Page:O'Higgins--The Adventures of Detective Barney.djvu/294

 but on every rise and fall of the road there were water-bars that held little pockets of mud, and through these the trail was clear. Barney heeded nothing else—neither the lights of the farmhouses, nor the barking of farm dogs, nor the cool accompaniment of an evening breeze that came ruffling and rustling through the grass and the foliage.

It was growing dark, and he was planning to use his electric lamp, when a dog rushed barking to the roadside from a little bungalow that looked out over the valley from the edge of the final descent. It was an aristocratic collie dog, and Barney growled at it, class-consciously. It worked itself into a nervous frenzy of vociferous disapproval of him. He hissed and spat at it like a cat, with the purpose of enticing it down the road to a place where some lilac bushes would hide him from the house. There he intended to “give it one in the ribs with a rock”; but as soon as the collie saw him stooping for the stone, it fled, growling. He threw his stone at a convenient