Had Treve been able to read type—as he could read human nature and weather signs and danger to the Dos Hermanos flocks—a front page news item in that paper might have told him much. The paper was the Santa Carlotta Bugle. The item had been written by the Bugle’s proprietor, himself, in his best florid style. The proprietor, by the way, chanced to be the managing editor, the city editor, the reportorial staff and the printer of the paper. Also the business-and-advertising manager and office boy. The Bugle was a one-man sheet.
His front-page article ran:
“Dan Cupid has been making a spring roundup of the ranch country, this season. We have had glad occasion to announce no less than four engagements and two marriages, in the Dos Hermanos Valley, during the past three months. We now take personal pleasure in retailing the latest romance from that garden spot of our fair state.
“Mr. Royce Mack, younger partner of the popular sheep-ranchers, Fenno and Mack, of the Dos Hermanos Ranch outfit, is about to marry Miss Reine Houston, the lovely and popular and talented Fourth Grade teacher at the Ova school.
“Miss Houston’s gain is the loss of the Dos Hermanos Valley; as the young couple plan to leave this section (which so aptly has been termed ‘God’s Country’), and to settle in the far and effete East, upon a well-stocked Vermont dairy farm which was recently bequeathed, along with a considerable cash legacy, to Mr. Mack, by his deceased maternal uncle.
“The nuptials, we understand, will occur at the bride’s parental home in Dodge City, Kas., early next month. Miss Houston expects to leave Ova, Friday, to go home for her final wedding arrangements. Mr. Mack, we learn, will follow the first of the week.”
There was more of the article, including a stanza of machine-made poetry, with a highly original reference to two hearts that beat as one. But no more is needed to explain the atmosphere of impending change which had begun to grate upon the collie’s nerves.
For a long time this change had been coming. Treve had trotted across to Ova, evening after evening, for weeks alongside of Royce’s pinto. He had lain boredly on a rug in a stuffy little boarding house parlor, while his master forgot him and everything else in chatting with a plump girl who smelt annoyingly of lily-of-the-valley perfume. A girl who said at the outset that she didn’t care much for dogs and who asked if collies weren’t supposed to be treacherous.
Treve had known from the first that she did not like him. This bothered him not at all. For he didn’t like her, either. Her pungent lily-of-the-valley perfume was as distressing to his sensitive nostrils as would be the reek of carrion to a human nose. Moreover, she was not the type of human that dogs like. Also, she took up too much of his master’s attention.
Intuitively, Treve realized Mack was not as fond of him as once he had been and that the man was not the jolly chum of yore. It grieved the sensitive collie. He sought wistfully to draw Royce’s attention more to himself and less to this painfully-scented outsider. But it was all in vain.
Royce Mack was blindly and deliriously in love. The world, for the time, contained for him only one person. That person was far more like an angel than a mere woman. And she exhaled in some occult way a faintly angelic perfume from her garments.
Sheepishly, Mack told his partner of the engagement. Joel’s reply was a grunt which implied nothing or anything. Fenno made precisely the same reply, a week afterward, when news came to Royce of his comfortable legacy of cash and of pleasant farmland in southern Vermont.
Risking monotony, Joel had achieved a third grunt when Mack went on to inform him of the projected eastward move. This move meant a breaking up of the partnership. Mack could not run a dairy farm in Vermont and also a ranch in the West.