Further Adventures of Lad Part 16

"Let it go at that!" ordained the Master. "Don't spoil your own fun, by trying to find out, beforehand. Be a good sportsman."

"Fun!" snarled Cyril. "What's the fun of secrets? I want to know--"

"It's snowing," observed the Mistress, as a handful of flakes began to drift past the windows, tossed along on a puff of wind.

"I want to KNOW!" half-wept the child; angry at the change of subject, and noting that the Mistress was moving toward the next room, with Lad at her heels. "Come back and tell me!"

He stamped after her to bar her way. Lad was between the irate Cyril and the Mistress. In babyish rage at the dog's placid presence in his path, he drew back one ungainly foot and kicked the astonished collie in the ribs.

At the outrage, Lad spun about, a growl in his throat. But he forbore to bite or even to show his teeth. The growl had been of indignant protest at such unheard-of treatment; not a menace. Then the dog stalked haughtily to his cave, and lay down there.

But the human witnesses to the scene were less forbearing;--being only humans. The Mistress cried out, in sharp protest at the little brute's action. And the Master leaned forward, swinging Cyril clear of the ground. Holding the child firmly, but with no roughness, the Master steadied his own voice as best he could; and said:--

"This time you've not even bothered to wait till our backs were turned.

So don't waste breath by crying and saying you didn't do it. You're not my child; so I have no right to punish you. And I'm not going to. But I want you to know you've just kicked something that's worth fifty of you."

"You let me down!" Cyril snarled.

"Lad is too white and clean and square to hurt anything that can't hit back," continued the Master. "And you are not. That's the difference between you. One of the several million differences,--all of them in Lad's favor. When a child begins life by being cruel to dumb animals, it's a pretty bad sign for the way he's due to treat his fellow-humans in later years,--if ever any of them are at his mercy. For your own sake, learn to behave at least as decently as a dog. If--"

"You let me down, you big bully!" squalled Cyril, bellowing with impotent fury. "You let me down! I--"

"Certainly," a.s.sented the Master, lowering him to the floor. "I didn't hurt you. I only held you so you couldn't run out of the room, before I'd finished speaking; as you did, the time I caught you putting red pepper on Lad's food. He--"

"You wouldn't dare touch me, if my folks were here, you big bully!"

screeched the child, in a veritable mania of rage; jumping up and down and actually foaming at the mouth. "But I'll tell 'em on you! See if I don't! I'll tell 'em how you slung me around and said I was worsen a dirty dog like Lad. And Daddy'll lick you for it. See if he don't! He--"

The Master could not choke back a laugh; though the poor Mistress looked horribly distressed at the maniac outburst, and strove soothingly to check it. She, like the Master, remembered now that Cyril's doting mother had spoken of the child's occasional fits of red wrath. But this was the first glimpse either of them had had of these.

Hitherto, craft had served Cyril's turn better than fury.

At sound of the Master's unintentional laugh the unfortunate child went quite beside himself in his transport of rage.

"I won't stay in your nasty old house!" he shrieked. "I'm going to the very first house I can find. And I'm going to tell 'em how you hammered a little feller that hasn't any folks here to stick up for him. And I'll get 'em to take me in and send a tel'gram to Daddy and Mother to come save me. I--"

To the astonishment of both his hearers, Cyril broke off chokingly in his yelled tirade; caught up a bibelot from the table, hurled it with all his puny force at Lad, the innocent cause of the fracas; and then rushed from the room and from the house.

The Mistress stared after him, dumfounded; his howls and the jarring slam of the house door echoing direfully in her ears. It was the Master who ended the instant's hush of amaze.

"Whenever I've heard a grown man say he wished he was a boy again," he mused, "I always set him down for a liar. But, for once in my life, I honestly wish I was a boy, once more. A boy one day younger and one inch shorter and one pound lighter than Cyril. I'd follow him out of doors, yonder, and give him the thras.h.i.+ng of his sweet young life.

I'd--"

"Oh, do call him back!" begged the Mistress. "He'll catch his death of cold, and--"

"Why will he?" challenged the Master, without stirring. "For all his n.o.ble rage, I noticed he took thought to grab up his cap and his overcoat from the hall, as he wafted himself away. And he still had his arctics on, from this afternoon. He won't--"

"But suppose he should really go over to one of the neighbors," urged the Mistress, "and tell such an awful story as he threatened to? Or suppose--"

"Not a chance!" the Master rea.s.sured her. "Now that the summer people are away, there isn't an occupied house within half a mile of here. And he's not going to trudge a half-mile through the snow, in this bitter cold, for the joy of telling lies. No, he's down at the stables or else he's sneaked in through the kitchen; the way he did that other time when he made a grandstand exit after I'd ventured to lecture him on his general rottenness. 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 pa.s.sing 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, surrept.i.tiously, 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. n.o.body'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 diminis.h.i.+ng 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 m.u.f.fle 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.