BUFF: A COLLIE (continued 2)

Buff ran twice around the closed garage. His nostrils told him the car was inside that dark and deserted building. He had followed it twenty miles or more. He was worn out from the run. Yet here the scent of his adored master was stronger than it had been anywhere along the way.

The dog scratched imperiously at the garage door. The sagging wood shook and grumbled under the impact. But it held firm. Nor did anyone come from inside to answer the summons. Frightened at the silence, yet certain of the scent he sought, Buff circled the building once more, nose to earth, steps uncertain, head darting from side to side.

The quest did not bring to his senses any trace of Trent. But it did bring to him a dual odour that set the dog’s ruff to bristling, and his teeth to glinting from under his uncurled lip. For here, side by side, had trodden Hegan and Gates. Not more than an hour earlier they had walked here, their heels striking deep in the dirt, as though they carried between them some heavy weight. They had walked thus to the dock and to its outer edge.

Baffled, the collie made his way back to the garage. There, distinct through the reek of gas and oil and dead tobacco and dried grease, he caught again the scent of his master. With a little whimper of eagerness, Buff paused beneath a shut and locked window, some three feet from the ground. He gathered his waning strength for one more effort, and sprang upward.

Through the thin and cracked glass and the rotting sash he clove his way, alighting on the slimy concrete floor of the garage amid a shower of window particles.

The glass, by some minor miracle, scarce cut the dog. Apart from a scratch or two on his pads and a shallow cut on the nose, he was none the worse for his dive through the shaky casement.

The instant he touched ground, Buff was in new search of his master’s scent. And at once he found it.

There were three cars in the garage. Two of them were old and battered and in parlous condition. The third was still new. And to this new car Buff ran.

It was Michael Trent’s car. Empty as it was now—even of cushions and dashboard equipments, and shorn of its license numbers—Buff knew it at a single sniff. He knew more. He knew that in this car’s muddied tonneau, little over half an hour ago, Trent had been lying. Yes, and that Gates and Hegan had been occupying the front seat. Also that the nasty smell of some medicine or drug was strong in the tonneau.

But the one thing that interested Buff was Michael Trent’s recent presence there. Being only a real-life dog and not a story-book detective, it occurred quite naturally to Buff that where Trent had so lately been, he would in time be again.

Trent had left the car. That was evident. But doubtless he would return to it. Every day he used this car. And, of course, he would come back to it, soon or late. Wherefore, as Trent’s trail led no farther, there seemed nothing for Buff to do but to wait for him here.

Accordingly, the collie stepped up on the running board, and through the open doorway of the tonneau. Stretching himself out there, as close as possible to the space where Trent had lain, Buff began his vigil—waiting in worried patience for the return of the man whom he had chosen as his deity.

And so in time he fell asleep; worn-out nature renewing itself in his tired body and building up again the strong young tissues and the wonted vigour of frame and of brain.

Fast as the dog had run, and with as few delays, yet he had arrived far too late to ameliorate or even share his master’s doom. Fast as a collie can run—and no dog but the greyhound can outstrip him—yet a new and desperately driven motor-car can cover thrice the same ground in far less time than can he.

Moreover, Buff had wasted many precious minutes in senselessness, in the waterless well, and many more in gnawing through the rope, and in casting about the farmhouse and in the yard for Trent’s trail. More than an hour ahead of him, Gates and Hegan had reached their destination. They had disposed of the stolen car, borne off the valuables they had taken from Trent’s home and from his body, and did all else they had planned in advance to do. The only creature with a clue to the victim’s whereabouts had come up an hour too late.

It was daylight when Buff awoke. He was stiff and drowsy. The bullet graze and the glass cut on his head were throbbing. He was thirsty, too, and hungry. He did not wake, of his own accord, but through force of habit, as the crunching of human feet reached his sleeping senses.

He lifted his head. Steps were clumping up to the garage door, and a key was at work in the padlock. Buff was keenly interested.

A dog awakens instantly and with all his faculties acute. With him there is none of the owlish stupidity and dazedness which marks the transition from sleep to awake, among humans. At one instant he is fast asleep; at the next he is wide awake. And so it was with Buff.

He was interested now at the sound of steps, because he hoped one of the two men whose tread he heard might be Michael Trent. But at once he knew it was not. Trent’s step was as familiar to Buff as was Trent’s scent. And neither of these two approaching persons had a semblance to Trent’s light, springy stride. Indeed, before the garage door opened more than an inch, Buff’s nostrils told him that these newcomers were total strangers to him.

One of the two men was elderly and disreputable. The other, a mere boy, had not lived long enough to look as thoroughly disreputable as did his companion, but very evidently he had done his best along that line in the few years allotted him.

The older man was approaching Trent’s car, talking over his shoulder to the youth.

“Put them new license plates on this, first thing you do,” he commanded. “Then get a chisel and see what you can do with the motor number. And we’ll have to——”

He stopped with much abruptness. As he had been speaking he had advanced to Trent’s car and had laid a careless hand on the swinging tonneau door. At the same moment he was aware of a tawny shape, bloody of head, that arose from the depths of the tonneau; teeth bared and eyes menacing.

This car belonged to Michael Trent as much as did the Trent farmhouse. Long since, Buff had learned that it was his sacred duty to guard the one as rigidly as the other. And here this stranger was laying an impious hand on the machine!

At the apparition of the threatening head and at the sound of the equally threatening growl, the man recoiled from the car, jerking back his dirty hand from the door as suddenly as if the latter had turned into a snake.

Open-mouthed, the two men surveyed Buff. Quietly, but not at all friendlily, the collie returned their stare. He had no quarrel with either of them. For all he knew or cared, this might be their rightful home. So long as they should abstain from touching or otherwise molesting Trent’s car, he was content to let them alone. But his pose and expression made it very clear that he expected the same sort of treatment from them and that he was calmly ready to enforce such treatment.

“It’s—it’s—why, it’s a dog!” cleverly observed the youth, breaking the momentary silence of surprise. “It’s——”

“It’s a collie,” amended his senior, finding his voice, and his wits together. “A top-notcher, at that. Must have sneaked in here while we was closin’ up last night. A dog like that is worth a big heap of cash. And most likely there’ll be a reward offered for him. See, he’s got a good collar on. And he’s chawed his rope through. He’s worth keepin’ till called for. Go, catch him, sonny. And tie him up yonder, till we c’n take him over to the house.”

The man spoke wheedlingly to his young companion. But the lad had noted his sire’s own reception from Buff. And, modestly, he hung back. At the other’s repeated and sterner mandate, the youth remarked:

“Think I’ll run up home for breakfast. I’ll be back in ten minutes. You might tie him up, yourself, while I’m gone. I ain’t much used to dogs.”

The older man scowled; then his brow cleared.

“We’ll both go up to breakfast,” he decreed. “We’ll lock this feller in here while we’re gone. On the way back I’ll stop for Joe Stears. He’s got a passel of dogs; and he und’stands handlin’ ’em. Come on.”

Compromising thus, they departed, closing and locking the garage door behind them. Neither of them having gone to the far side of the room, they did not see the broken sash and the mess of glass on the floor—a bit of wreckage hidden from their view by the three cars.

For a few minutes after they left him, Buff lay still. Then he got up, stretched fore and aft, collie fashion, and stepped down to the concrete floor. Making his way across to a water-tub, he drank long and deep. Then he stood irresolute.

He had been in this ill-smelling place for many hours. Michael Trent had not returned to his car. Michael Trent’s odour had grown faint—almost imperceptible. There was no reason, after all, to believe that Trent would come back here. A few months ago he had taken his old car to a garage and had never gone back for it. Perhaps that was what he would do in the present case.

Meanwhile, Buff was bitterly homesick for his master. And Buff was worried, to the depths of his soul, as to what might have befallen Trent at the hands of the two men with whom the dog associated his master’s departure—the men he was learning to hate with a mortal hatred because he knew them for his master’s enemies.

By loitering here, he could get no trace of Trent, nor of the men who had carried him away. Refreshed and once more alert, he prepared to take up his quest again.

An easy leap carried Buff out through the smashed window, and to freedom. As he stood in the road, hesitant, he saw bearing down toward him at a run the two men who had just left the garage, and with them a third man, who carried a rope and a club.

As the trio very evidently meant to seize him, and as he had no reason for staying there in the road to be caught, the collie set off across the nearest field at a hard-gallop, heading for a distant patch of woods. The men gave chase. But, without bothering to increase his speed, he soon left them panting and swearing, far in the rear. Presently, they gave up the pursuit.

Midway in the field, Buff scared up an unwary young rabbit. At sight of the pneumatically bouncing cottontail, the collie remembered he himself had eaten nothing in nearly twenty-four hours. Like a furry whirlwind, he was after the rabbit. Fifty yards on, a swirl in the long grass and a few red-stained leaves marked the abrupt end of the race. And Buff found himself supplied with a toothsome breakfast.

Thus began the collie’s first day of utter loneliness; a day of bleak misery and bewilderment, of biting grief. He ranged the country for miles on either side for a trace of his master. He followed several motor-cars, on various highways, because of their vague resemblance to Trent’s.

Once he ran rapturously for a quarter-mile, in pursuit of a well-set-up man who was taking a cross-country tramp; and whom, in the distance, his near-sighted eyes mistook for his master. The wind being in the wrong direction, Buff was not aware of his error until he had careered to within fifty feet of the stranger. Then, head and brush drooping, he slunk away, heavy of heart and heedless of the man’s kindly hail.

Under cover of darkness, that evening, the collie made a detour that brought him back to the garage where last he had seen Trent’s car. Whether he hoped Trent might have come back there, or whether perhaps the desolate dog craved the faint scent of his master on the tonneau door and flooring—in any event, he leaped in through the unmended window of the garage, and sought to locate the stolen car.

The car was no longer there. After the deft underground method employed by professional automobile thieves and receivers of such booty, the car had already been passed along the line to its next resting-place.

A boy, coming home late from the near-by city, chanced to be passing the unlit garage. From the cavernous depths of the building burst forth into the still night a hideous sound—the anguish howl of a wolf or of a masterless and wretched collie.

While the boy still stood shivering in terror at the eerie sound, a dark shape hurtled out through the window and vanished into the surrounding blackness.

And now began Buff’s tortured experience as a stray—as a leal one-man dog whose master is gone. Goaded on ever by that vague hope of somewhere finding Trent, and the scarce lesser hope of finding and wreaking vengeance on the men he associated with Trent’s disappearance, the great collie wandered aimlessly over the face of the countryside.

Unhappiness and the nerve-wrack of his endless quest lent him a strange furtiveness, and made him revert in a measure to the wild. Always searching—always avoiding his own kind and humans—he grew gaunt and lean. Living by his wits, in summer the forests gave him enough food to support life. He became craftily adept in catching rabbits and squirrels, and even occasional young birds. He did not starve, for the wolf-brain lent him the gift of foraging; although his farm training held him aloof from hen-roost and stall and fold, in his food-hunts.

Almost at once he skirted the city and guided himself back to Boone Lake, nearly thirty miles from where the trail had ended. The feat was not difficult, and he consumed less than a single night on the journey.

Reaching his master’s farm at grey of dawn, Buff found the house and outbuildings deserted. The weeds had crept thick among the once trim crops, and there was an air of desolation brooding over the land.

Buff could not know that of all Boone Lake, Ruth Hammerton alone had refused to accept as true the report that Michael Trent had left home of his own accord. She had visited the deserted farm with her father, as soon as the story had been repeated to her, and had prevailed on Mr. Hammerton to send one of his farm-hands to transfer to the Hammertons’ place Trent’s suffering livestock for safe-keeping.

It was enough for the collie to know his master was not at home, and that he had not been at home since the night of his kidnapping. Buff did not belong to the silly and professionally loyal type of dog that curls itself on its owner’s vacant doorstep and starves to death.

There was no time to think of such selfish matters as death, while Michael Trent remained to be found and his two enemies to be tracked down.

So, aimlessly, he took up his search.

That night he circled Boone Lake, investigating every house and path that Trent had been wont to frequent, visiting first the Hammerton place and last the market square—the scene of his triumph over Bayne, the drover.

Dawn found him miles away, ever seeking, ever wandering, living on slain forest creatures, obsessed and haunted by his overmastering impulse to find Trent.

Once, as he trotted along the ridge of a wooded hill, Buff saw in the valley below a farmer trying with pitiable ill-success to round up a flock of sixty sheep that had bolted through the pasture gate and were scattering over the surrounding fields and woods; instead of marching toward their distant fold, whose gate stood invitingly open.

Moved by an instinct he did not stay to define or to resist, the collie swept down the ridge and into the valley below. The harassed farmer beheld descending on his stampeded flock a bolt of tawny-and-white lightning that whirled in and out among the galloping strays as if bent on their wholesale destruction.

While the man was yelling his lungs out and seeking a stone wherewith to brain the marauder, he suddenly came to a foolish halt, and stood gaping at the spectacle before him.

The supposedly rabid and murderous dog was rounding up the scattered flock with uncanny skill and speed, marshalling them into the narrow road, driving strays back into the column and moving the whole woolly throng steadily and decorously toward the fold.

Arrived at the gate, one wether bolted past it, and ten other sheep followed his lead. The wether did not go forty feet before he and his fellow-truants found themselves confronted by a large and indignant collie, who forced them with gentle relentlessness to wheel in their tracks and rejoin the flock.

Tongue out, tail wagging, Buff stood at the gate of the fold, holding his prisoners from passing out again until the puffing and marvelling farmer came running up.

The man paused to fasten the gate before turning his full attention on the wonderful collie. But by the time the gate was made fast the dog was a hundred yards down the road, trotting lazily back toward the ridge. Not by so much as a turn of his classic head did he show he heard the frantic and cajoling shouts the farmer sent after him.

On another late afternoon, ten miles from there, a farmer’s child was piloting her father’s eleven cows and two calves home along the road from pasture. Three men, passing in a small motor-truck, halted, jumped to the ground, seized the pair of calves and prepared to sling them into the truck.

The child screamed in terrified appeal, and caught hold of one of the men by the arm, while the herd of cows ran in panic through fields and woods.

The man shook off the child’s convulsive hold with a vehemence that sent her flat in the dust of the road.

And on the same instant a huge and lean and hairy beast burst through a roadside thicket and flung himself on the man, bearing him to earth by the sheer weight of his assault.

By the time the thief had landed, rolling and yelling, in the roadway, Buff had deserted him, and was at another of the trio. And this was the collie of it. A bulldog secures his grip and holds it till doomsday. A collie, fighting, is everywhere at once. The collie strain in Buff told him his opponents were three, and that there was no sense in devoting himself over-long to any one of them at the expense of the rest. So he was raging at the second man’s throat before the first fairly realised what had attacked him.

The third man, however, had a trifle more time on his hands than had either of his companions. And, wisely, he utilised that second of time in dropping the calf he had caught and in making one flying leap for the seat of the truck.

There, as fast as they could beat off the furry demon that was rending their flesh and clothes, the two others joined him. Leaving the calves to run free, the men set the machine into rapid motion and rattled off down the road.

Buff did not follow. Already he was in the thickets again, rounding up the gawkily galloping cows. And presently he had them back in the highway, in orderly alignment and walking stolidly homeward.

Dropping back beside the still weeping child, Buff licked her frightened face with his pink tongue, wagged his tail and his entire body reassuringly, and then thrust his muzzle into her trembling little hand. Thus, her father, having witnessed the scene from afar, came hurrying up, to find his cattle safe and in the road, and his erstwhile terrified daughter hugging a huge collie frantically and kissing the silken crest of the dog’s head in an agony of gratitude and love.

But, as the farmer himself sought to catch hold of the dog, Buff showed his white teeth in a wild-beast snarl that made the man start back.

Taking advantage of this momentary check, the collie bounded off into the bushes and was gone.

Buff himself could not have explained the unwonted wildness and ferocity that seemed to have taken hold of him in his wanderings. For the first three years or so of his life—indeed, until Gates’s pistol shot had stunned him—he had known nothing but friendliness and good treatment. And, except toward tramps and like prowlers, he had never felt hatred. Though he had always been a one-man dog, he had shown no ill-temper toward those who sought to make friends with him.

Yet now, as evidenced by his snarl at the father of the child who was caressing him, he had neither lot nor part with mankind at large. His every hope and yearning were centred on the finding of his master. And the wolf strain in his make-up thrilled almost as keenly to his longing to encounter the men with whom he associated the disappearance of Trent.

For the rest of humanity he felt no interest. Not even toward Ruth Hammerton, who had reigned second to Trent in his heart.

Twice during his months as a tramp dog, Buff revisited Boone Lake—casting about the farm, trotting at midnight through the village, hanging wistfully around the Hammerton place for nearly an hour. But before dawn he was far away again.

Most of his travelling was done by night or in dusk and at grey daybreak. For experience had taught him that the open ways are not safe for an unattached dog by sunlight.

A lesser dog might readily have attached himself to one of the various friendly folk who chanced to meet him and to give him a kindly word or call. A lesser dog, too, might have chosen a home at one of the farms scattered through the broad stretch of country Buff traversed. At any of a dozen places his beauty and his prowess at herding would have won for the collie a warm and lasting welcome.

But none of this was for Buff. He had known but one master. Losing Trent, he was fated to be forever masterless, unless he should chance to find the man he had lost. And, being only a dog, he knew no better way of finding him than by this everlasting and aimless search.

On a late September afternoon, he was roused from a troubled nap in the long grass and bushes at the verge of a field, by the sound of a mad-galloping horse and of a woman’s brave yet frightened calls to the runaway. Looking over the fringe of grass, towards the road, a furlong distant, he saw a fast-moving cloud of yellow-grey dust, which resolved itself into a hazy screen for a horse and light buggy.

The horse—a young and nervous brute—had taken fright at the running of a woodchuck across the road under his feet, and had sprung forward with a suddenness that snapped his check-rein. The swinging check smote him resoundingly again and again, on the neck and across the face, turning his first fright into panic, and making useless the efforts of the driver to bring him down.

A woman was driving. She was neither young nor beautiful. She had self-possession, and she had a more than tolerable set of driving hands. She was keeping the maddened horse more or less in the road, and was sawing with valorous strength on one rein while she held the other steady. Which was all the good it did her. For the brute had the bit between his teeth.

Buff arrived at the road-edge just as one of the two light reins broke under the undue strain put on it.

Before the driver could lighten the pull on the remaining rein its impulse had jerked the horse’s low-laid head far to one side. His rushing body prepared to follow the lead of his head towards a steep roadside bank some ten feet deep, with a scattering of broken rock at the bottom.

Then it was that the horse became dimly aware of a furry shape which whizzed in front of him on that side, and of a flying head that struck for his nose. A stinging slash on the left nostril sent the runaway veering from the bank-edge, and plunging toward the telegraph pole on the other side of the road. He was met and turned again by a second slash from one of the collie’s curved eye-teeth. On the same moment Buff stopped slashing and let his bulldog ancestry take control.

Thus the horse was assailed by a full double set of teeth that buried themselves in his bleeding nostrils, and that hung on.

The wild steed sought to fling up his head to shake off this anguishing weight of seventy odd pounds. But he could not shake himself free. He checked his furious pace and reared, striking out with his forefeet, and threatening to pitch backward into the buggy.

But a fierce wrench of the hanging jaws and a wriggle of the intolerable weight brought him down on all fours again. At once Buff released his grip and stood in front of the trembling horse. The runaway made as though to plunge forward. But he flinched at the memory of the dog’s attack and at the threat of its renewal.

While he hesitated, dancing, pawing, and in momentary cessation of his run, the woman slipped from the seat to the ground and ran to his head. With practised strength she shook the bit into place and held fast. The horse jerked back. Buff nipped his heel, and instantly was at his bloody nose, again.

The runaway, conquered and shivering, lashed out with one foreleg in a last hopeless display of terrified anger. His shod hoof smote the unprepared collie in the side. With a gasping sound, Buff rolled over into the ditch, two ribs broken and a foot crushed.

Tying the horse to a telegraph pole, the woman went over to where the wounded collie lay. In strong, capable arms, that were wondrous gentle, she lifted him and bore him to the buggy. Laying him tenderly on the floor of the vehicle, she returned to the horse’s head, untied the cowed and trembling steed, and began to lead him homeward.

Ten minutes later she turned in at a lane leading to a rambling, low farmhouse. And in another five minutes Buff was reclining on the kitchen floor, the woman’s husband working skilfully over his injuries, while the matron poured out the tale of his heroism and cleverness.

“I know what dog this is, too,” she finished. “I’m sure I know. It must be the same one that fought those thieves away from Sol Gilbert’s cows over to Pompton, last week, when Sol’s girl was driving them home. Mrs. Gilbert told me about it at the Grange, Monday. And he’s likely the dog that rounded up those sheep for Parkins—or whatever his name was—at Revere. You read me about it in the Bulletin, don’t you remember? The letter Parkins wrote to the editor about it? I know it must be the same one. It isn’t likely there’s more than one dog in Passaic County with the sense to do all three of those things. He must be like those knight-errant folks in Sylvia’s school book, who used to go through the country rescuing folks that were in distress. The best in the house isn’t any too good for him.”

“He’ll get it,” curtly promised her husband, without looking up from his task. “It’s lucky I’ve had experience, though, in patching up busted critters. Because this one is needing a lot of patching. Say! Notice how he don’t even let a whimper out of him? This rib-setting must hurt like fury, too. Acts more like a bulldog than a collie. I’m going to advertise him. And if the owner shows up, I’ll offer him a hundred dollars for the dog. He’ll be worth it, and a heap more, to me, herding and such. So, old feller! Now for the smashed foot. Don’t seem to be any big bones broke there.”

The weeks that followed were more nearly pleasant to Buff than had been any space of time since Trent’s disappearance. He was perforce at rest, while his fractured ribs and then his broken foot slowly mended. And all that time he was fed up and petted and made much of, in a way that would have turned most invalids’ heads.

It was well, after his months of restless searchings, to come to a halt here in this abode of comfort and kindliness; to be petted again by a woman’s soft hand, to eat cooked food once more, to be praised and to feel himself gloriously welcome.

Buff’s craving ambition, to find Trent and to run to earth his two enemies, was less acute in these drowsy days of convalescence. His sick soul seemed to be returning to normal along with his sick body.

By the time Buff could walk with any degree of comfort again, the morning frost lay heavy on the fields. The dog went out for a brief stroll with the farmer and his wife. To their delight, he did not try to run away, but accompanied them home and lay down contentedly on the doorstep.

After that, no further guard was kept over him. It was understood that he would stay with the people who had succoured and healed him.

One cold night in late autumn the dog accompanied his host, as usual, on the evening rounds of barns and outbuildings. As they were returning towards the warm red glow of the lamplit kitchen windows, Buff came to a dead stop.

A slight shudder ran through him. He lifted his delicate nose and sniffed the frosty air. He smelt nothing. He sniffed merely in an effort to corroborate in some way by scent the strange impulse which was taking possession of him—an impulse he could not resist.

“Come along, Shep, old boy!” coaxed the farmer, arriving at the doorstep and turning back towards the collie. “Supper’s ready. What’s the matter?”

Slowly, very slowly, Buff approached the man. Timidly, almost remorsefully, he licked the outstretched hand. Then, throwing back his magnificent head, he made the frost-chilled stillnesses of the autumn night re-echo with a hideously discordant and ear-torturing wolf-howl.

“Why, Shep,” exclaimed the farmer in amaze, “whatever ails you? What’s——”

He broke off in the midst of his bewildered query and raised his voice in a shout of summons to the dog. For, like a streak of tawny light, Buff had whirled out of the dooryard and was fleeing up the road.

He heard the eager call of the man who had cured him and befriended him and given him a happy home. But he heard—far more clearly—a soundless call that urged him forward.

Guided only by mystic collie instinct and by that weird impulse which had taken possession of him, he fled through the night at breakneck speed, headed unswervingly for Boone Lake, full thirty miles away.

On the same night—after a cautious absence of several months—Con Hegan and Billy Gates ventured to return to their former homes in the Boone Lake suburbs.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE END OF THE TRAIL

RUTH HAMMERTON hurried into her father’s study on her return from the post-office, whither she had fared for the evening mail.

Her dark face was aglow with a colour that had been foreign to it for many a long week—a colour that softened and mellowed the new lines of leanness and of sorrow in cheek and brow. Her eyes were alight with nervous eagerness.

Mr. Hammerton looked up in surprise from a heap of papers on his desk, as his daughter burst so unceremoniously in upon him. A month earlier he had been appointed local justice of the peace. His new duties still called for much night work, in the way of study and preparation for the next day’s court duties. So it was with a slight frown that he greeted this sudden interruption of his labours.

“I’ve just come from the post-office!” began Ruth eagerly. “As I was coming out two men almost bumped into me. I looked back, as they slouched into the store and sat down by the stove. They had a huge bulldog at their heels. I heard one of the loafers there hail them by name. They were Con Hegan and Billy Gates. A boy told me they had come back to Boone Lake to-day. He said it was their first visit here since they got out of prison. He——”

“Pshaw!” fumed Hammerton. “So those two crooks are back here, are they? That means more lawlessness! Just as I was congratulating myself that it was becoming a law-abiding and decent community at last! I wish——”

“You don’t understand!” broke in the girl. “You don’t see what I mean. You don’t get the significance of it. And yet I’ve been all over it with you so often! I——”

“Over what?” demanded Hammerton, nettled by her air of excited mystery. “Please explain what you’re driving at. I’m tremendously busy to-night and——”

“Michael Trent was the means of Hegan and Gates going to prison,” she hurried on. “They swore they would get him for it. We have proof of that. The very night after they were set free Michael disappeared. And now they are back here again, after four months! Don’t you see——”

“I see you are trying to lure me into that same endless old argument again,” returned Hammerton with a glance of regret at his piled-up work. “But really, I can’t see why these two jailbirds’ appearance in town to-night should have flustered you so. There was no foul play connected with Trent’s disappearance. I’ve explained that to you, over and over. Calvin Greer called him up on the telephone that evening. Trent told Calvin he was sick of Boone Lake and that he was starting off on a long motor tour up country. He said if he liked it up there he’d settle somewhere in the north counties and never come back. Next day he and his automobile were gone. Where is the mystery?”

“Where?” she repeated miserably. “Why, everywhere! The whole thing is a mystery. In the first place, I rode over to see Calvin Greer, at his stock farm. He had never met Michael till that day, and he wasn’t at all familiar with Michael’s voice. But he told me it sounded rougher and hoarser over the phone than when he talked to him face to face. And he——”

“That’s no proof. Many people’s voices sound altogether different over the phone. Or Trent may have had a cold. There’s no mystery about it, I tell you. Most assuredly there’s nothing to connect Hegan and Gates with the affair. As to——”

“You knew Michael,” she went on. “You knew him well and you liked him. Tell me, was he the sort of man to go away like that and not have the courtesy to say good-bye to us? Was he? He stopped here—he and Buff—you remember, on his way home from the market square that evening. He sat and chatted with us for half an hour or so. He didn’t say a word about going away. Instead, he arranged to go horseback riding with me the next day. Yet less than half an hour later, apparently, he tells Calvin Greer he’s leaving Boone Lake—perhaps forever. Is that——”

“Men do queer things,” said Hammerton, turning back to his papers. “I can’t agree with you that there’s any mystery about it, daughter. Certainly no mystery that would justify the law in suspecting——”

“You know what care he took of his livestock,” pursued Ruth. “Is it likely—is it possible—that he would have left his sheep and cattle to starve, his cows unmilked and his horses with empty mangers? Would he have gone away like that, of his own accord, and let all his livestock starve to death? For they would have starved to death out there on that solitary farm if you and I hadn’t gone to get them and bring them here.”

“That’s the only part of the whole thing that I can’t understand,” assented Hammerton. “He treated his livestock as other people treat their pets. It wasn’t like him to leave them to starve. Out there they might have gone hungry till they died before any neighbour would have been likely to happen in and find them. Even if he hadn’t been so fond of them, it doesn’t make sense for a man to leave such valuable property to die of neglect. To say nothing of the ruin of his year’s crops through his absence. Why, if you hadn’t wheedled me into having his crops looked after, the year would have been a total loss to his farm. As it is——”

“Then,” she declared triumphantly, “since you admit he wouldn’t have done such a thing of his own accord——”

“I don’t admit it. I only say I can’t understand it. But it happened. We have proof of that. He went away in his car. And he took Buff along with him. If he had left Buff there I could have seen, perhaps, where the mystery came in. For he and that collie were chums. But he took Buff with him. And he took along everything of portable value in his house, too. No, that doesn’t look like foul play. He did it deliberately, whatever his motive may have been. Took along his dog and his valuables and drove away in his own car. The car couldn’t have been stolen, either. For he told Greer over the phone——”

“If it was Michael who told——”

“We don’t know his motive,” summed up Hammerton. “But we do know he went of his own accord. There is ample proof of that. As for connecting Gates and Hegan with——”

“He did not go of his own accord!” announced the girl, deathly white, her eyes ablaze, as she towered over her wondering father. “And I have every reason to know he didn’t. I don’t want to tell why I know it. But I must, if I want you to get the truth out of those two assassins. I know Michael Trent did not leave here of his own accord. I know it because he loved me. A man doesn’t run away like that from——”

“What?” shouted Hammerton in astonishment. “He—you say he——”

“I say he loved me,” reiterated the girl, her sweet voice held steady by a great effort. “And no man will go away willingly from a woman he loves as Michael loved me. Most of all, he won’t go away and fail to send any kind of word.”

“You never told me!” accused her father indignantly. “You never——”

“Michael never told me,” she retorted.

“Then how——”

“He never told me in so many words,” she went on. “Yet I knew it. A woman always knows. He loved me. And he was waiting until he could put his farm on a better paying basis before he told me of it. Now, perhaps, you’ll believe me when I say he’d never have gone away like that unless he had been kidnapped or killed.”

Long and silently Hammerton stared at his daughter, dazed by the revelation. Then he said, hesitantly:

“If I’d known—if you had told me—but——”

“But now that you do know,” she persisted, “you’ll get the truth from Hegan and Gates? You’ll start the machinery of the law to working; and——”

“Dear,” he said gently, “there’s nothing I can do. There is no shadow of proof that either of those men was concerned in——”

“As you choose!” she exclaimed, turning to leave the room. “Since you won’t interrogate them, I am going to. I’m going back to the post-office to find them. If they aren’t there, I’m going to find where they live and go——”

“Are you crazy?” stormed Hammerton, jumping up to bar her way. “You surely can’t mean to do an insane thing like that! I won’t permit it!”

“Then interrogate them yourself, as a magistrate of this county!” she bade him. “Because if you don’t do it, I shall. If it is insane, let it be insane. In these past months I have had enough to drive a wiser woman insane. I love Michael Trent. I love him, I tell you! And if he is on earth I shall find him, now that I have a clue.”

Hammerton stared wonderingly down upon his wontedly placid daughter. Then he caught her into his arms and held her close to his heart for a moment. Releasing her, he crossed to the telephone and called up Roy Saunders, the Boone Lake chief of police.

“Saunders?” he queried. Then: “Judge Hammerton speaking. Hegan and Gates are in town again. I want a talk with them. You’ll find them at the post-office. Will you bring them up here to my study? As soon as you can, please? No, there’s no warrant out for them. But I don’t think they’ll be fools enough to refuse to come here. Thanks.”

He set down the telephone and passed his arm again round the girl. Ruth, her self-control giving way, wept convulsively on his breast.

“There! There!” Hammerton murmured. “Try to get hold of yourself, darling! They’ll be here in a few minutes. And our one chance is to keep cool. I—I haven’t much faith in our success with them. It’s only fair to tell you that, Ruth. And I’ve no legal right to question them at all. I’m doing it to save you from doing it. Try to be brave, if nothing comes of our talk with them.”

Airily, not to say jauntily, Con Hegan and Billy Gates strolled up the village street and into the highroad leading to the Hammerton place. To one side of the unconcerned pair strode Saunders, the truculent but puzzled chief of police.

The men had grinned mirthfully at Saunders’ command that they accompany him to the magistrate’s home. They had complied without a single demur. And they lightened the tedium of the walk by guying the pompous police chief in a way that reduced him to sullen homicidal yearnings.

Marshalled by Saunders, they lounged through the doorway in the wake of a servant and were ushered into Hammerton’s study at the extreme rear of the house.

They found Hammerton seated at his desk, looking very magisterial indeed. At a far end of the room, her face in the shadows, sat Ruth.

“Here they are, Your Honour!” proclaimed the chief of police, ranging his two grinning charges side by side in front of the desk.

“Yep,” cheerily assented Hegan. “Here we are, Judge. We was planning to bolt. But this vigilant chief kind of overawed us. We was afraid he might cry if we stood him on his head and lit out.”

“Or,” supplemented Gates, “he’d maybe have hit one of us a crool slap on the wrist as we run past him. Or he might go to where we live and bust one of our umbrellas, to punish us. So we stuck.”

“The judge looks pretty near as terrifyin’ as the chief,” confided Hegan to his companion in a loud whisper and shaking with simulated awe. “Most likely he keeps a ’lectric chair in his kitchen. We’d best be p’lite to him.”

Hammerton checked an angry forward movement on the part of Saunders and addressed the grinning prisoners.

“I have no legal right to enforce replies to the questions I am going to ask you,” he said quietly. “But it is only fair to tell you what rights I do possess. It is within my jurisdiction to commit you both, here and now, for vagrancy, since you have no visible means of support in this village. And before the thirty-day vagrancy term can expire there will be some new charge. So, to avoid these annoyances, I advise you to wipe those grins off your faces and to drop the attempt to insult anyone here and to answer the questions I shall put to you. Otherwise, you will leave here with handcuffs on and will proceed to the lock-up; thence to come before me in the morning on a vagrancy charge.”

The men looked at each other uncertainly. Gates seemed to be measuring the distance to the study door. Unobtrusively, Hammerton took a pistol from the drawer of his desk and laid it in his lap. Instantly the two men stiffened and lost their jauntily insolent manner.

“There’s no call to threaten us, Judge,” said Hegan, nervously. “We’re glad to answer any questions you care to spring on us. As for vagrancy—well, we’re no vags. We just got home to-day and, of course, we haven’t had time to look round us for any steady work yet. But——”

“You were let out of Logan Prison on the twenty-sixth of last July,” interposed Hammerton. “Where did you go from there? I mean as soon as you were let out.”

“We went straight to Paterson,” returned Hegan. “We got out of Logan at ten, on the morning of the twenty-sixth. We took the noon train to Paterson. We got work there and we stayed on the job till yesterday, when the works shut down for the winter. Then we come back here.”

“You hadn’t been here since you were sent to prison?”

“Not till we got here this morning from Paterson. No, Judge.”

“H’m! You were not here on the twenty-seventh of July? You are certain of that?”

“Certain sure, Judge!” declared Gates. “We wouldn’t be likely to forget if we had. This is our home town. We was kind of ashamed to come back, right off, after they turned us loose from the hoosgow. So we——”

“You have not been in or near Boone Lake since you were released from prison—until to-day?” insisted Hammerton.

“No, Your Honour, we ain’t. And we c’n prove it. We went straight to Paterson; and there we——”

“Then,” spoke up Ruth, coming forward, “how did two reputable witnesses happen to see you at Mr. Michael Trent’s farm late on the afternoon of July twenty-seventh?”

Hegan gulped. Gates, however, answered suavely:

“Flash your witnesses on us, ma’am. If they seen us here or in this county that day they sure got good eyes. They——”

“Yep!” supplemented Hegan. “Who’s your witnesses? Who are they?”

Hammerton and Saunders were looking at the troubled girl in surprise. With true feminine quibble for truth, she had put the statement in the form of a query in speaking of the witnesses whose identity she had just invented. The failure of her ruse distressed her keenly, even while the memory of Hegan’s start and his scared gulp made her doubly certain she was on the right track.

“Guess you never took a course of poker playing, at school, ma’am,” chuckled Gates, reading her face with all the trained skill of a true panhandler.

“Shut up, you!” grunted Saunders in wrath.

He glowered upon the suave Gates, who promptly turned his respectful gaze to the magistrate’s face. Hammerton, frowning perplexedly, opened his lips for further query, even while he realised the utter uselessness of trying to catch such skilled offenders by any questions he might have the wit to frame.

Before he could speak a maid rushed wildly into the room. With a manifest effort, she came to a halt inside the doorway and stood as though trying to announce some guest. But the guest himself entered the room, close at her heels.

Steadily, through the gathering darkness, Buff had run, his first mad pace settling down into the choppy little mile-eating stride of the trotting wolf pack. And so he kept on, ever headed for Boone Lake, moving swervelessly and with deceptive quickness.

Stars came out. A fat moon began to butt its way up over the eastern horizon mists. Here and there, as the pad-pad-pad of the collie’s tireless feet pattered along the frozen road, a farm dog would bark challenge or dart out in pursuit. But no challenge bark checked Buff’s obsessed flight. Nor did any of the pursuing curs catch up with him.

Now and then, along the state road, motor cars would meet or pass him. The dog moved aside barely far enough to miss the whirring wheels, but did not falter in his run.

Once, as he padded through a village, some fool, catching sight of him, noted his tense pose and the arrow-like straightness of his course and raised the shout of “Mad dog!”

This asinine cry lurks ever in the back of the human throat, ready and eager to spring into life at the slightest provocation. And woe to the harmlessly running or perhaps sick dog at whom it is howled! At once the hue-and-cry is ready to start in murderous pursuit. No question is asked. Nobody stops to realise that there are probably not two actually rabid dogs in any one state in the Union in the course of any two years, and that a genuinely hydrophobic dog is no more in condition to chase and attack people than is a typhoid patient.

But in Buff’s case the shout was raised too late. The tawny-and-white shape sped on through the dim moonlight and out of sight before the hue-and-cry was fairly up. And he did not so much as glance back to note the progress of the useless pursuit.

As he turned off the state road, taking the macadam byway which led towards Trent’s farm, the collie dropped to a wavering halt, his sensitive nostrils pulsing. A scent had come to him, though it was still too elusive to register clearly in the eager brain.

Twenty doubtful steps Buff took along the byway, until he came to a point where a field path from a cross-road a mile away intersected it. At the intersection the scent struck him with a force that dizzied him. Nostrils to earth, he found that a man had left this path for the byroad not ten minutes earlier.

The knowledge did amazing things to the dog. For an instant he shivered as though with a physical convulsion. His breath came in long gasps. A whine in his throat shook itself forth in an eerie note that belonged to no normal beast.

Then, like a whirlwind, he was off, down the byway; nose to earth, body flat and flying. Half a mile farther on, the rush of his madly scampering feet came to the ears of a man who was plodding wearily toward the farm—a man thin and shabby, who walked as though completing an exhausting journey. In the middle of the road the man paused and glanced back. Adown the moonlit byway was dashing a tawny-and-white creature, flat to earth in its speed.

Fifty yards from the man Buff lifted his head as he galloped. The scent—any dog’s strongest quality—told him he might now rely on sight, which is the weakest of a dog’s senses. At what he saw, the collie gave tongue.

Not in the hideous wolf howl or in whimper did Buff speak now, but in a cry that was human and rending—a cry that tore at the listener’s heartstrings by reason of its awful intensity.

Delirious—screaming, writhing, panting—Buff flung himself on the man he had tracked. He was at the end of the trail! And what he found there drove him quite insane.

Up into Michael Trent’s dusty arms the dog sprang—a vibrant mass of mad ecstasy. Moaning, crying, sobbing like a human child, Buff sought to lick his master’s haggard face and to pat him in a hundred places at once with the whirling paws.

Almost thrown off his balance by the impact, Trent spoke to the collie in wondering delight. And the sound of the tired voice sent Buff into a new frenzy of rapture. Dropping to earth, he whizzed round and round Trent in a bewildering gyroscopic flight, stomach to ground, tongue and throat clamorous with hoarse joy.

Presently, flinging himself at his master’s feet, the dog lay there, moaning and sobbing, his swift tongue caressing the man’s dusty shoes, his furry body quivering from nose to tail in hysterical bliss. There he lay while Trent leaned over and laid both calloused hands on his head, stroking him and talking to him in the pleasant, slow tones the collie loved.

“Buff!” muttered the man, swallowing hard. “Buff! Why, I didn’t think anyone on earth cared that much about anything! Come up here, old friend! You’re shaking as if you had ague. How did you find me? Have you been waiting at home for me ever since? Or have you been living with—with her?”

Buff, his paroxysm spent, crouched at Trent’s feet, his silken head pressed against his master’s knee, his upraised eyes scanning the man’s face in adoration. From time to time he shivered and moaned.

He had come to the end of the trail—the gloriously happy end of the horrible long trail. And he understood now why his queer sixth sense had summoned him hither, from the far-off farm where for weeks he had lived so placidly. The master-call had come to him. He had obeyed it. For it had been stronger than he.

And it had led him to his god. That was all Buff knew or cared to know.

And now, still talking to his dog, still petting him, Michael Trent took up again his homeward trudge. But there was life in his step. Fatigue seemed to have fallen away from him. The ludicrous worship of a dog had somehow made life over and had changed depression to hope.

Following his old custom—immemorial among lonely men who own dogs—Trent talked to Buff as they went along, as though to another human—knowing the collie could not get the sense of one word in ten, yet glad to have this vent for his own yearning for expression.

“The start of it all is pretty hazy to me, Buff,” he rambled on, in the soft monotone that was music to the dog. “I saw Hegan and Gates in the doorway. One minute I was fighting with them. The next minute I was in the smelly fo’cas’le of a tramp steamship. I was sick. And I was aching all over. I had been shanghaied. The next three months were unadulterated hell. We were bound for Honolulu by way of the Horn, Buff. And the crew was only one degree better than the captain and the mate. Let’s let it go at that.

“A chap named Carney and I got to be pals. We broke ship together at San Francisco on the way back. And we made most of the transcontinental trip on brake beams. Brake beams aren’t flowery beds of ease, Buff. Keep off them. Carney had got a bit of the story about me, from a man who was the mate’s pal between voyages. It seems a fellow who was in prison down at Logan with Gates and Hegan helped them engineer my shanghaiing. He told them where to take me. And they loaded me on a launch of his, down the river to the harbour and sold me to the captain. He was just weighing anchor. And he was short-handed.

“Hegan and Gates were planning to keep me out of the way and to let my stock starve and my crops go to wrack—as most likely they have, for nobody was likely to get to our out-of-the-way farm in time to prevent it. Then they were going to lay low for a few months, and after that they were coming back to Boone Lake and set fire to the house and barns. Most likely they’ve done it before now. Nice home-coming, hey, Buff? We’re dead broke, most likely, you and I. But we’ve got each other, anyhow. And that’s more than I dared hope for.”

He was turning in at the gateway of his farm as he finished the rambling tale. Buff thrust his nose into his master’s hand and whined softly. Then, in a trice the collie had stiffened to attention and darted forward through the shadows towards a patch of white that emerged from the darkness of the dooryard.

When Gates and Hegan came home to Boone Lake that day they brought with them a new possession in the shape of a mongrel bulldog of huge proportions and with a local fame for being one of the “dirtiest” fighters that ever set upon a weaker foe. Planning to carry out their amiable intent of firing Trent’s house and barns late in the night, they had stationed this dog in their victim’s dooryard that evening, to scare off any possible tramp or other intruder who might be intending to make the deserted house a resting place. They had no desire for such witnesses; the penalty for arson being somewhat drastic in their home state.

It was this guardian dog that came tearing forward now to repel the two intruders, as Trent and Buff turned into the dooryard. Buff, guessing his ferocious intent and resenting another and hostile dog’s presence in his own beloved bailiwick, flew eagerly to meet him. An instant later the two beasts came together with a clash; and a right energetic dog fight was raging at Trent’s feet.

Buff, for all his fury, fought with brain as well as brawn, against his heavier assailant.

There never yet was a bulldog that could, in the open, seize a collie that was aware of his assault and that wished to elude it.

Buff nimbly sprang aside as the bulldog rushed and let the other hurtle past him. But the bulldog did not go scatheless. As he lumbered past, a slash from Buff’s curved eyetooth ploughed a long and deep red furrow along his shoulder and back. And, as he turned, Buff’s slash laid open a similar cut at one side of the enemy’s stomach. The collie danced out of reach of the clashing jaws that sought to grab him before he could jump back.

When the jaws clamped together the collie’s throat was not there. Even as his opponent struck a second time Buff flung himself on the ground and dived for the heavy forelegs in front of him.

Buff’s teeth closed on the bulldog’s right foreleg. And, but for his own strong strain of collie blood, the fight must have ended then and there. For a bulldog would have gained this foreleg grip and would have hung onto it, heedless of the fact that his own spine and the back of his neck were within easy reach of the foe.

Wherefore, merely giving the forefoot an agonising bite as he went, he continued his diving rush. Under and between the bowed forelegs of the bulldog he slipped, eel-like, in swift elusiveness, slashing the other’s underbody again as he went, and emerged safe on the far side of the enemy.

Back and forth over the frost-slippery, moon-lit grass raged the fight, the frantic clawing of feet and Buff’s own staccato snarls and the thud of clashing bodies alone breaking the night silences. Twice the bulldog well-nigh secured his coveted throat hold—a hold that must speedily have left Buff gasping out his life through a severed jugular.

A third time the bulldog charged for the throat. Buff reared, twisting sidewise to avoid the charge and at the same time to counter on the panting and lumbering body. But he did not take account of the slipperiness of the frosty, dead grass.

The collie’s hind legs slid from under him. Down he went, asprawl on his back, under this sudden loss of his precarious balance. As quick as a cat he had spun to his feet again. But the instant of wasted time had sufficed for the enemy.

The bulldog, lunging murderously for the exposed throat, missed his mark by reason of Buff’s swirling motion of scrambling to his feet again. Yet this time the ravening jaws did not close on air or on fur. Instead they buried themselves in Buff’s upper right foreleg, almost at the junction of leg and body.

Helpless to break free, Buff ceased to thrash about. He felt the locked jaws begin to grind, deep and deeper towards the bone. He felt his enemy’s braced pressure brought to bear upon the imperilled foreleg.

Then his wolf brain told him what to do. He struck straight for the nose and upper jaw of the bulldog. He did not slash, as does a collie. He bent down and secured his grip as would a bulldog.

The bulldog, his own hold secure in the collie’s upper foreleg, was aware of a terribly painful grip on his tender nose, a grip that waxed sterner and more tense all the time, a grip also that was shutting off his breathing power.

In the anguish of choking, the bulldog let go Buff’s foreleg and shook himself furiously to get free of that encumbering hold. As he shook he gave tone, emitting a most horrendous yell of pain and rage.

Then for the first time Trent was able in the elusive moonlight and shadow bars to see how the fight was going or to intervene without peril of injuring his own dog. But as he bent down to drag the squirming bulldog away he saw he was too late. Buff’s grinding jaws had found the jugular. The fight was over. The victor stood up, panting and weary, and looked down at the inert mass that had so lately been a mighty fighting machine.

Half an hour later, shaved and clean, Michael Trent set forth for Ruth Hammerton’s home. Buff, wholly rested from his battle, trotted happily at his master’s heels. The maid at Hammertons’ gaped wordlessly at sight of the visitor.

Buff, as politeness bade him, wagged his tail and took a step towards her. The maid, by nature, was built for endurance rather than speed. Yet, recovering from her shock, she jumped at least a foot from the veranda floor; and she made a sound better fitted to a turkey whose tail feathers have been grabbed than to a decorous household servant.

After which she bolted into the house and down the hall towards the study. Trent hesitated as to whether or not he ought to follow. But Buff took matters into his own hands. At the opening of the front door he caught the scent of Hammerton’s two convict visitors. And down the long hall he went like a thunderbolt.

Trent, in consternation, dashed after him. But he did not catch up with the collie until Buff halted, perforce, at the doorway which the maid’s ample body was just then blocking. As he strove to wriggle past into the room Trent came alongside and seized the inexplicably excited dog firmly by the collar. This precaution saved the life of Con Hegan, who chanced to be standing nearest to the door.

It was Billy Gates who broke the brief spell. Even as Ruth started forward, with a choking little cry, towards Trent, the convict’s nerve and brain suddenly collapsed. Waving a tremulous arm at the raging Buff, Gates babbled in horror:

“Take him away! For the Lord’s sake, take him away! That’s no dog! It’s a devil! A—a ghost! I—I shot him and I buried him in a—a forty-foot well with a rope and a stone on his neck! Take him away! He’s come back for me!”

At a nod from Hammerton the chief of police shoved Hegan into an adjoining room. Then, wheeling on the gibbering and helpless Gates, Trent said sternly:

“Now, talk! The whole truth, mind you, unless you want me to let this—this ghost loose at you! Talk!”

And Gates talked. Drunk with superstitious horror, he talked and continued to talk. Even the sight of Hammerton taking swift notes did not deter him.

As the chief of police strutted back to the lock-up, propelling his handcuffed prisoners before him, he tried hard not to look at a shaded corner of the moonlit veranda—a corner wherein a maid and a man were seated very close together, with a big collie curled up in drowsy contentment at their feet.