upward with his whipstock.

"Whut buzzards--where?" asked the squire with an elaborate note of
carelessness in his voice.

"Right yonder, over Little Niggerwool--see 'em there?"

"Oh, yes," the squire made answer. "Now I see 'em. They ain't doin'
nothin', I reckin--jest flyin' round same as they always do in clear
weather."

"Must be somethin' dead over there!" speculated the man in the buggy.

"A hawg probably," said the squire promptly--almost too promptly.
"There's likely to be hawgs usin' in Niggerwool. Bristow, over on the
other side from here--he's got a big drove of hawgs."

"Well, mebbe so," said the man; "but hawgs is a heap more apt to be
feedin' on high ground, seems like to me. Well, I'll be gittin' along
towards town. G'day, squire." And he slapped the lines down on the
mare's flank and jogged off through the dust.

He could not have suspected anything--that man couldn't. As the squire
turned away from the road and headed for his house he congratulated
himself upon that stroke of his in bringing in Bristow's hogs; and yet
there remained this disquieting note in the situation, that buzzards
flying, and especially buzzards flying over Little Niggerwool, made
people curious--made them ask questions.

He was half-way across the weedfield when, above the hum of insect life,
above the inward clamor of his own busy speculations, there came to his
ear dimly and distantly a sound that made him halt and cant his head to
one side the better to hear it. Somewhere, a good way off, there was a
thin, thready, broken strain of metallic clinking and clanking--an eery
ghost-chime ringing. It came nearer and became plainer--tonk-tonk-tonk;
then the tonks all running together briskly.

A sheep bell or a cowbell--that was it; but why did it seem to come from
overhead, from up in the sky, like? And why did it shift so abruptly
from one quarter to another--from left to right and back again to left?
And how was it that the clapper seemed to strike so fast? Not even the
breachiest of breachy young heifers could be expected to tinkle a
cowbell with such briskness. The squire's eye searched the earth and the
sky, his troubled mind giving to his eye a quick and flashing scrutiny.
He had it. It was not a cow at all. It was not anything that went on
four legs.

One of the loathly flock had left the others. The orbit of his swing had
carried him across the road and over Squire Gathers' land. He was
sailing right toward and o