ad.

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

Such a leap could readily have carried it across double the space which
lay between it and Cyril. But not one-third of that space was covered
in the lightning pounce.

From the upper air,--apparently from nowhere,--a huge shaggy body
launched itself straight downward. As unerringly as the swoop of an
eagle, the down-whizzing bulk flew. It smote the leaping wildcat, in
mid-flight.

A set of mighty jaws,--jaws that could crack a beef-bone as a man
cracks a filbert,--clove deep and unerringly into the cat's back, just
behind the shoulders. And those jaws flung all their strength into the
ravening grip.

A squall,--hideous in its unearthly clangor,--split the night silences.
The maddened cat whirled about, spitting and yowling; and set its
foaming teeth in the dog's fur-armored shoulder. But before the
terrible curved claws could be called into action, Lad's rending jaws
had done their work upon the spine.

To the verge of the narrow ledge the two combatants had rolled in their
unloving embrace. Its last lurch of agony carped the stricken wildcat
over the edge and out the ninety-foot drop into the ravine. Lad was
all-but carried along with his adversary. He clawed wildly with his
toes for a purchase on the smooth cliff wall; over which his
hindquarters had slipped. For a second he hung, swaying, above the
abyss