CHAPTER IV: THE KILLER
The rainy season was coming to an end—the season as nastily disagreeable as it was needful. Spring was at hand. And the folk on the Dos Hermanos ranch rejoiced almost as much as did their thousands of chronically damp sheep and their soggy acres of mud-tormented range land.
To Treve the winter had passed pleasantly enough. He had had more time for cross-country rambles and for jack rabbit chasing than was at his command during the year’s three other and busier seasons.
The soaking rains bothered him not at all. True, his mighty outer coat was often drenched and flattened by the wet. But the queerly woven and downy mist-hued undercoat served him as well as could any mackintosh. It was waterproof and all but coldproof.
The occasional snowfalls exhilarated him. The glare and tingle of them went to his head and made him frisk and roll in puppylike glee and snatch up mouthfuls of the stinging white flakes as they lay for a brief space on the sodden or half-frozen earth.
True, hard snow-lumps had an annoying way of forming between his pads; so that he had to halt in his romps or his runs, every few minutes, to gnaw them out. But these were petty drawbacks. The snow, for the most part, was Treve’s loved playfellow.
Royce Mack was as enthusiastic over the snowfalls as was Treve himself. They reminded him of the jolly winter sports in the Vermont hills he had left so far behind him. He and Treve used to tramp for miles through the glistening whiteness; just for the fun of it.
Joel Fenno had never in his long and grouchy life done anything “just for the fun of it.” Fun had no place in his meager workaday vocabulary. Sourly he used to watch Royce and young Treve set forth together on their snow-tramps, in the rare hours of worklessness, that winter.
He grudged the idea of any energy not directed to the piling up of dollars and cents. Moreover, he had grown to care queerly much for the big collie that once had saved him from death. He was vaguely annoyed by the dog’s evident preference for Mack; and the gay romps and rambles they enjoyed.