een 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