From the first, Jock adopted Baby Marise as his particular deity. He would lie for hours at the foot of her crib, or would walk in sedate slowness at the side of her perambulator, in preference to a woodland race or even a romp with Dick or Klyda.
Yet between him and Dick there was a strange bond of sympathy. Dearly as the dog loved Klyda and Marise, he was closer to Dick than to either of them. He would lie with his eyes on the man’s face, watching its every change; and seemed to be studying him to the very soul. Even as a puppy, Jock used to do this.
A scowl on Dick’s brow would bring him forward with a rush, to offer canine sympathy or to rub his nose consolingly against his master’s hand. He would go into ecstasies of joyous excitement when Dick laughed or smiled. And, as the dog grew older, he seemed able to see past mere facial expression and to read Dick’s varying moods, even when those moods gave no visible sign of expression.
All of this seemed nothing short of magic to the Snowdens, though it is a common enough phenomenon to anyone who has been much with collies.
It was when Baby Marise was a harum-scarum girl of four, and when Jock was a stately giant in his early maturity, that something happened which the Snowdens never tired of talking about.
Dick started at sunrise for a day’s trout-fishing along a brook which ran through a wild tract of meadow and forest, some three miles above the Snowden place. Jock, as his master set forth, galloped enthusiastically ahead, eager for the prospective walk. But Dick whistled him back. The man did not desire to have wary trout scared away by the occasional plunges of a seventy-pound collie into the brook.
“No,” he said, as if talking to a fellow-human. “Not to-day, old man! Stay here and look after the place.”
Crestfallen yet philosophical, Jock trotted back to the veranda and lay down, his deep brown eyes following pathetically the receding figure of his master, hoping against hope that Dick might relent and summon him to follow. Then Marise came down to breakfast with Klyda, and Jock proceeded to devote himself to their society.
It was about four o’clock that afternoon when Klyda was awakened from a nap on the porch by the sudden rising of the collie from his resting-place on the mat near her. Jock had been asleep; yet something had startled him in an instant from his repose and had changed a sedately slumbering collie into a creature of puppylike excitability. Every hair on the dog’s shaggy ruff was abristle. His eyes were glinting as with pain. He burst into a salvo of frantic barking and dashed across to where Klyda lay.