But Klyda did not answer. She was plunging headlong through the bushes, panting and gasping with her own violent efforts to reach the spot where Jock awaited her.
Out in a little clearing, beside the brook, and at the base of a ten-foot cliff-bank, she came upon the dog. He was standing guard over a body that sprawled inertly, half in the water at the cliff-foot, a splintered fishing rod at its side.
There lay Dick Snowden, his leg broken in two places by his tumble from the bank. In falling, his head had struck against a water-edge boulder. The impact had caused concussion of the brain. Nor did the victim recover consciousness until an hour after they had gotten him home.
People who did not understand collies used to smile politely and lift their brows when the Snowdens told how Jock had brought aid to the stricken master, of whose plight the dog could not possibly have known through any explainable channels.
Some of these people agreed with Klyda’s brother, who always insisted there was nothing mysterious or occult about the matter. They explained that Jock had waxed lonely for his absent master and had tried to coax Klyda into going with him to meet the returning fisherman,—and that the accident to Dick had been a mere coincidence, quite outside the dog’s calculations.
They did not explain how Jock knew the precise direction in which Dick had gone that day, nor why, during Snowden’s previous and succeeding absences from home, the collie made no such effort to follow him.
Klyda and Dick did not bother to argue with these sceptics. They knew Jock; other people did not.
“It wasn’t coincidence,” was all Klyda would say when outsiders sought to convince her. “It was—Something.”
And so the years went on at the Snowden home, pleasantly and uneventfully. Baby Marise was a leggy and big-eyed girl of nine, and Jock was in the full hale prime of latter middle age. Dick and Klyda were sweethearts, as ever. They and their child and their huge gold-and-white dog formed a close corporation that made home life very beautiful for all four of them.
Then, over the smugly complacent land, rang a bugle-call. Half the world was sick unto death with the Hun pestilence, and America alone could stay the hideous disease’s assault on humanity. America alone could cure a dying world. To achieve this Heaven-sent miracle, the lives of thousands of brave men were needed. And at the terrible blast of the bugle-call these men responded in millions.