“Maybe—maybe you’re right,” hesitated Trippler, after a minute search of the yard had failed to reveal a footprint corresponding with Tam’s. “And the county’s got to pay for ‘any damage done to stock by an unknown dog.’ That’s the law. I’m kind of glad, too. You see, I like old Tam. Besides, I c’n c’llect more damages from the county than I c’d c’llect from a lawsoot with a neighbour. What’ll we do now? Fix up a posse; like we did, the other times?”
“No,” replied Trask. “It would do no good. The Black is too clever. And in summer there are too many ways to throw off the scent. Tam will get him,—if anyone can. Let’s leave it to him.”
But other farmers were not so well content to leave the punishment of the mysterious raider to Tam. As the days went on, there were more and more tidings of the killer. Up and down the Valley he worked; never twice in succession in the same vicinity.
Twice, an hour or so after his visits, men saw Tam prowling along the mongrel’s cooling tracks. They reported to Frayne that the collie had grown lean and gaunt and that his beautiful coat was one mass of briar and burr; and that he had slunk away, wolf-fashion, when they called to him.
Frayne, himself, caught no slightest sight of his beloved dog; though, occasionally, in the mornings, he found empty the dish of food he had set out on the previous night. Trask was working out the problem, for himself, nowadays, deaf to all requests that he head another band of hunters into the mountains. He was getting no sleep to speak of. But he was thrilling with the suspense of what sportsmen know as “the still hunt.”
Every evening, when his chores and his supper were finished, Frayne went to the sheepfold and led thence a fat wether that had a real genius for loud bleating. This vocal sheep he would tether to a stake near the river-bank. Then he himself would study the trend of the faint evening breeze; and would take up a position in the bushes, somewhere to leeward of the sheep. There, gun across knees, he would sit, until early daylight.
Sometimes he dozed. Oftener he crouched, tense and wakeful, in his covert; straining his eyes, through the gloom, for the hoped-for sight of a slinking black shadow creeping towards the decoy. Not alone to avenge the death of Wisp and to rid the Valley of a scourge did he spend his nights in this way. He knew Tam; as only a born dogman can know his dog. He missed the collie, keenly. And he had solid faith that on the death of the Black, the miserable quest would end and Tam would return to his old home and to his old habits.
So, night after night, Frayne would keep his vigil. Morning after morning, he would plod home, there to hear a telephoned tale of the Black’s depredations at some other point of the Valley. At first his nightly watch was kept in dense darkness. But, soon the waxing moon lightened the river-bank; and made the first hours of the sentry duty easier.
Frayne began to lose faith in his own scheme. He had an odd feeling that the Black somehow knew of his presence in the thicket and that Frayne’s Farms was left unvisited for that reason. Trask’s immunity from the Black’s depredations was the theme of much neighboured talk, as time went on. Once more was revived Trippler’s theory that Tam and the Black were hunting in couples and that the collie (like so many dogs which have “gone bad”) was sparing his late master’s property.
On all these unpleasant themes Trask Frayne was brooding, one night, late in the month; as he sat in uncomfortable stillness amid the bushes and stared glumly out at the occasionally-bleating wether. He had had a hard day. And the weeks of semi-sleeplessness were beginning to tell cruelly on him. His senses had taken to tricking him, of late. For instance, at one moment, this night, he was crouching there, waiting patiently for the full moon to rise above the eastern hills, to brighten his vigil. The next moment,—though he was certain he had not closed his eyes,—the moon had risen and was riding high in the clear heavens.