Over the impromptu bridge scampered the wether; to the safety of the far bank. And over the same bridge, in scurrying haste, stormed the other sheep.
Under their sustained weight and the incessant reverberating impact of their pounding hoofs, the rotted log was assailed more heavily than its feeble shell of resistance could withstand. Not with the usual cracking and rending, but with a soggily soughing sound, it gave way. Not a fiber of it was strong enough to crackle. But the whole bridge went to pieces as might a wad of soaked blotting paper that is wrenched apart.
By the rare luck that so often attends idiots and sheep, the leader and forty-six of his flock had reached the high clay bank on the far side, before the thick log collapsed.
Treve came whizzing up the slope to the spot where the crossing had been made. He arrived, just as the log went to pieces. Its punk-like sections splashed noisily into the torrent below. And with them splashed almost as noisily the last sheep that had attempted the crossing. This wether had hesitated and started to turn back as he felt the bridge sinking under him. The moment of delay had sent him headlong into the water among the log débris.
Down plunged the unlucky wether. Before his body struck water, his silly head smote against a pointed outcrop of rock that protruded above the churned surface of the river. The contact broke the sheep’s skull, as neatly as could a hatchet-corner. Stone dead, the poor creature went bobbing and tossing and revolving, down the swirling current.
Scarce had the wether plunged into the Chiquita when Treve was off the bank, in one wild bound; and into the water after him.
It was not the first nor the tenth time that the collie had “gone overboard” to rescue a sheep. For there is no limit to the quantity and quality of mischances into which sheep can entangle themselves. Falling off bridges is one of their recognized accomplishments.
But never in his two years of life had the young dog found himself in a torrent like this. At his first immersion into it, he was bowled over, then sucked under water; then he was spun dizzily about;—all before he could get his bearings. Rising to the surface and taking instinctive advantage of the current, he shook the water from his eyes and struck downstream after the bobbing gray-white body of the sheep.
At the end of fifty yards—during which a whirling log had well nigh stove the collie’s ribs in, and two successive eddies had pulled his head under water—he saw a twist of the erratic current pick up the sheep’s body and sling it high on a patch of stony beach at a bend in the stream.
There it sprawled. And thither the collie fought his breath-tortured way. But when he dragged himself up out of the water and sniffed at the wet huddle of wool and flesh, a single instant’s inspection told him he had had his hazardous swim for nothing. The sheep was dead.