Free from the chain, but not free from the hospital. He knew well that if any one discovered that he was loose, he would be tied up again, so he crouched in a corner of the room behind a packing box and awaited his chance.
Nurses often came to this storeroom in the night for supplies.
After about half an hour, the door opened quickly and some one came in hurriedly. The door was left half ajar, so Pep slipped out and ran into the main corridor leading to the great quadrangle in front of the hospital. Here he slipped behind a door and waited for the next door to open.
Luck was with him. The telephone was constantly ringing, and soon nurses and doctors were hurrying to and fro. Presently he learned the reason why, for they began bringing in an endless procession of wounded men. The quadrangle was filled with ambulances.
He could hear the motors puffing away from his hiding place. When wounded and dying men are arriving faster than they can be cared for, men do not think much about dogs, so it was easy enough for Pep to slip out through the quadrangle and into the boulevard. He brushed against the leg of his friend the Captain, who did not even notice him.
Once out on the broad street he turned his nose northward and galloped away like the wind.
Something away to the northeast was calling, calling, calling. A mind and a soul that was stronger than his own dog mind was pulling him, pulling, pulling, pulling, so why should he not know which way to go?
This sense or instinct which some of the dumb animals have is called orientation. Dogs and horses have it to a marked degree and homing pigeons and seals even more. Thompson Seton tells of how when hopelessly lost in the Rocky Mountains a dozen miles from home his horse carried him straight to camp, when he gave him his head.
My own small dog, a clever beagle, has an almost uncanny sense of my whereabouts, a sense that transcends mind.
When I arise in the morning and go from my bedroom to the bathroom he may be playing with some other dogs twenty rods away, but as soon as I open my bedroom door, as though I had touched a hidden spring in his dog intellect, he will turn and gallop for the house and be whining at the front door to be let in when I come down stairs.