Presently he forgot his disappointment in the knowledge that he was very, very ill. His tongue and throat no longer burned, but his body and brain seemed full of hot lead that weighed a ton. He felt stupid, and too weak to stir. A great drowsiness gripped him.
With a grunt of discomfort and utter fatigue, he slumped down on the veranda floor to sleep off his sick lassitude. After that, for a time, nothing mattered.
For perhaps an hour Wolf lay sprawling there, dead to his duty, and to everything else. Then faintly, through the fog of dullness that enwrapped his brain, came a sound—a sound he had long ago learned to listen for. The harshly scraping noise of a boat's prow drawn up on the pebbly shore at the foot of the lawn.
Instinct tore through the poison vapors and roused the sick dog. He lifted his head. It was strangely heavy and hard to lift.
The sound was repeated as the prow was pulled farther up on the bank. Then came the crunch of a human foot on the waterside grass.
Heredity and training and lifelong fidelity took control of the lethargic dog, dragging him to his feet and down the veranda steps through no volition of his own.
Every motion tired him. He was dizzy and nauseated. He craved sleep; but as he was just a thoroughbred dog and not a wise human, he did not stop to think up good reasons why he should shirk his duty because he did not feel like performing it.
To the brow of the hill he trotted—slowly, heavily, shakily. His sharp powers of hearing told him the trespasser had left his boat and had taken one or two stealthy steps up the slope of lawn toward the house.
And now a puff of west wind brought Wolf's sense of smell into action. A dog remembers odors as humans remember faces. And the breeze bore to him the scent of the same man who had flung ashore that bit of meat which had caused all his suffering.
He had caught the man's scent an hour earlier, as he had stood sniffing at the boat ten feet away from him. The same scent had been on the meat the man had handled.