Vic disappeared over the ridge beyond the spring.  Lower down, where the ridge merged into the Basin itself, the big curly-horned Billy that had cost Helen May more than any half dozen of his followers stepped out briskly at the head of the band.  Helen May wondered what new depravity was in his mind, and whether Vic would cross the gully he was in and confront Billy in time to change the one idea that seemed always to possess that animal.

Helen May did not know how vitally important it is to have a good dog at such work.  She did not know that Billy and his band felt exactly like boys who have successfully eluded a too lax teacher, and that they would have yielded without argument to the bark of a trained sheep dog.  She had set Vic a harder task than she realized; a task from which any experienced herder would have shrunk.  In her ignorance she blamed Vic, and called him lazy and careless and a few other sisterly epithets which he did not altogether deserve.

She watched now, impatient because he was so long in crossing the gully; telling herself that he was trying to see how slow he could be, and that he did it just to be disagreeable and to irritate her—­as if she were there of her own desire, and had bought those two hundred miserable goats to spite him.  Harmony, as you must see, did not always dwell in Sunlight Basin.

Eventually Vic toiled up the far side of the gully, which was deep and as hot as an oven, and followed it down within rock-throwing distance of the goats.  A well-aimed pebble struck Billy on the curve of one horn and halted him, the band huddling vacant-eyed behind him.  Vic aimed and threw another, and Billy, turning his whiskered face upward, stared with resentful head-tossings and a defiant blat or two before he swerved back into the Basin, his band and Vic plodding after.

“Well, for a wonder!” Helen May ejaculated ungraciously, grudging Vic the small tribute of praise that was due him.  But she was immediately ashamed of that, and told herself that it was pretty hard on the poor kid, and that after all he must hate the country worse than she did, even, which would certainly mean a good deal; and that she supposed he missed his boy chums just as much as she missed her friends, and found it just as hard to fit himself comfortably into a life for which he had no liking.  Besides, it wasn’t his health that had shunted them both out here into the desert, and she ought to be ashamed of herself for treating him the way she did.

After that she decided that it was her business to find the nine goats that were lost.  Vic certainly could not do both at once; and deep down in her heart Helen May knew that she was terribly afraid of Billy and would rather trudge the desert for hours under the hot sun than stay in the Basin watching the main flock.  She wished that she could afford to hire a herder, but she shrunk from the expense.  It seemed to her that she and Vic should be able to herd that one band, especially since there was nothing else for them to do out there except cook food and eat it.