“But that wasn’t like either Gates or Hegan to give in. When they were normal, they were as tough a pair of birds as I care to see. They’ve had nearly three years to sober up in and get back their nerve by hard work and plain food and no drink, Buff. And unless I’ve got them both sized up all wrong, they’ve been spending most of that three years in planning how to get back at the man who spoiled their game and thrashed them and got them put away.
“They’ve had plenty of time to store up venom, Buff. And plenty of venom to store up. Yes, and a good alibi, too, to clear them if anything happens to me. Buff, we aren’t going to be fools enough to worry. But we’ll keep awake, just the same. And, Lord, but wasn’t it glorious of her to care enough about me to come ’way out here and warn me! Buff, she knew what I meant, too, when I told her about having the right pretty soon to ‘ask a question.’ I wonder if I’m pig-headed not to have asked it long ago instead of waiting till I had something besides my measly self to offer?”
During his mumbled address to the wistfully listening dog he had been moving homeward. Now, standing on his neat porch, the man looked about him, over his well-kept farm and its trim buildings; with a little throb of pride as he contrasted it with the way the home had looked on his return from prison three years earlier. The world, all at once, seemed to him a wonderful place to live in, and life seemed unbelievably sweet. His glance strayed down the long, yellow road toward the old Brander place, and his lean face softened with a glow that transfigured it.
Early the following morning Michael Trent set off down the same yellow road toward Boone Lake for the monthly market day. But the patch of road directly in front of him was no longer yellow. It was filled with jogging and tossing billows of greyish-white.
Forty sheep, consigned to the market, were moving in close formation in front of their staff-swinging master. For one reason alone did they keep this close formation or, indeed, keep to the narrow road at all.
That one reason was Buff. The collie, with calm generalship, was herding and driving them. And he was doing it to such perfection as to make Trent’s rearguard task a sinecure.
For more than thirty months now Buff had been the lonely Trent’s closest chum and almost his only companion. With true collie efficiency, the dog had learned his hard and confusing farm lessons from the master, who never lost his temper with him and who never dealt unjustly by him. The bond between the two had sharpened and increased Buff’s naturally “human” tendencies, and had brought out in him the great soul and uncanny brain wherewith nature had endowed him. A one-man dog, he idolised Trent and served him with joyous zeal.
Trent and Buff guided their woolly charges through the single winding street of Boone Lake, now beginning to fill with market day traffic, and on to the fenced-in market square. There they herded the forty silly sheep in one corner of the livestock enclosure, a rod or two distant from a second and much larger flock.
The owner of this second flock—a drover named Bayne—had no dog to reinforce his shepherding. Instead, three of his hired men were busily running and shouting along the wabbly borders of the hemmed-in flock.
Trent observed that they were not keeping their sheep in the best order, and that they seemed to be wilfully exciting instead of calming the big flock. At this he wondered, even as he had wondered when these same shepherds had been equally awkward at two former market days—days whereon Trent himself had had no sheep to sell.