Now, the ways of the most insignificant brushfire are beyond the exact wisdom of man. Especially in droughty weather. When they knocked off work for the day, the two laborers had gone back to the blaze beyond the tool-house and conscientiously had scattered and stamped on its last visible remnants. The Master, too, coming home from his evening walk, had glanced toward the back garden and had seen no telltale spark to hint at life in the trampled fire.
Nevertheless, a scrap of ember, hidden from the men's gaze beneath a handful of dead leaves had refused to perish with its comrade-sparks. And, in the course of five hours, an industrious little flicker had ignited other bits of brush and of dried leafage and last year's weed stumps. The wind was in the north.
And it had guided the course of the crawling thread of red. The advancing line had thrown out tendrils of scarlet, as it went.
Most of these had died, in the plowed ground. One had not. It had crept on, half-extinguished at times and again snapping merrily, until it had reached the tool-house. The shed-like room stood on low joists, with a clear space ten inches high between its flimsy board floor and the ground. And, in this space, the leaves of the preceding autumn had drifted in windrows. The persevering spark did the rest.
Lady woke from a fitful doze, to find herself choking from smoke.
The boards of the floor were too hot for endurance. Between their cracks thin wavery slices of smoke were pouring upward into the room. The leaves had begun to ignite the floor-boards and the lower part of the ramshackle building's thin walls.
While the pain and humiliation of her whipping had not been able to wring a sound from the young thoroughbred, yet fright of this sort was afar different thing. Howling with panic terror, she dashed about the small enclosure, clawing frantically at door and scantling. Once or twice she made half-hearted effort to spring up at the closed window. But, from lack of running-space as well as from lack of nerve to make the high leap, she failed.
Across the lawn and door-yard and around the end of the stables thundered Lad. With the speed of a charging bull he came on.
Before he reached the burning shack, he knew more of his mate's plight and peril than any human could have known.
Around the small building he whirled, so close to it that the flames at its base seared his mighty coat and blistered and blackened his white paws.
Then, running back a yard or so, he flung his eighty-pound weight crashingly at the fastened door. The door, as it chanced, was well-nigh the only solid portion of the shack. And it held firm, under an impact that bruised the flying dog and which knocked him breathless to the fire-streaked ground.
At sound of her mate's approach, Lady had ceased wailing. Lad could hear her terrified whimpers as she danced frantically about on the red-hot boards. And the knowledge of her torture drove him momentarily insane.
Staggering up from his fall, he flung his splendid head back and, with muzzle to the clouded skies, he tore to shreds the solemn silences of the spring night with a wolf-howl; hideous in its savage grief, deafeningly loud.
As though the awesome yell had cleared his brain, he sprang to his feet amid the stinging embers; steady, alert, calm; with no hint of despair or of surrender.
His smarting eyes fixed themselves on the single dusty window of the tool-house. Its sill was a full five feet above ground. Its four small panes were separated by a wide old-fashioned cross-piece of hardwood and putty. The putty, from age, was as solid as cement. The whole window was a bare sixteen by twenty inches.
Lad ran back, once more, a few feet; his gaze fixed appraisingly on the window and measuring his distance with the sureness of a sharpshooter.
The big collie had made up his mind. His plan was formed. And as he was all-wise, with the eerie wisdom of the highest type of collie, there can be scant doubt he knew just what that plan entailed.
