent—any dog’s strongest quality—told him he might now rely on sight, which is the weakest of a dog’s senses. At what he saw, the collie gave tongue.
Not in the hideous wolf howl or in whimper did Buff speak now, but in a cry that was human and rending—a cry that tore at the listener’s heartstrings by reason of its awful intensity.
Delirious—screaming, writhing, panting—Buff flung himself on the man he had tracked. He was at the end of the trail! And what he found there drove him quite insane.
Up into Michael Trent’s dusty arms the dog sprang—a vibrant mass of mad ecstasy. Moaning, crying, sobbing like a human child, Buff sought to lick his master’s haggard face and to pat him in a hundred places at once with the whirling paws.
Almost thrown off his balance by the impact, Trent spoke to the collie in wondering delight. And the sound of the tired voice sent Buff into a new frenzy of rapture. Dropping to earth, he whizzed round and round Trent in a bewildering gyroscopic flight, stomach to ground, tongue and throat clamorous with hoarse joy.