A DOG is only a dog. But a collie is—a collie. Says the Scotch proverb:

“A collie has the brain of a man, and the ways of a woman!”

This is the story of Dick Snowden’s collie, Jock—and of—Something. You can believe the tale or not, as you choose. But if you know collies, you will think twice before you pooh-pooh it as rankly impossible. Moreover, in its chief—and strangest—happenings, it chances to be true.

It began when Dick Snowden’s pretty girl-wife was lying in the centre of a huge white bed, and when she was watching the world glide past her and not much caring how soon it might glide altogether away from her.

Cuddled close to her in the enormous bed was a white-swathed bundle of tiny humanity that smelled of talcum powder and of sachet and was a week old.

The coming of Baby Marise into the ken of mankind had well-nigh cost the life of Klyda Snowden, her girl-mother. There were no complications; there was nothing the learned doctors could put a name to. But Klyda had suffered much and had been through much. She was very, very tired. So tired was she that it did not seem worth while to pick up the bulky burden of life again.

It was much easier to lie still, with half-shut eyes, and feel herself drifting lazily out of life. Dully, she knew the baby was hers, that it was the precious little daughter for whose advent she and Dick had for months been planning so happily. She knew, too, that the lean and bronzed man who spent so many miserable hours at her bedside was her worshipped husband, Dick.

Yes, she was quite sane. But she was so tired that none of the real-life things, in which usually she revelled, were worth living for. Mentally, she knew that the future was bright for her and for Dick and for their baby. Physically, she was not interested in anything but drowsing.

It was on the afternoon of the eighth day of Baby Marise’s life that Dick came into the room carrying a covered wicker basket. Klyda had no interest in him or in what he was carrying—even when he set down the basket on the edge of the bed and lifted its cover. Sleepily she looked at him, ready to drop into another doze.

Into the opened basket went Dick Snowden’s hand, to take out the contents. But the contents saved him the effort.

Out from the depths of the basket sprang a fluffy gold-and-white ball of dynamic energy. It wavered dizzily on the wicker edge, then catapulted clumsily to the counterpane, where it caught sight of Klyda’s colourless little face set in a halo of tumbled sunlit hair.

With the awkward canter of a badly made patent toy, the ball of fluff danced sidewise up the counterpane until it reached the white little face, which it proceeded to lick ecstatically with a very small and very pink tongue.

By this time Klyda’s weary brain had registered the fact that the new arrival was a two-months-old collie pup—also that it was doubtless the same collie pup which Dick had promised, a month ago, to buy for her.

The gift was one on which Klyda had set her heart; from the day she and her husband had chanced to pass by some neighbouring collie kennels and had seen a litter of month-old puppies playing with their dam in one of the wire runs. Instantly, she had taken a violent fancy to this particular pup. It was then too young to leave its mother, but Dick had secured the owner’s promise to sell it to him, as soon as the youngster should be weaned.

The promise had delighted Klyda. She had named the puppy Jock and had decreed that he should be Baby’s guardian and chum.

Yet, since then, so many things had happened! And now the arrival of the once-coveted pup meant nothing to Klyda at all—except that she did not like to have her wan face licked, nor to be patted at by a set of clumsy and shapeless white forepaws.

She frowned slightly and hoped Dick would take the obstreperous puppy away. But at sight of her frown the puppy evidently mistook the slight facial contortion for an invitation to play, for he braced himself on all four shapeless legs and made threatening little rushes at the frowning face, accenting his attacks with ferocious baby barks.

In spite of herself Klyda felt a vague amusement at the pup’s silly antics. She reached out a weak white hand to pet him. At the touch, Jock forgot he was a lion or whatever other furious wild beast he was pretending to be. He remembered only that he was very young and very far from home and mother, and that the caress of the tired hand was sweet. With a cluck of contentment, he cuddled close to Klyda’s face and curled up for a nap.

Dick, glad to have aroused his apathetic wife’s interest to even so mild an extent, stooped to pick up the puppy and carry him away. But Jock was in no hurry to go. So piteously did he look to Klyda for rescue that she bade her husband leave him there for the time. Whereat, by way of showing his thanks, Jock began again to play with her hand as it lay idle on the quilt.

Up to this time everybody had moved on tiptoe about the sick-room, and had talked in undertones. But Jock was no respecter of silence. He gambolled and barked to his heart’s content. Partly amused and partly annoyed by his bumptiousness, Klyda found herself for the first time unable to sink at will into that dreamy apathy of hers. It is hard to dream, when a tiny furry whirlwind is charging at one or is professing to believe that one’s white fingers are a mortal foe to be nibbled and threatened.

Thus it was, against her own will, that Klyda Snowden was shaken from her semi-coma. After that, youth and nature combined to keep her from sinking back into it. Probably she would have gotten well, anyhow. And certainly a noisy collie pup is not to be prescribed as a temporary roommate for a sick girl. But the fact remained that Klyda “turned the corner,” that very day, and forthwith grew better.

She had not discovered a new zest in life. Her husband and her new-born child furnished that. But she had been deprived of the luxury of drifting away. Action and annoyance and clownish gambols had chanced to supply the needed impetus to bring her back to normality.

Yet Dick and she always attributed her rally to the arrival of Jock. And they loved him accordingly. Instead of living in the green-painted kennel in the garden and seeing his owners for only a casual hour or so each day, he was brought up in the house and with hourly human companionship.

That sort of thing has a queerly humanising influence on a dog, especially if the dog be a thoroughbred collie.

From earliest puppyhood Jock learned to know the human voice in all its phases, and to read from experience its many shades of meaning. He learned, too, from constant hearing, the meanings of many simple words and phrases. He learned still more of human nature—all of which was wholly natural and has occurred to hundreds of house-bred collies.

From the first, Jock adopted Baby Marise as his particular deity. He would lie for hours at the foot of her crib, or would walk in sedate slowness at the side of her perambulator, in preference to a woodland race or even a romp with Dick or Klyda.

Yet between him and Dick there was a strange bond of sympathy. Dearly as the dog loved Klyda and Marise, he was closer to Dick than to either of them. He would lie with his eyes on the man’s face, watching its every change; and seemed to be studying him to the very soul. Even as a puppy, Jock used to do this.

A scowl on Dick’s brow would bring him forward with a rush, to offer canine sympathy or to rub his nose consolingly against his master’s hand. He would go into ecstasies of joyous excitement when Dick laughed or smiled. And, as the dog grew older, he seemed able to see past mere facial expression and to read Dick’s varying moods, even when those moods gave no visible sign of expression.

All of this seemed nothing short of magic to the Snowdens, though it is a common enough phenomenon to anyone who has been much with collies.

It was when Baby Marise was a harum-scarum girl of four, and when Jock was a stately giant in his early maturity, that something happened which the Snowdens never tired of talking about.

Dick started at sunrise for a day’s trout-fishing along a brook which ran through a wild tract of meadow and forest, some three miles above the Snowden place. Jock, as his master set forth, galloped enthusiastically ahead, eager for the prospective walk. But Dick whistled him back. The man did not desire to have wary trout scared away by the occasional plunges of a seventy-pound collie into the brook.

“No,” he said, as if talking to a fellow-human. “Not to-day, old man! Stay here and look after the place.”

Crestfallen yet philosophical, Jock trotted back to the veranda and lay down, his deep brown eyes following pathetically the receding figure of his master, hoping against hope that Dick might relent and summon him to follow. Then Marise came down to breakfast with Klyda, and Jock proceeded to devote himself to their society.

It was about four o’clock that afternoon when Klyda was awakened from a nap on the porch by the sudden rising of the collie from his resting-place on the mat near her. Jock had been asleep; yet something had startled him in an instant from his repose and had changed a sedately slumbering collie into a creature of puppylike excitability. Every hair on the dog’s shaggy ruff was abristle. His eyes were glinting as with pain. He burst into a salvo of frantic barking and dashed across to where Klyda lay.

Catching the hem of the astonished woman’s skirt in his teeth, he tugged at her dress, backing away with a suddenness that all but threw her to the floor.

“Jock!” expostulated Klyda, recovering her balance and trying to extricate the skirt from his grip. “Jock, have you gone crazy?”

Jock’s answer was to release his hold on the skirt-hem, and to gallop off the porch and out onto the drive which led to the highway. There he halted, barked in imperious summons and darted back to Klyda. Catching her skirt again between his jaws, he sought to draw her out onto the driveway with him.

Laughing at her pet’s odd behaviour, Klyda went down the steps to the drive. Instantly Jock let go of her skirt and ran fifty feet towards the main road. There, halting again, he turned and barked. As the woman still did not follow, he ran back, seized her skirt in his teeth again and tried to draw her onward.

This time Klyda did not refuse to follow. A queer notion had possessed her—a notion that Jock was not doing these unaccountable things for a mere lark or to lure her into a romp. It was not at all like the dignified collie to behave this way. Calling to her brother—who was reading, indoors—to join her, she set forth in the wake of the dog.

The moment the two humans started toward him, Jock ceased to bark in that frantic and panic-urged fashion. He wheeled and galloped off, straight across country. Every few hundred yards he would pause to make sure the others were still following, and to let them come nearer. Then he would be off again.

A wearisome walk he led the puzzled Klyda and her grumbling brother. In a precise line he travelled, turning aside for no hillock or rock or tangle of undergrowth.

“For goodness’ sake!” panted the brother, once, as he looked ruefully down at his buckskin shoes which had just plodded through a corner of swamp-land. “For goodness’ sake, Klyda, let’s stop this fool ramble! The idiot of a dog will probably halt in front of some oak where he’s treed a cat, and he’ll want us to dislodge his quarry for him. On a red-hot day like this, what’s the earthly sense of following a——”

“He hasn’t treed a cat,” was Klyda’s reply. “He hasn’t treed anything. He’s been with me, all day. I don’t know why he is acting like this. But I know Jock, and I know he’s got some good reason for being so eager for me to follow him. If you’re tired——”

“Oh, I’ll trail along, if you’re going to!” grunted her brother. “Only, if he leads us over into the next county and then turns around and leads us back, just for fun—well, I warn you I’ll guy you for the rest of your days for being so silly as to—Hello!” he broke off. “Here’s where we’ll have to wade!”

They had come out of the woods at the verge of a wide brook. Klyda gave a little start as she saw it, and lost her colour.

“Why, this is Snake Brook!” she cried. “Dick and I have been here a dozen times. But we’ve always come by way of the road. I didn’t know it was in this direction. I——”

“Well?” queried her brother. “Even at that, what’s the excitement? There’s nothing so very dramatic, is there, in coming upon Snake Brook? It’s——”

“It’s where Dick came to fish to-day,” said Klyda, her pallor increasing. “Jock has led us here, and——”

“And that’s the thrilling end of our quest?” interrupted her brother with a growl of disgust. “Jock got lonely for his master, and he’s dragged us through marsh and brambles, all this way, just for a sweet family reunion! Lord!”

“No,” contradicted Klyda, her voice not quite steady, “no! See, he hasn’t crossed the brook. He’s running along it, on this side. And now he’s stopped again for us to follow him. Come!”

She set off at a run along the pebbly and winding margin of the brook. Jock, as she started, wheeled again and vanished into a copse of shrubbery which ran down from a steep bank to the edge of the water.

Ten seconds later the two heard the collie’s voice upraised once more, this time in a quavering wolf-howl of anguish. And no longer did the undergrowth crackle at his charging progress. He had come to a halt somewhere.

“The cur’s stumbled into a hornets’ nest,” guyed the brother, laughing loudly to subdue a prickly feeling that ran along his spine at sound of that eerie cry.

But Klyda did not answer. She was plunging headlong through the bushes, panting and gasping with her own violent efforts to reach the spot where Jock awaited her.

Out in a little clearing, beside the brook, and at the base of a ten-foot cliff-bank, she came upon the dog. He was standing guard over a body that sprawled inertly, half in the water at the cliff-foot, a splintered fishing rod at its side.

There lay Dick Snowden, his leg broken in two places by his tumble from the bank. In falling, his head had struck against a water-edge boulder. The impact had caused concussion of the brain. Nor did the victim recover consciousness until an hour after they had gotten him home.

People who did not understand collies used to smile politely and lift their brows when the Snowdens told how Jock had brought aid to the stricken master, of whose plight the dog could not possibly have known through any explainable channels.

Some of these people agreed with Klyda’s brother, who always insisted there was nothing mysterious or occult about the matter. They explained that Jock had waxed lonely for his absent master and had tried to coax Klyda into going with him to meet the returning fisherman,—and that the accident to Dick had been a mere coincidence, quite outside the dog’s calculations.

They did not explain how Jock knew the precise direction in which Dick had gone that day, nor why, during Snowden’s previous and succeeding absences from home, the collie made no such effort to follow him.

Klyda and Dick did not bother to argue with these sceptics. They knew Jock; other people did not.

“It wasn’t coincidence,” was all Klyda would say when outsiders sought to convince her. “It was—Something.”

And so the years went on at the Snowden home, pleasantly and uneventfully. Baby Marise was a leggy and big-eyed girl of nine, and Jock was in the full hale prime of latter middle age. Dick and Klyda were sweethearts, as ever. They and their child and their huge gold-and-white dog formed a close corporation that made home life very beautiful for all four of them.

Then, over the smugly complacent land, rang a bugle-call. Half the world was sick unto death with the Hun pestilence, and America alone could stay the hideous disease’s assault on humanity. America alone could cure a dying world. To achieve this Heaven-sent miracle, the lives of thousands of brave men were needed. And at the terrible blast of the bugle-call these men responded in millions.

Dick Snowden was one of them.

There were tears at the Snowden home when Dick first went thence to the officers’ training-camp. There was dire loneliness after he had gone.

But there were no tears when, at the end of his last furlough, Captain Richard Snowden said good-bye to his family and embarked for France.

There were no tears, then. There was a hero-smile on Klyda’s drawn lips. Baby Marise tried to smile, too. And at least she did not cry—which was very brave indeed. Jock looked long and gravely up into Snowden’s forcedly gay face; and laid his splendid head against his master’s khaki knee as Dick said to him:

“Good-bye, old chap! Take care of them till I come back. You’re the man of the house, remember, while I’m gone.”

No, there were no tears when Captain Dick Snowden sailed gallantly away to fight the grey-clad pests which were engulfing the world. But there was a deadly and bitter loneliness that swooped down on the once-merry little household and gripped it by the throat—a loneliness that deepened and grew more cruelly hard to bear as the dreary weeks sagged on.

Jock, with his queer collie sixth sense, felt acutely the changed atmosphere of the place. He sought, in a thousand unobtrusive ways, to console and cheer his mistress and Marise. And he seemed to have understood Dick’s parting charge to him to assume the responsibilities of “the man of the house.” Always Jock had been a fiery guardian of the home in the matter of warding off intruders. Nowadays his jealous guardianship became an obsession.

Voluntarily abandoning his lifelong nightly resting-place on the rug outside the door of Klyda’s room, he took to sleeping on the veranda. Nor was his sleep heavy. A dozen times a night the wakeful Klyda could hear the big dog get to his feet and start off on a thorough patrol of the grounds.

This sentry-go accomplished, he would circle the porch and return to his doormat bed for another fitful snooze. But the very slightest sound was enough to awaken him and to bring him at once to fierce alertness. The step of a belated wayfarer on the highroad beyond,—the faintest stir of one of the sleepers within the house,—any of a hundred negligible noises of the night,—sufficed to rouse him to his duty.

In the daytime, Jock was seldom more than arm’s-length from Klyda or Marise. With cold suspicion his melancholy dark eyes would follow the motions of each casual visitor or tradesman. Yes, Jock was taking his job seriously.

On the rare occasions when a letter from France reached the place, he knew of its arrival before the mail was sorted. It would thrill him and set him to barking wildly and to scampering about the house like a joy-crazed puppy. He seemed to know the occasion was one of rapture for them all.

“The minute the letters are handed in at the door,” Klyda boasted to her brother, “even before any of us have time to look them over, Jock always knows whether or not there’s a letter from Dick.”

“Why shouldn’t he?” demanded the sceptic. “A collie has a wolf’s power of scent. He can smell the touch of Dick’s hand on the envelope. It’s perfectly normal.”

“No,” denied Klyda, musingly, “it isn’t normal. It’s—Something!”

Then, late of a September night, the household was jolted from slumber by a clangour of barking from the porch.

To one who understands collies, there is as much difference in a dog’s various modes of barking as in the inflections of a human voice. For example, there is the gay bark of greeting, there is the sharply imperative bark of challenge, there is the noisily swaggering bark of sheer excitement, and there is the acute and agonised bark that tells of stark emotion.

Jock’s bark to-night had the timbre of that with which, long ago, he had summoned Klyda to the aid of her injured husband at Snake Brook. And the sound went through the lonely wife’s soul like a knife-thrust.

She sprang out of bed and, in dressing-gown and slippers, ran out to the porch. As on that earlier day, Jock was awaiting her in fevered excitement. Catching the hem of her wrapper, he tugged. Then, dropping the wrapper, he galloped up the driveway and wheeled about to face her with a bark of summons.

To-night Klyda needed no second invitation to follow him. Bewildered, trembling, yet trusting to the collie’s intuition, she stumbled along in the direction Jock led. And, leaving the driveway, he was travelling due northeast.

Well did Klyda know she was moving northeastward. For, by dint of compass and maps, she had long since figured out for herself the approximate direction of France in relation to her home. And always she faced in that direction when she knelt to pray for Dick.

For perhaps half a mile the dog continued his progress, at first in mad eagerness, but presently in growing indecision and irresolution.

At last he stopped, sniffed the air through vertically lifted nostrils, then trotted back to Klyda. Head a-droop, tail dragging, every line of his grand body expressing the utmost miserable dejection, he crept up to Klyda and crouched before her, his head on her foot. He shuddered, as if in pain; and then whimpered softly, lifting his head for a moment and peering to the northeast.

He had failed. He had awakened with the sudden knowledge of his master’s peril. He had followed the urge of the call. And all at once he had realised that for some reason he could not hope to lead his mistress to the man who so sorely needed her aid. Perplexed, heartsick, he had crawled back; helpless to do more.

Again, Klyda’s brother scoffed at his sister’s certainty that something was amiss with Snowden. So did all others to whom the unhappy woman told the tale. They still scoffed at the idea of any premonition on the part of the dog—but there was an awed note behind their scoffing—when, a few weeks later, a shaky scrawl was received from the absentee; a scrawl written in a base hospital:

“I am laid by the heels for a day or two by a handful of rather nasty little shrapnel-bites that Herr Fritz sprayed me with three nights ago during a reconnoitre. Nothing serious—so you’re not to worry your dear self. I’ll be as good as new in a week or two. The surgeon says so. He says I’ll be lucky if I’m able to claim a wound-chevron on the strength of such a piker injury.

“Here is a funny bit of mental delusion that may amuse you: When I toppled over and lay there in No Man’s Land,—before my men could find me and bring me in,—there was an ungodly lot of racket from the Hun batteries. It almost deafened me. But through it all I believed I could hear—as distinctly as ever I heard anything—the wild barking of old Jock.

“Wasn’t that a quaint trick for a wounded man’s brain to play? Jock has a pretty thunderous bark, but its echo could hardly travel three thousand miles and reach me above the roar of the boche batteries. Yet I heard it. It wasn’t his usual bark, either. It sounded the way it did the time Marise fell down the well, and as it sounded when the house caught fire in the night and he roused us barely in time to put out the blaze. I must have been a bit delirious, of course. But it gave me a queer homey feeling to hear the dear old fellow’s voice—even if I didn’t hear it.”

Klyda looked at the date on the letter. Then she subtracted three days therefrom and computed the time difference between her home and northern France. Then she turned to the little desk-calendar on which, superstitiously, she had marked with a cross the date of her awakening by Jock. After that she showed her brother the letter and the calendar. As I have said, he still scoffed. But there was something of awe in his manner.

It was a shock to Klyda to know her adored soldier was wounded. Yet it was also a joy to know that he was not only in no danger from his wound, but that he was kept, perforce, out of battle, for a time. This knowledge, and the relief from her weeks of foreboding, gave Klyda a curious sense of peace which had not been hers in many a day. Her spirits rebounded to a lightness which was almost hysterical. As the day wore on, her unnatural gaiety and her sense of nearness to Dick increased.

Early in the evening she left the house and strolled out into the white autumn moonlight. She was restless, and she wanted solitude and exercise. Jock rose from his bed on the doormat and ranged alongside her for the anticipated walk.

Crossing the stretch of moon-soaked turf, the two made their way towards a rustic summer-house that stood on a knoll at the far end of the grounds. Here, with Dick, they had been wont to sit, daily, to watch the sunset. And to the old trysting-place, Klyda now strolled.

Jock, like herself, had been gay all day; ever since the arrival of the pencil scrawl from Dick. It was with difficulty now that he curbed his exuberant pace to keep time with hers.

They reached the summer-house on the knoll. There, Klyda stood for an instant in silence, to gaze dreamily over the moon-swept hills. The night was deathly still.

Then, of a sudden, the silences were shattered by a sound that wailed forth in hideous cadences from hill to hill; re-echoing until the placid night fairly screamed with it. Klyda gasped aloud at the horror of the plangent din, and she spun about to locate its cause.

There in the moonlight twenty feet away from her stood Jock. The dog’s every muscle was tense, as if with torture. His head was flung back. From his cavernous throat was issuing a series of long-drawn howls, slow, earsplitting, raucous,—howls of mortal anguish.

“Jock!” panted Klyda in swift terror. “Jock!”

(At the same moment, in a base hospital near Meran-en-Laye, a nurse was drawing the top of a cotton sheet over a face whose eyes would no longer need the light of day. The nurse was saying to a fellow-worker, as she performed the grim duty:

“Poor fellow! He was doing so nicely, too, till the blood poison set in.... Say, Nora, did I hear a dog howling, just then, or are my nerves going bad?”)

At the quick appeal in Klyda’s voice Jock ceased his hideous lament and stood trembling, with head bent almost to the ground. Then, through her moment of dread, that same strange sense of nearness to her husband came back upon the woman, but fiftyfold stronger than ever before since his departure. Through no volition of her own, she heard herself whisper timidly:

“Dick?”

As she spoke, the collie raised his head, as in joyous greeting. He came swiftly over to where his mistress stood.

But it was not towards her he was moving. Nor was it at her that his rapturously welcoming gaze was turned.

The dog was hurrying, with eyes aglint and plumy tail waving, toward a spot directly beside her. Thus had he advanced, many a time, to greet his master, when Dick had returned from brief absences and when Jock had seen him standing there with his arm thrown protectingly about his wife and his eyes smiling down into hers.

To humans, the tensely waiting woman would have seemed to be standing there in the moonlight, alone. But it was not into empty space that the advancing dog gazed so eagerly.

No one, seeing the collie then, could have doubted for an instant that Jock was looking at—Something!