The force of Lad"s rearing leap sent the mongrel spinning back by sheer weight, but at once he drove in again to the a.s.sault. This time he did not give his muzzled antagonist a chance to rear, but sprang at Lad"s flank. Lad wheeled to meet the rush and, opposing his shoulder to it, broke its force.
Seeing himself so helpless, this was of course the time for Lad to take to his heels and try to outrun the enemy he could not outfight. To stand his ground was to be torn, eventually, to death.
Being anything but a fool Lad knew that; yet he ignored the chance of safety and continued to fight the worse-than-hopeless battle.
Twice and thrice his wit and his uncanny swiftness enabled him to block the big mongrel"s rushes. The fourth time, as he sought to rear, his hind foot slipped on a skim of puddle-ice.
Down went Lad in a heap, and the mongrel struck.
Before the collie could regain his feet the mongrel"s teeth had found a hold on the side of Lad"s throat. Pinning down the muzzled dog, the mongrel proceeded to improve his hold by grinding his way toward the jugular. Now his teeth encountered something more solid than mere hair. They met upon a thin leather strap.
Fiercely the mongrel gnawed at this solid obstacle, his rage-hot brain possibly mistaking it for flesh. Lad writhed to free himself and to regain his feet, but seventy-five pounds of fighting weight were holding his neck to the ground.
Of a sudden, the mongrel growled in savage triumph. The strap was bitten through!
Clinging to the broken end of the leather the victor gave one final tug. The pull drove the steel bars excruciatingly deep into Lad"s bruised nose for a moment. Then, by magic, the torture-implement was no longer on his head but was dangling by one strap between the muzzled mongrel"s jaws.
With a motion so swift that the eye could not follow it, Lad was on his feet and plunging deliriously into the fray. Through a miracle, his jaws were free; his torment was over. The joy of deliverance sent a glow of Berserk vigor sweeping through him.
The mongrel dropped the muzzle and came eagerly to the battle. To his dismay he found himself fighting not a helpless dog, but a maniac wolf. Lad sought no permanent hold. With dizzying quickness his head and body moved--and kept moving, and every motion meant a deep slash or a ragged tear in his enemy"s short-coated hide.
With ridiculous ease the collie eluded the mongrel"s awkward counter-attacks, and ever kept boring in. To the quivering bone his short front teeth sank. Deep and bloodily his curved tusks slashed--as the wolf and the collie alone can slash.
The mongrel, swept off his feet, rolled howling into the road; and Lad tore grimly at the exposed under-body.
Up went a window in the hovel. A man"s voice shouted. A woman in a house across the way screamed. Lad glanced up to note this new diversion. The stricken mongrel yelping in terror and agony seized the second respite to scamper back to the doorstep, howling at every jump.
Lad did not pursue him, but jogged along on his journey without one backward look.
At a rivulet, a mile beyond, he stopped to drink. And he drank for ten minutes. Then he went on. Unmuzzled and with his thirst slaked, he forgot his pain, his fatigue, his muddy and blood-caked and abraded coat, and the memory of his nightmare day.
He was going home!
At gray dawn the Mistress and the Master turned in at the gateway of The Place. All night they had sought Lad; from one end of Manhattan Island to the other--from Police Headquarters to dog pound--they had driven. And now the Master was bringing his tired and heartsore wife home to rest, while he himself should return to town and to the search.
The car chugged dispiritedly down the driveway to the house, but before it had traversed half the distance the dawn-hush was shattered by a thundrous bark of challenge to the invaders.
Lad, from his post of guard on the veranda, ran stiffly forward to bar the way. Then as he ran his eyes and nose suddenly told him these mysterious newcomers were his G.o.ds.
The Mistress, with a gasp of rapturous unbelief, was jumping down from the car before it came to a halt. On her knees, she caught Lad"s muddy and b.l.o.o.d.y head tight in her arms.
"Oh, Lad;" she sobbed incoherently. "Laddie! _Laddie!_"
Whereat, by another miracle, Lad"s stiffness and hurts and weariness were gone. He strove to lick the dear face bending so tearfully above him. Then, with an abandon of puppylike joy, he rolled on the ground waving all four soiled little feet in the air and playfully pretending to snap at the loving hands that caressed him.
Which was ridiculous conduct for a stately and full-grown collie. But Lad didn"t care, because it made the Mistress stop crying and laugh. And that was what Lad most wanted her to do.
CHAPTER VII
THE THROWBACK
The Place was nine miles north of the county-seat city of Paterson.
And yearly, near Paterson, was held the great North Jersey Livestock Fair--a fair whose awards established for the next twelve-month the local rank of purebred cattle and sheep and pigs for thirty miles in either direction.
From the Ramapo hill pastures, south of Suffern, two days before the fair, descended a flock of twenty prize sheep--the playthings of a man to whom the t.i.tle of Wall Street Farmer had a lure of its own--a lure that cost him something like $30,000 a year; and which made him a scourge to all his few friends.
Among these luckless friends chanced to be the Mistress and the Master of The Place. And the Gentleman Farmer had decided to break his sheep"s fair-ward journey by a twenty-four-hour stop at The Place.
The Master, duly apprised of the sorry honor planned for his home, set aside a disused horse-paddock for the woolly visitors" use. Into this their shepherd drove his dusty and bleating charges on their arrival.
The shepherd was a somber Scot. Nature had begun the work of somberness in his Highland heart. The duty of working for the Wall Street Farmer had added tenfold to the natural tendency. His name was McGillicuddy, and he looked it.
Now, in northern New Jersey a live sheep is well nigh as rare as a pterodactyl. This flock of twenty had cost their owner their weight in merino wool. A dog--especially a collie--that does not know sheep, is p.r.o.ne to consider them his lawful prey, in other words, the sight of a sheep has turned many an otherwise law-abiding dog into a killer.
To avoid so black a smirch on The Place"s hospitality, the Master had loaded all his collies, except Lad, into the car, and had shipped them off, that morning, for a three-day sojourn at the boarding kennels, ten miles away.
"Does the Old Dog go, too, sir?" asked The Place"s foreman, with a questioning nod at Lad, after he had lifted the others into the tonneau.
Lad was viewing the proceedings from the top of the veranda steps. The Master looked at him, then at the car, and answered:
"No. Lad has more right here than any measly imported sheep. He won"t bother them if I tell him not to. Let him stay."
The sheep, convoyed by the misanthropic McGillicuddy, filed down the drive, from the highroad, an hour later, and were marshaled into the corral.
As the jostling procession, followed by its dour shepherd, turned in at the gate of The Place, Lad rose from his rug on the veranda. His nostrils itching with the unfamiliar odor, his soft eyes outraged by the bizarre sight, he set forth to drive the intruders out into the main road.
Head lowered, he ran, uttering no sound. This seemed to him an emergency which called for drastic measures rather than for monitory barking. For all he knew, these twenty fat, woolly, white things might be fighters who would attack him in a body, and who might even menace the safety of his G.o.ds; and the glum McGillicuddy did not impress him at all favorably. Hence the silent charge at the foe--a charge launched with the speed and terrible menace of a thunderbolt.
McGillicuddy sprang swiftly to the front of his flock, staff upwhirled; but before the staff could descend on the furry defender of The Place, a sweet voice called imperiously to the dog.
The Mistress had come out upon the veranda and had seen Lad dash to the attack.
"Lad!" she cried. "_Lad!_"
The great dog halted midway in his rush.
"Down!" called the Mistress. "Leave them alone! Do you hear, Lad?
_Leave them alone!_ Come back here!"
Lad heard, and Lad obeyed. Lad always obeyed. If these twenty malodorous strangers and their staff-brandishing guide were friends of the Mistress he must not drive them away. The order "Leave them alone!" was one that could not be disregarded.
Trembling with anger, yet with no thought of rebelling, Lad turned and trotted back to the veranda. He thrust his cold nose into the Mistress" warm little hand and looked up eagerly into her face, seeking a repeal of the command to keep away from the sheep and their driver.
But the Mistress only patted his silken head and whispered:
"We don"t like it any more than you do, Laddie; but we mustn"t let anyone know we don"t. Leave them alone!"