CHAPTER VII
THE THROWBACK
The Place was nine miles north of the county-seat city of Paterson. And yearly, near Paterson, was held the great North Jersey Livestock Fair—a fair whose awards established for the next twelve-month the local rank of purebred cattle and sheep and pigs for thirty miles in either direction.
From the Ramapo hill pastures, south of Suffern, two days before the fair, descended a flock of twenty prize sheep—the playthings of a man to whom the title of Wall Street Farmer had a lure of its own—a lure that cost him something like $30,000 a year; and which made him a scourge to all his few friends.
Among these luckless friends chanced to be the Mistress and the Master of The Place. And the Gentleman Farmer had decided to break his sheep's fair-ward journey by a twenty-four-hour stop at The Place.
The Master, duly apprised of the sorry honor planned for his home, set aside a disused horse-paddock for the woolly visitors' use. Into this their shepherd drove his dusty and bleating charges on their arrival.
The shepherd was a somber Scot. Nature had begun the work of somberness in his Highland heart. The duty of working for the Wall Street Farmer had added tenfold to the natural tendency. His name was McGillicuddy, and he looked it.
Now, in northern New Jersey a live sheep is well nigh as rare as a pterodactyl. This flock of twenty had cost their owner their weight in merino wool. A dog—especially a collie—that does not know sheep, is prone to consider them his lawful prey, in other words, the sight of a sheep has turned many an otherwise law-abiding dog into a killer.
To avoid so black a smirch on The Place's hospitality, the Master had loaded all his collies, except Lad, into the car, and had shipped them off, that morning, for a three-day sojourn at the boarding kennels, ten miles away.