Dick Snowden was one of them.
There were tears at the Snowden home when Dick first went thence to the officers’ training-camp. There was dire loneliness after he had gone.
But there were no tears when, at the end of his last furlough, Captain Richard Snowden said good-bye to his family and embarked for France.
There were no tears, then. There was a hero-smile on Klyda’s drawn lips. Baby Marise tried to smile, too. And at least she did not cry—which was very brave indeed. Jock looked long and gravely up into Snowden’s forcedly gay face; and laid his splendid head against his master’s khaki knee as Dick said to him:
“Good-bye, old chap! Take care of them till I come back. You’re the man of the house, remember, while I’m gone.”
No, there were no tears when Captain Dick Snowden sailed gallantly away to fight the grey-clad pests which were engulfing the world. But there was a deadly and bitter loneliness that swooped down on the once-merry little household and gripped it by the throat—a loneliness that deepened and grew more cruelly hard to bear as the dreary weeks sagged on.
Jock, with his queer collie sixth sense, felt acutely the changed atmosphere of the place. He sought, in a thousand unobtrusive ways, to console and cheer his mistress and Marise. And he seemed to have understood Dick’s parting charge to him to assume the responsibilities of “the man of the house.” Always Jock had been a fiery guardian of the home in the matter of warding off intruders. Nowadays his jealous guardianship became an obsession.
Voluntarily abandoning his lifelong nightly resting-place on the rug outside the door of Klyda’s room, he took to sleeping on the veranda. Nor was his sleep heavy. A dozen times a night the wakeful Klyda could hear the big dog get to his feet and start off on a thorough patrol of the grounds.
This sentry-go accomplished, he would circle the porch and return to his doormat bed for another fitful snooze. But the very slightest sound was enough to awaken him and to bring him at once to fierce alertness. The step of a belated wayfarer on the highroad beyond,—the faintest stir of one of the sleepers within the house,—any of a hundred negligible noises of the night,—sufficed to rouse him to his duty.
In the daytime, Jock was seldom more than arm’s-length from Klyda or Marise. With cold suspicion his melancholy dark eyes would follow the motions of each casual visitor or tradesman. Yes, Jock was taking his job seriously.