oing 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
diminishing 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