“That’s right!” agreed Rick. “There ought to be a red lamp here!”
“There may have been,” said Mr. Campbell, “and the wind may have blown it out. I can’t believe any one who knew of this broken bridge would neglect to put out a warning sign. That is unless the bridge has just collapsed. We’ll take a look. But I think we owe our lives to Ruddy.”
“Do you think he knew about it?” asked Chot in an awed voice.
“It seems so; doesn’t it?” asked Rick. “He howled just at the right time to stop us; didn’t he?”
“He surely did,” agreed Mr. Campbell. “His howls and the queer way he acted convinced me that something was wrong which we couldn’t see or know about. So I thought it best to stop suddenly, though at the time I felt it might be a foolish and superstitious notion. But it wasn’t.”
“How do you s’pose Ruddy knew about it?” inquired Chot.
“Same as dogs know when a person’s going to die,” said Rick. “Dogs always howl the night before a person’s going to die.”
“Who told you that?” asked Mr. Campbell, as he prepared to alight from the car.
“Sartin Sure, the colored man who works for us—he told me,” said the boy. “He said he never knew it to fail, that when he heard a dog howl, the next day somebody would be dead.”
“That’s all bosh!” laughed Mr. Campbell. “I admit that a dog may howl in the night, and somewhere in our city a person may be dead next day. But that doesn’t prove anything. Dogs will howl more on moonlight nights than any other, but more persons don’t die on such nights than on nights when there is no moon.