“Now,” murmured the doctor to Dan, “that strikes me as a singular manifestation of intelligence in an animal—­he has found the site of the very barn where he was hurt—­upon my word!  Even fire doesn’t affect his memory!”

Here he observed that the face of Whistling Dan had grown grim.  He ran to Bart and crouched beside him, muttering; and Byrne heard.

“That’s about where you was lyin’,” said Dan, “and you smell your own blood on the ground.  Keep tryin’, Bart.  They’s something else to find around here.”

The wolf-dog looked his master full in the face with pricking ears, whined and then started off sniffling busily at the heaps of ashes.

“The shooting of the dog is quite a mystery,” said Byrne, by way of conversation.  “Do you suppose that one of the men from the bunk-house could have shot him?”

But Dan seemed no longer aware of the doctor’s presence.  He slipped here and there with the wolf-dog among the ash-heaps, pausing when Bart paused, talking to the brute continually.  Sometimes he pointed out to Bart things which the doctor did not perceive and Bart whined with a terrible, slavering, blood-eagerness.

The wolf-dog suddenly left the ash-heaps and now darted in swiftly entangled lines here and there among the barns.  Dan Barry stood thoughtfully still, but now and then he called a word of encouragement.

And Black Bart stayed with his work.  Now he struck out a wide circle, running always with his nose close to the ground.  Again he doubled back sharply to the barn-site, and began again in a new direction.  He ran swiftly, sometimes putting his injured leg to the ground with hardly a limp, and again drawing it up and running on three feet.  In a moment he passed out of sight behind a slight rise of ground to the left of the ash-heaps, and at some little distance.  He did not reappear.  Instead, a long, shrill wail came wavering towards the doctor and Dan Barry.  It raised the hair on the head of the doctor and sent a chill through his veins; but it sent Whistling Dan racing towards the place behind which Black Bart had disappeared.  The doctor hurried after as fast as he might and came upon the wolf-dog making small, swift circles, his nose to the ground, and then crossing to and fro out of the circles.  And the face of the master was black while he watched.  He ran again to Bart and began talking swiftly.

“D’you see?” he asked, pointing.  “From behind this here hill you could get a pretty good sight of the barn—­and you wouldn’t be seen, hardly, from the barn.  Someone must have waited here.  Look about, Bart, you’ll be findin’ a pile of signs, around here.  It means that them that done the shootin’ and the firin’ of the barn stood right here behind this hill-top and watched the barn burn—­and was hopin’ that Satan and you wouldn’t ever come out alive.  That’s the story.”

He dropped to his knees and caught Bart as the big dog ran by.