On the rare occasions when a letter from France reached the place, he knew of its arrival before the mail was sorted. It would thrill him and set him to barking wildly and to scampering about the house like a joy-crazed puppy. He seemed to know the occasion was one of rapture for them all.
“The minute the letters are handed in at the door,” Klyda boasted to her brother, “even before any of us have time to look them over, Jock always knows whether or not there’s a letter from Dick.”
“Why shouldn’t he?” demanded the sceptic. “A collie has a wolf’s power of scent. He can smell the touch of Dick’s hand on the envelope. It’s perfectly normal.”
“No,” denied Klyda, musingly, “it isn’t normal. It’s—Something!”
Then, late of a September night, the household was jolted from slumber by a clangour of barking from the porch.
To one who understands collies, there is as much difference in a dog’s various modes of barking as in the inflections of a human voice. For example, there is the gay bark of greeting, there is the sharply imperative bark of challenge, there is the noisily swaggering bark of sheer excitement, and there is the acute and agonised bark that tells of stark emotion.
Jock’s bark to-night had the timbre of that with which, long ago, he had summoned Klyda to the aid of her injured husband at Snake Brook. And the sound went through the lonely wife’s soul like a knife-thrust.
She sprang out of bed and, in dressing-gown and slippers, ran out to the porch. As on that earlier day, Jock was awaiting her in fevered excitement. Catching the hem of her wrapper, he tugged. Then, dropping the wrapper, he galloped up the driveway and wheeled about to face her with a bark of summons.
To-night Klyda needed no second invitation to follow him. Bewildered, trembling, yet trusting to the collie’s intuition, she stumbled along in the direction Jock led. And, leaving the driveway, he was travelling due northeast.
Well did Klyda know she was moving northeastward. For, by dint of compass and maps, she had long since figured out for herself the approximate direction of France in relation to her home. And always she faced in that direction when she knelt to pray for Dick.