It was a shot.

Then the bark of the Airedale, baying "treed." The dog itself, keen of nose, and of the instinct to run almost any sort of trail, even so very faint as this on which it was set, had in part followed out the winding course of the fleeing girl after Sim Gage himself had abandoned it, thinking it had been laid on that trail.

And now what Sim saw on ahead, down the hill, below the trail, was the figure of Mary Warren herself, sitting up weakly, gropingly, on the log over which she had fallen the night before--beneath which, like some animal, she had cowered all that awful night on the heap of pine needles which she had swept up for herself! A cry broke from Sim Gage's lips.

She heard him and herself called out aloud, "Sim! Sim! Is it you?
I knew it was you when the dog came!" And then, still shivering and trembling with fear and cold and exhaustion, Mary Warren once more lost all sense of things, and dropped limp.

The little dog stood licking at her hands and face.
Here was work for Doctor Barnes after all.