Remember how worried about him you were, that time; till we found him sitting in the kitchen and pestering the maids? He--""But that time, he was only sulky," said the Mistress. "Not insanely angry, as he is now. I do hope--""Stop worrying!" adjured the Master. "He's all right."Which proved, for perhaps the trillionth time in history, that a woman's intuitions are better worth following than a man's saner logic. For Cyril was not all right. And, at every passing minute he was less and less all right; until presently he was all wrong.
For the best part of an hour, in pursuance of her husband's counsel, the Mistress sat and waited for the prodigal's return.
Then, surreptitiously, she made a round of the house; sent a man to ransack the stables, telephoned to the gate lodge, and finally came into the Master's study, big-eyed and pale.
"He isn't anywhere around," she reported, frightened. "It's dinner time. He's been gone in hour. Nobody's seen him. He isn't on the Place. Oh, I wonder if--""H'm!" grumbled her husband. "He's engineering an endurance contest, eh? Well, if he can stand it, we can."But at sight of the deepening trouble in his wife's face, he got up from his desk. Going out into the hall, he summoned Lad.
"We might shout our heads off," he said, "and he'd never answer;if he's really trying to scare us. That's part of his lovable nature. There's just one way to track him, in double time. LAD!"The Master had been drawing on his mackinaw and hipboots as he spoke. Now he opened the front door.
"Laddie!" he said, very slowly and incisively to the expectantly eager collie. "Cyril! Find CYRIL! FIND him!"To the super-wise collie, there was nothing confusing in the command. Like many another good dog, he knew the humans of the household by their names; as well as did any fellow-human. And he knew from long experience the meaning of the word, "Find!"Countless times that word had been used in games and in earnest.
Its significance, now, was perfectly plain to him. The Master wanted him to hunt for the obnoxious child who so loved to annoy and hurt him.
Lad would rather have found anyone else, at the Master's behest.
But it did not occur to the trained collie to disobey. With a visible diminishing of his first eager excitement, but with submissive haste, the big dog stepped out on to the veranda and began to cast about in the drifts at the porch edge.
Immediately, he struck Cyril's shuffling trail. And, immediately, he trotted off along the course.
The task was less simple than ordinarily. For, the snow was coming down in hard-driven sheets; blotting out scent almost as effectively as sight. But not for naught had a thousand generations of Lad's thoroughbred ancestors traced lost sheep through snowstorms on the Scottish moors. To their grand descendant they had transmitted their weird trailing power, to the full. And the scent of Cyril, though faint and fainter, and smothered under swirling snow, was not too dim for Lad's sensitive nostrils to catch and hold it.
The Master lumbered along, through the rising drifts, as fast as he could. But the way was rough and the night was as black dark as it was cold. In a few rods, the dog had far outdistanced him.
And, knowing how hard must be the trail to follow by sense of smell, he forbore to call back the questing collie, lest Lad lose the clew altogether. He knew the dog was certain to bark the tidings when he should come up with the fugitive.
The Master by this time began to share his wife's worry. For the trail Lad was following led out of the grounds and across the highway, toward the forest.
The newborn snowstorm was developing into a very promising little blizzard. And the icy lash of the wind proved the fallacy of the old theory, "too cold to snow." Even by daylight it would have been no light task to steer a true course through the whirling and blinding storm. In the darkness, the man found himself stumbling along with drunkenly zigzag steps; his buffeted ears strained, through the noise of the wind for sound of Lad's bark.
But no such sound came to him. And, he realized that snow and adverse winds can sometimes muffle even the penetrating bark of a collie. The man grew frightened. Halting, he shouted with all the power of his lungs. No whimper from Cyril answered the hail. Nor, at his master's summons, did Lad come bounding back through the drifts. Again and again, the Master called.
For the first time in his obedient life, Lad did not respond to the call. And the Master knew his own voice could not carry, for a single furlong, against wind and snowfall.
"I'll go on for another half-hour," he told himself, as he sought to discern the dog's all-but obliterated footsteps through the deepening snow. "And then I'll go back and raise a search party."He came to a bewildered stop. Fainter and more indistinguishable had Lad's floundering tracks become. Now,--by dint of distance and snow,--they ceased to be visible in the welter of drifted whiteness under the glare of the Master's flashlight.
"This means a search-party," decided the man.
And he turned homeward, to telephone for a posse of neighbors.
Lad, being only a dog, had no such way of sharing his burden. He had been told to find the child. And his simple code of life and of action left him no outlet from doing his duty; be that duty irksome or easy. So he kept on. Far ahead of the Master, his keen ears had not caught the sound of the shouts. The gale and the snow muffled them and drove them back into the shouter's throat.
