Further Adventures of Lad Part 17

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 m.u.f.fled them and drove them back into the shouter's throat. Cyril, naturally, had not had the remotest intent of laboring through the bitter cold and the snow to the house of any neighbor; there to tell his woeful tale of oppression. The semblance of martyrdom, without its bothersome actuality, was quite enough for his purpose. Once before, at home, when his father had administered a mild and much-needed spanking, Cyril had made a like threat; and had then gone to hide in a chum's home, for half a day; returning to find his parents in agonies of remorse and fear, and ready to load him with peace-offerings. The child saw no reason why the same tactics should not serve every bit as triumphantly, in the present case.

He knew the maids were in the kitchen and at least one man was in the stables. He did not want his whereabouts to be discovered before he should have been able to raise a healthy and dividend-bringing crop of remorse in the hearts of the Mistress and the Master, so he resolved to go farther afield.

In the back of the meadow, across the road, and on the hither side of the forest, was a disused cattle-barrack, with two stalls under its roof-pile of hay. The barrack was one of Cyril's favorite playhouses.

It was dry and tight. Through his thick clothing he was not likely to be very cold, there, for an hour or two. He could snuggle down in the warm hay and play Indians, with considerable comfort; until such time as the fright and penitence of his hosts should have come to a climax and make his return an ovation.

Meanwhile, it would be fun to picture their uneasiness and fear for his safety; and to visualize their journeyings through the snow to the houses of various neighbors, in search of the lost child.

Buoyed up by such happy thoughts as these, Cyril struck out at a lively pace for the highroad and into the field beyond. The barrack, he knew, lay diagonally across the wide meadow, and near the adjoining woods.

Five minutes of tramping through the snow ought to bring him to it. And he set off, diagonally.

But, before he had gone a hundred yards, he lost his first zest in the adventure. The darkness had thickened; and the vagrant wind-gusts had tightened into a steady gale; a gale which carried before it a blinding wrack of stingingly hard-driven snow.

The gray of the dying dusk was blotted out. The wind smote and battered the spindling child. Mechanically, he kept on for five or six minutes, making scant and irregular progress. Then, his spirit wavered. Splendid as it would be to scare these hateful people, there was nothing splendid in the weather that numbed him with cold and took away his breath and half-blinded him with snow.

What was the fun of making others suffer; if he himself were suffering tenfold more? And, on reaching the barrack, he would have all that freezing and blast-hammering trip back again. Aw, what was the use?

And Cyril came to a halt. He had definitely abandoned his high enterprise. Turning around, he began to retrace his stumbling steps.

But, at best, in a large field, in a blizzard and in pitch darkness, and with no visible landmarks, it is not easy to double back on one's route, with any degree of accuracy. In Cyril's case, the thing was wholly impossible.

Blindly, he had been traveling in an erratic half-circle. Another minute of walking would have brought him to the highroad, not far from the Place's gateway. And, as he changed his course, to seek the road, he moved at an obtuse angle to his former line of march.

Thus, another period of exhausting progress brought him up with a b.u.mp against a solid barrier. His chilled face came into rough contact with the top rail of a line fence.

So relieved was the startled child by this encounter that he forgot to whine at the abrasion wrought upon his cheek by the rail. He had begun to feel the first gnawings of panic. Now, at once, he was calm again.

For he knew where he was. This was the line fence between the Place's upper section and the land of the next neighbor.

All he need do was to walk along in the shelter of it, touching the rails now and then to make certain of not straying, until he should come out on the road, at the gate lodge. It was absurdly easy; compared to what he had been undergoing. Besides, the lee of the fence afforded a certain shelter from wind and snow. The child realized he had been turned about in the dark; and had been going in the wrong direction.

But now, at last, his course seemed plain to him.

So he set off briskly, close to the fence;--and directly away from the nearby road.

For another half-hour he continued his inexplicably long tramp; always buoyed up by the hope of coming to the road in a few more steps; and doggedly sure of his bearings. Then, turning out from the fence, in order to skirt a wide hazel thicket, he tripped over an outcrop of rock, and tumbled into a drift. Getting to his feet, he sought to regain the fence; but the fall had shaken his senses and he floundered off in the opposite direction. After a rod or two of such futile plunging, a stumbling step took him clean off the edge of the world, and into the air.

All this, for the merest instant. Then, he landed with a jounce in a heap of brush and dead leaves. Squatting there, breathless, he stretched out his mittened hand, along the ground. At the end of less than another yard of this exploring, his fingers came again to the edge of the world and were thrust out over nothingness.

With hideous suddenness, Cyril understood where he was; and what had happened to him and why. He knew he had followed the fence for a full mile, AWAY from the road; through the nearer woods, and gradually upward until he had come the line of hazels on the lip of the ninety-foot ravine which dipped down into a swamp-stretch known as "Pancake Hollow."

That was what he had done. In trying to skirt the hazels, he had stepped over the cliff-edge, and had dropped five feet or more to a rather narrow ledge that juts out over the ravine.

Well did he remember this ledge. More than once, on walks with the Mistress and the Master, he had paused to look down on it and to think fun it would be to imprison someone there and to stand above, guying the victim. It had been a sweet thought. And now, he, himself, was imprisoned there.

But for luck, he might have fallen the whole ninety feet; for the ledge did not extend far along the face of the cliff. At almost any other spot his tumble might have meant--

Cyril shuddered a little; and pursued the grisly theme no further. He was safe enough, till help should come. And, here, the blast of the wind did not reach him. Also, by cuddling low in the litter of leaves and fallen brush, he could ward off a little of the icy cold.

He crouched there; shaking and worn out. He was only eleven. His fragile body had undergone a fearful hour of toil and hards.h.i.+p. As he was drawing in his breath for a cry to any chance searchers, the boy was aware of a swift pattering, above his head. He looked up. The sky was shade or two less densely black than the ravine edge. As Cyril gazed in terror, a s.h.a.ggy dark shape outlined itself against the sky-line, just above him.

Having followed the eccentric footsteps of the wanderer, with great and greater difficulty, to the fence-lee where the tracing was much easier, Lad came to the lip of the ravine a bare five minutes after the child's drop to the ledge.

There, for an instant, the great dog stood; ears c.o.c.ked, head inquiringly on one side; looking down upon the ledge. Cyril shrank to a quivering little heap of abject terror, at sight of the indistinct animal shape looming mountain-high above.

This for the briefest moment. Then back went Lad's head in a pealing bark that seemed to fill the world and to reecho from a myriad directions at once. Again and again, Lad gave clamorous voice to his discovery of the lost child.

On a clear or windless night, his racket must have penetrated to the dullest ears at the Place, and far beyond. For the bark of a dog has more carrying power than has any other sound of double its volume. But, in the face of a sixty-mile gale laden with tons of flying snow, the report of a cannon could scarce have carried over the stretch of windswept ground between the ravine and the Place.

Lad seemed to understand this. For, after a dozen thunderous barks, he fell silent; and stood again, head on one side, in thought.

At first sound of the barking, Cyril had recognized the dog. And his terror had vanished. In its place surged a peevish irritation against the beast that had so frightened him. He groped for a rock-fragment to hurl up at the rackety collie.

Then, the child paused in his fumbling. The dog had scant reason to love him or to seek his society. Of late, Lad had kept out of his way as much as possible. Thus it was not likely the collie had come here of his own accord, on such a night; for the mere joy of being with his tormentor.

His presence must mean that the Master was close behind; and that the whole Place was in a ferment of anxiety about the wanderer. By stoning Lad away and checking the barks, Cyril might well prevent the searchers from finding him. Too weak and too numb with cold to climb up the five-foot cliff-face to the level ground above, he did not want to miss any chance for rescue.

Hence, as Lad ceased to bark, the child set up a yell, with all his slight lung-power, to attract the seekers' notice. He ordered Lad to "Speak!" and shook his fist angrily at the dog, when no answering bark followed.

Despairing of making anyone hear his trumpeting announcement that he had found the child, Lad presently made up his mind as to the only course that remained. Wheeling about, head down, he faced the storm again; and set off at what speed he could compa.s.s, toward home, to lead the Master to the spot where Cyril was trapped. This seemed the only expedient left. It was what he had done, long ago, when Lady had caught her foot in a fox-trap, back in the woods.

As the dog vanished from against the gray-black sky-line, Cyril set up a howl of wrathful command to him to come back. Anything was better than to be in this dreary spot alone. Besides, with Lad gone, how could Lad's Master find the way to the ledge?

Twice the child called after the retreating collie. And, in another few steps, Lad had halted and begun to retrace his way toward the ledge.

He did not return because of Cyril's call. He had learned, by ugly experience, to disregard the child's orders. They were wont to mean much unpleasantness for him. Nevertheless, Lad halted. Not in obedience to the summons; but because of a sound and a scent that smote him as he started to gallop away. An eddy of the wind had borne both to the dog's acute senses.

Stiffening, his curved eyeteeth baring themselves, his hackles bristling, Lad galloped back to the ravine-lip; and stood there sniffing the icy air and growling deep in his throat. Looking down to the ledge he saw Cyril was no longer its sole occupant. Crouched at the opening of a crevice, not ten feet from the unseeing child, was something bulky and sinister;--a mere menacing blur against the darker rock.

Crawling home to its lair, supper-less and frantic with hunger, after a day of fruitless hunting through the dead forest world, a giant wildcat had been stirred from its first fitful slumber in the ledge's crevice by the impact of the child upon the heap of leaves. The human scent had startled the creature and it had slunk farther back into the crevice.

The more so when the bark and inimical odor of a big dog were added to the shattering of the ravine's solitude.

Then the dog had gone away. Curiosity,--the besetting trait of the cat tribe,--had mastered the crevice's dweller. The wildcat had wriggled noiselessly forward a little way, to learn what manner of enemy had invaded its lair. And, peering out, it had beheld a spindling child; a human atom, without strength or weapon.

Fear changed to fury in the bob-cat's feline heart. Here was no opponent; but a mere item of prey. And, with fury, stirred long-unsatisfied hunger; the famine hunger of mid-winter which makes the folk of the wilderness risk capture or death by raiding guarded hencoops.

Out from the crevice stole the wildcat. Its ears were flattened close to its evil head. Its yellow eyes were mere slits of fire. Its claws unsheathed themselves from the furry pads,--long, hooked claws, capable of disemboweling a grown deer at one sabre-stroke of the muscular hindlegs. Into the rubble and litter of the ledge the claws sank, and receded, in rhythmic motion.

The compact yellow body tightened into a ball. The back quivered. The feet braced themselves. The cat was gauging its distance and making ready for a murder-spring. Cyril, his head turned the other way, was still peering up along the cliff-edge for sight of Lad.

This was what Lad's scent and hearing,--and perhaps something else,--had warned him of, in that instant of the wind's eddying s.h.i.+ft.

And this was the scene he looked down upon, now, from the ravine-lip, five feet above.

The collie brain,--though never the collie heart,--is wont to flash back, in moments of mortal stress, to the ancestral wolf. Never in his own life had Sunnybank Lad set eyes on a wildcat. But, in the primal forests, wolf and bob-cat had perforce met and clashed, a thousand times. There they had begun and had waged the eternal cat-and-dog feud, of the ages.

Ancestry now told Lad that there is perhaps no more murderously dangerous foe than an angry wildcat. Ancestry also told him a wolf's one chance of certain victory in such a contest. Ancestry's aid was not required, to tell him the mortal peril awaiting this human child who had so grievously and causelessly tormented him. But the great loyal heart, in this stark moment, took no thought of personal grudges. There was but one thing to do,--one perilous, desperate chance to take; if the child were to be saved.

The wildcat sprang.