lock torn and dismembered. They even pointed
out the particular big collie dog who would most likely go "sheep-mad."
Lena's heavy face drew into anxious, grotesque wrinkles at this kind of
talk, and he visited the uplying pasture more and more frequently.

One morning, just before dawn, he came, pale and shamefaced, to the house
of the owner of the collie. The family, roused from bed by his knocking,
made out from his speech, more incoherent than usual, that he was begging
their pardon for having killed their dog. "I saw wh-where he'd bit th-the
throats out of two ewes that w-was due to lamb in a few days and I guess
I--I--I must ha' gone kind o' crazy. They was ones I liked special. I'd
brought 'em up myself. They--they was all over blood, you know."

They peered at him in the gray light, half-afraid of the tall apparition.
"How _could_ you kill a great big dog like Jack?" They asked wonderingly.

In answer he held out his great hands and his huge corded arms, red with
blood up to the elbow. "I heard him worrying another sheep and I--I
just--killed him."

One of the children now cried out: "But I shut Jackie up in the woodshed
last night!"

Someone ran to open the door and the collie bounded out. Lem turned white
in thankfulness, "I'm _mortal_ glad," he stammered. "I felt awful
bad--afterward. I knew your young ones thought a sight of Jack."

"But what dog did you kill?" they asked.

Some of the men went back up on the mountain with him and found, torn in
pieces and scattered wide in bloody fragments, as if destroyed by some
great revenging beast of prey, the body of a big gray wolf. Once in a
while one wanders over the line from the Canada forests and comes down
into our woods, following the deer.

The hard-headed farmers who looked on that savage scene drew back from the
shambling man beside them in the only impulse of respect they ever felt
for him. It was the one act of his life to secure the admiration of his
fellow-men; it was an action of which he himself always spoke in horror
and shame.

Certainly his marriage aroused no admiration. It was universally regarded
as a most addle-pated, imbecile affair from beginning to end. One of the
girls who worked at the hotel in the village "got into trouble," as our
vernacular runs, and as she came originally from our district and had gone
to school there, everyone knew her and was talking about the scandal. Old
Ma'am Warren was of the opinion, spiritedly expressed