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, his hearing re-enforced his scent.  He could catch the pad-pad-pad of running feet.  And the increasing of the sound told him he was gaining fast.

But in another bound his ears told him something else—­something he would have heard much sooner, had not the night wind been setting so strongly in the other direction.  He heard not only the pounding of his prey’s heavy-shod feet, but the soft thud of hundreds—­perhaps thousands—­of other army shoes.  And now, despite the adverse wind, the odor of innumerable soldiers came to his fiercely sniffing nostrils.  Not only was it the scent of soldiers, but of German soldiers.

For the first time, Bruce lifted his head from the ground, as he ran, and peered in front of him.  The moon had risen above the low-lying horizon vapors into a clear sky, and the reach of country was sharply visible.

Bruce saw the man he was chasing,—­saw him plainly.  The German was still running, but not at all as one who flees from peril.  He ran, rather, as might the bearer of glad tidings.  And he was even now drawing up to a group of men who awaited eagerly his coming.  There must have been fifty men in the group.  Behind them—­in open formation and as far as the dog’s near-sighted eyes could see—­ were more men, and more, and more—­thousands of them, all moving stealthily forward.

Now, a collie (in brain, though never in heart) is much more wolf than dog.  A bullterrier, or an Airedale, would have charged on at his foe, and would have let himself be hacked to pieces before loosing his hold on the man.

But—­even as a wolf checks his pursuit of a galloping sheep when the latter dashes into the guarded fold—­Bruce came to an abrupt halt, at sight of these reenforcements.  He stood irresolute, still mad with vengeful anger, but not foolish enough to assail a whole brigade of armed men.