Catching the hem of the astonished woman’s skirt in his teeth, he tugged at her dress, backing away with a suddenness that all but threw her to the floor.
“Jock!” expostulated Klyda, recovering her balance and trying to extricate the skirt from his grip. “Jock, have you gone crazy?”
Jock’s answer was to release his hold on the skirt-hem, and to gallop off the porch and out onto the drive which led to the highway. There he halted, barked in imperious summons and darted back to Klyda. Catching her skirt again between his jaws, he sought to draw her out onto the driveway with him.
Laughing at her pet’s odd behaviour, Klyda went down the steps to the drive. Instantly Jock let go of her skirt and ran fifty feet towards the main road. There, halting again, he turned and barked. As the woman still did not follow, he ran back, seized her skirt in his teeth again and tried to draw her onward.
This time Klyda did not refuse to follow. A queer notion had possessed her—a notion that Jock was not doing these unaccountable things for a mere lark or to lure her into a romp. It was not at all like the dignified collie to behave this way. Calling to her brother—who was reading, indoors—to join her, she set forth in the wake of the dog.
The moment the two humans started toward him, Jock ceased to bark in that frantic and panic-urged fashion. He wheeled and galloped off, straight across country. Every few hundred yards he would pause to make sure the others were still following, and to let them come nearer. Then he would be off again.
A wearisome walk he led the puzzled Klyda and her grumbling brother. In a precise line he travelled, turning aside for no hillock or rock or tangle of undergrowth.
“For goodness’ sake!” panted the brother, once, as he looked ruefully down at his buckskin shoes which had just plodded through a corner of swamp-land. “For goodness’ sake, Klyda, let’s stop this fool ramble! The idiot of a dog will probably halt in front of some oak where he’s treed a cat, and he’ll want us to dislodge his quarry for him. On a red-hot day like this, what’s the earthly sense of following a——”
“He hasn’t treed a cat,” was Klyda’s reply. “He hasn’t treed anything. He’s been with me, all day. I don’t know why he is acting like this. But I know Jock, and I know he’s got some good reason for being so eager for me to follow him. If you’re tired——”
“Oh, I’ll trail along, if you’re going to!” grunted her brother. “Only, if he leads us over into the next county and then turns around and leads us back, just for fun—well, I warn you I’ll guy you for the rest of your days for being so silly as to—Hello!” he broke off. “Here’s where we’ll have to wade!”