“Quite naturally,” assented Brean, transferring two more flabbily cooling flapjacks to his plate. “You see I chance to be a surgeon.”
At this statement and at the confirmation offered by the deft dressing on the ear, Joel Fenno’s face took on new clouds of puzzlement. He felt he had almost cudgeled his memory into placing the visitor. Now, this new development sidetracked his processes. He was quite certain he had not met Brean in any medical capacity. He had been increasingly sure he had met the man under circumstances somehow unfavorable to Brean. But again he was all at sea.
“You say the pup is broke to handlin’ sheep?” demanded Fenno, in hope of finding some clue to bring his thoughts back again to the right trail. “How old is he?”
“A year old, last Monday,” returned Brean, rising as he spoke. “In my country, we begin to break them to sheep at four months. I am sorry you don’t care to buy him. He is a bargain.”
He paused for an instant, then resumed, as he started doorward:
“I must thank you for a good breakfast. I shall not forget your hospitality to a foreigner in disreputable hiking clothes. But, really,” feeling for his pocket, “I should feel more comfortable and less like an intruder, if you would let me pay for what I have eaten.”
Fenno’s curt headshake and his partner’s more vociferous refusal were interrupted by Treve.
Past the shack a herdsman drove a handful of lambs toward the marking yard. As the way was short, and as the Number Three outfit’s only dog was a half mile away herding another and larger bunch of sheep, the man had undertaken to steer the lambs, singlehanded. He was making a ragged job of it.
At sound and scent of the approaching huddle of sheep, Treve leaped to his feet; queer ancestral instincts tugging at the back of his alert young brain. In all his eight months of life he had never seen nor smelt a sheep. But his Scottish ancestors, for a hundred generations, had earned their right to live by tending such creatures as these which came trooping past the shack. Something far stronger than himself urged the pup to action.