most his first step he saw something that changed
his gracefully slouching walk into a charging run.

The Shadow suddenly had merged with the sentinel. For an instant, in
stark silence, the two seemed to cling together. Then the Shadow fled,
and the lanky Missourian slumped to the earth in a sprawling heap, his
throat cut.

The slayer had been a deft hand at the job. No sound had escaped the
Missourian, from the moment the stranglingly tight left arm had been
thrown around his throat from behind until, a second later, he fell
bleeding and lifeless.

In twenty leaping strides, Bruce came up to the slain sentinel and bent
over him. Dog-instinct told the collie his friend had been done to
death. And the dog's power of scent told him it was a German who had
done the killing.

For many months, Bruce had been familiar with the scent of German
soldiers, so different from that of the army in which he toiled. And he
had learned to hate it, even as a dog hates the vague "crushed
cucumber" smell of a pitviper. But while every dog dreads the
viper-smell as much as he loathes it, Bruce had no fear at all of the
boche odor. Instead, it always awoke in him a blood-lust, as fierce as
any that had burned in his wolf-ancestors.

This same fury swept him now, as he stood, quivering, above the body of
the kindly man who so lately had petted him; this and a craving to
revenge the murder of his human friend.

For the briefest time, Bruce stood there, his dark eyes abrim with
unhappiness and bewilderment, as he gazed down on the huddled form in
the wet grass. Then an electric change came over him. The softness fled
from his eyes, leaving them bloodshot and blazing. His great tawny ruff
bristled like an angry cat's. The lazy gracefulness departed from his
mighty body. It became tense and terrible. In the growing moonlight his
teeth gleamed whitely from under his upcurled lip.

In a flash he turned and set off at a loping run, nose close to ground,
his long stride deceptively swift. The zest of the man-hunt had
obsessed him, as completely as, that day, it had spurred the advance of
the "Here-We-Comes."

The trail of the slayer was fresh, even over such broken ground. Fast
as the German had fled, Bruce was flying faster. Despite the murderer's
long start, the dog speedily cut down the distance between his quarry
and himself. Not trusting to sight, but solely to his unerring sense of
smell. Bruce sped on.

Then, in a moment or two, hi