The rest was conquest.
Hampered by the ferocious beast that clung to his right arm—weak from pain and exertion—the man was ridiculously easy to overcome.
“You’ve won your welcome, Buff, old chum!” panted Trent, as he trussed up his prisoners, before marching them to the village. “And you’ve saved a life I don’t value overmuch. But you’ve done a lot more. You’ve let me clear myself of the other charge. These men will have to talk when the police sweat them. And that will make life worth while for me again. Yes, you’ve paid your way, all right! Something tells me you and I are going to be the best pals ever. But—where in blue blazes did a thoroughbred collie ever pick up that bulldog grip?”
CHAPTER TWO: “THE HUNT IS UP!”
MICHAEL TRENT stood knee-deep in a grey-white drift that eddied and surged about him in tumultuous, soft waves, almost threatening to engulf him.
The grey-white drift filled the tiny field in whose centre Trent was standing. Its ragged edges were spilling in irregular driblets into the adjoining fields and the road, scattering thence athwart the nearer countryside.
To descend to bare fact, Michael Trent was in the middle of a milling and unruly flock of merino sheep; and he was, incidentally, in more or less of a fix.
Of these sheep, seventy had belonged to his farm for months. And he had just added to them two additional flocks, new-bought, of thirty and of twenty-five each; making a grand total of one hundred and twenty-five.