CHAPTER X
THE KILLER
One of the jolliest minutes in Lad's daily cross-country tramp with the Mistress and the Master was his dash up Mount Pisgah. This "mount" was little more than a foothill. It was treeless, and covered with short grass and mullein; a slope where no crop but buckwheat could be expected to thrive. It rose out of the adjoining mountain forests in a long and sweeping ascent.
Here, with no trees or undergrowth to impede him, Lad, from puppyhood, had ordained a racecourse of his own. As he neared the hill he would always dash forward at top speed; flying up the rise like a tawny whirlwind, at unabated pace, until he stopped, panting and gloriously excited, on the summit; to await his slower-moving human escorts.
One morning in early summer, Lad, as usual, bounded ahead of the Mistress and the Master, as they drew near to the treeless "mount." And, as ever, he rushed gleefully forward for his daily breather, up the long slope. But, before he had gone fifty yards, he came to a scurrying halt, and stood at gaze. His back was bristling and his lips curled back from his white teeth in sudden annoyance.
His keen nostrils, even before his eyes, told him something was amiss with his cherished race-track. The eddying shift of the breeze, from west to north, had brought to his nose the odor which had checked his onrush; an odor that wakened all sorts of vaguely formless memories far back in Lad's brain; and which he did not at all care for.
Scent is ten times stronger, to a dog, than is sight. The best dog is near sighted. And the worst dog has a magic sense of smell. Wherefore, a dog almost always uses his nose first and his eyes last. Which Lad now proceeded to do.
Above him was the pale green hillside, up which he loved to gallop. But its surface was no longer smoothly unencumbered. Instead, it was dotted and starred—singly or in groups—with fluffy grayish-white creatures.
Lad was almost abreast of the lowest group of sheep when he paused. Several of the feeding animals lifted their heads, snortingly, from the short herbage, at sight of him; and fled up the hill. The rest of the flock joined them in the silly stampede.
The dog made no move to follow. Instead, his forehead creased and his eyes troubled, he stared after the gray-white surge that swept upward toward the summit of his favored coursing ground. The Mistress and the Master, too, at sight of the woolly avalanche, stopped and stared.