Through the smother came the loud moaning of fog-horns in the Firth.Although nothing could be seen, and sounds were muffled as if the ears of the world were stuffed with wool, odors were held captive and mingled in confusion.
There was nothing to guide a little dog's nose, everything to make him distrust his most reliable sense.The smell of every plant on the crag was there; the odors of leather, of paint, of wood, of iron, from the crafts shops at the base.Smoke from chimneys in the valley was mixed with the strong scent of horses, hay and grain from the street of King's Stables.There was the smell of furry rodents, of nesting birds, of gushing springs, of the earth itself, and something more ancient still, as of burned-out fires in the Huge mass of trap-rock.
Everything warned Bobby to lie still in safety until morning and the world was restored to its normal aspects.But ah! in the highest type of man and dog, self-sacrifice, and not self-preservation, is the first law.A deserted grave cried to him across the void, the anguish of protecting love urged him on to take perilous chances.Falling upon a narrow shelf of rock, he had bounded off and into a thicket of thorns.Bruised and shaken and bewildered, he lay there for a time and tried to get his bearings.
Bobby knew only that the way was downward.He put out a paw and felt for the edge of the shelf.A thorn bush rooted below tickled his nose.He dropped into that and scrambled out again.Loose earth broke under his struggles and carried him swiftly down to a new level.He slipped in the wet moss of a spring before he heard the tinkle of the water, lost his foothold, and fell against a sharp point of rock.The shadowy spire of a fir-tree looming in a parting of the vapor for an instant, Bobby leaped to the ledge upon which it was rooted.
Foot by foot he went down, with no guidance at all.It is the nature of such long, low, earth dogs to go by leaps and bounds like foxes, calculating distances nicely when they can see, and tearing across the roughest country with the speed of the wild animals they hunt.And where the way is very steep they can scramble up or down any declivity that is at a lesser angle than the perpendicular.Head first they go downward, setting the fore paws forward, the claws clutching around projections and in fissures, the weight hung from the stout hindquarters, the body flattened on the earth.
Thus Bobby crept down steep descents in safety, but his claws were broken in crevices and his feet were torn and pierced by splinters of rock and thorns.
Once he went some distance into a cave and had to back up and out again.And then a promising slope shelving under suddenly, where he could not retreat, he leaped, turned over and over in the air, and fell stunned.His heart filled with fear of the unseen before him, the little dog lay for a long time in a clump of whins.He may even have dozed and dreamed, to be awakened with starts by his misery of longing, and once by the far-away barking of a dog.It came up deadened, as if from fathoms below.He stood up and listened, but the sound was not repeated.His lacerated feet burned and throbbed; his bruised muscles had begun to stiffen, so that every movement was a pain.
In these lower levels there was more smoke, that smeared out and thickened the mist.Suddenly a breath of air parted the fog as if it were a torn curtain.
Like a shot Bobby went down the crag, leaping from rock to rock, scrambling under thorns and hazel shrubs, dropping over precipitous ledges, until he looked down a sheer fall on which not even a knot of grass could find a foothold.He took the leap instantly, and his thick fleece saved him from broken bones; but when he tried to get up again his body was racked with pain and his hind legs refused to serve him.
Turning swiftly, he snarled and bit, at them in angry disbelief that his good little legs should play false with his stout heart.Then he quite forgot his pain, for there was the sharp ring of iron on an anvil and the dull glow of a forge fire, where a smith was toiling in the early hours of the morning.Aclever and resourceful little dog, Bobby made shift to do without legs.
Turning on his side, he rolled down the last slope of Castle Rock.Crawling between two buildings and dropping from the terrace on which they stood, he fell into a little street at the west end and above the Grassmarket.
Here the odors were all of the stables.He knew the way, and that it was still downward.The distance he had to go was a matter of a quarter of a mile, or less, and the greater part of it was on the level, through the sunken valley of the Grassmarket.But Bobby had literally to drag himself now; and he had still to pull him self up by his fore paws over the wet and greasy cobblestones of Candlemakers Row.Had not the great leaves of the gate to the kirkyard been left on the latch, he would have had to lie there in the alcove, with his nose under the bars, until morning.But the gate gave way to his push, and so, he dragged himself through it and around the kirk, and stretched himself on Auld Jock's grave.
It was the birds that found him there in the misty dawn.They were used to seeing Bobby scampering about, for the little watchman was awake and busy as early as the feathered dwellers in the kirkyard.But, in what looked to be a wet and furry door-mat left out overnight on the grass, they did not know him at all.The throstles and skylarks were shy of it, thinking it might be alive.
