Around the small building he whirled, so close to it that the flames at its base seared his mighty coat and blistered and blackened his white paws.
Then, running back a yard or so, he flung his eighty-pound weight crashingly at the fastened door. The door, as it chanced, was well-nigh the only solid portion of the shack. And it held firm, under an impact that bruised the flying dog and which knocked him breathless to the fire-streaked ground.
At sound of her mate's approach, Lady had ceased wailing. Lad could hear her terrified whimpers as she danced frantically about on the red-hot boards. And the knowledge of her torture drove him momentarily insane.
Staggering up from his fall, he flung his splendid head back and, with muzzle to the clouded skies, he tore to shreds the solemn silences of the spring night with a wolf-howl; hideous in its savage grief, deafeningly loud.
As though the awesome yell had cleared his brain, he sprang to his feet amid the stinging embers; steady, alert, calm; with no hint of despair or of surrender.
His smarting eyes fixed themselves on the single dusty window of the tool-house. Its sill was a full five feet above ground. Its four small panes were separated by a wide old-fashioned cross-piece of hardwood and putty. The putty, from age, was as solid as cement. The whole window was a bare sixteen by twenty inches.
Lad ran back, once more, a few feet; his gaze fixed appraisingly on the window and measuring his distance with the sureness of a sharpshooter.
The big collie had made up his mind. His plan was formed. And as he was all-wise, with the eerie wisdom of the highest type of collie, there can be scant doubt he knew just what that plan entailed.
It was suicide. But, oh, it was a glorious suicide! Compared to it the love-sacrifices of a host of Antonys and Abelards and Romeos are but petty things. Indeed, its nearest approach in real life was perhaps Moore's idiotically beautiful boast:
Through the fiery furnace your steps I'll pursue;
To find you and save you:—or perish there, too!