Then a well-remembered voice chilled her heart with terror; for her father cried angrily:
“Call that brute off! He looks like flying at my throat!”
During a few seconds of icy fear and foreboding she could neither move nor speak. The dog, quick to learn that this stranger was unwelcome, snarled with louder menace, and the fur rose along his spine.
“Do you hear?” shouted Willard, now thoroughly alarmed. “Do you want me to shoot him?”
“Down, Guess!” she contrived to say, in a queer falsetto; for her tongue seemed palsied, and her throat had gone dry. But the mechanical effort at speech served to restore her faculties, and she continued more naturally:
“You startled both Guess and myself, Father. The dog will not hurt you. Use his name—Guess. Then he will wag his tail and make friends.”
Guess, however, belied this good character. He allowed Willard to approach; but eyed him with covert suspicion. In her panic of distress and apprehension the girl had forgotten that her father was one of that small company of human beings who dislike dogs, and whose antipathy is returned in double measure by the animal which, above all others, is regarded as the friend of man. Still, Guess obeyed orders, with reservations, and contented himself by displaying an alert watchfulness widely at variance with his earlier state of dignified repose.
“Of course, you know why I am here?” began Willard, smiling complacently. Nancy’s evident agitation put him at once in a superior position, and his mean soul rejoiced in the fact; for it was he who should be afraid, and not his daughter.
“No,” she faltered, turning her frightened eyes toward the lake.
Oh, if Derry would only come back sooner than he had promised! She half formed a desperate resolve to fire both barrels of the gun, and thus summon him with all speed, because the reports would be heard easily across that mile and a half of placid water.