ingled
in confusion. There was nothing to guide a little dog's nose, everything
to make him distrust his most reliable sense. The smell of every plant
on the crag was there; the odors of leather, of paint, of wood, of iron,
from the crafts shops at the base. Smoke from chimneys in the valley was
mixed with the strong scent of horses, hay and grain from the street of
King's Stables. There was the smell of furry rodents, of nesting birds,
of gushing springs, of the earth itself, and something more ancient
still, as of burned-out fires in the Huge mass of trap-rock.

Everything warned Bobby to lie still in safety until morning and the
world was restored to its normal aspects. But ah! in the highest type
of man and dog, self-sacrifice, and not self-preservation, is the first
law. A deserted grave cried to him across the void, the anguish of
protecting love urged him on to take perilous chances. Falling upon a
narrow shelf of rock, he had bounded off and into a thicket of thorns.
Bruised and shaken and bewildered, he lay there for a time and tried to
get his bearings.

Bobby knew only that the way was downward. He put out a paw and felt for
the edge of the shelf. A thorn bush rooted below tickled his nose. He
dropped into that and scrambled out again. Loose earth broke under his
struggles and carried him swiftly down to a new level. He slipped in the
wet moss of a spring before he heard the tinkle of the water, lost his
foothold, and fell against a sharp point of rock. The shadowy spire of a
fir-tree looming in a parting of the vapor for an instant, Bobby leaped
to the ledge upon which it was rooted.

Foot by foot he went down, with no guidance at all. It is the nature
of such long, low, earth dogs to go by leaps and bounds like foxes,
calculating distances nicely when they can see, and tearing across the
roughest country with the speed of the wild animals they hunt. And where
the way is very steep they can scramble up or down any declivity that is
at a lesser angle than the perpendicular. Head first they go downward,
setting the fore paws forward, the claws clutching around projections
and in fissures, the weight hung from the stout hindquarters, the body
flattened on the earth.

Thus Bobby crept down steep descents in safety, but his claws were
broken in crevices and his feet were torn and pierced by splinters of
rock and thorns. Once he went some distance into a cave and had to back
up and out again. And then a promis