“Well, would you look at that!” Helen May never having watched a good sheep-dog at work, spoke in an awed tone.  “Vic, please write!”

Vic, watching open-mouthed, actually forgot to resent the implication that Pat had left him hopelessly behind in the art of handling goats.

“Seems to have the savvy, all right,” Starr observed, just as though he had not paid all those dollars for the “savvy” that made Pat one of the best goat dogs in the State.

“Savvy?  Why, that dog’s human.  Now, I suppose he’s stopping over there to see what he must do next, is he?”

“Wants to know whether I want ’em all rounded up, or just edged up outa the Basin.  G’ round ’em, Pat,” he called, and made a wide, circular sweep with his right arm.

Pat gave a yelp, dropped his head, and scurried up the ridge, driving all stragglers back toward the center of the flock.  He went to every crest and sniffed into the wind to satisfy himself that none had strayed beyond his sight; returned and evened up the ragged edges of the hand, and then came trotting back to Starr with six inches of pink tongue draped over his lower jaw and a smile in his eyes and a waggle of satisfaction at loved work well done.  The goats, with a meek Billy in the foreground, huddled in a compact mass on the slope and eyed the dog as they had never eyed Vic, for all his hoe-handle and his accuracy with rocks.

Helen May dropped her hand on Pat’s head and looked soberly into his upturned eyes.  “You’re a perfect miracle of a dog, so you can’t be my dog, after all,” she said.  “Your owner will be riding day and night to find you.  I know I should, if you got lost from me.”  Then she looked at Starr.  “Don’t you think you really ought to take him back with you?  It—­somehow it doesn’t seem quite right to keep a dog that knows so much.  Why, the man I bought the goats from had a dog that could herd them, and he wanted twenty-five dollars for it, and at that, he claimed he was putting the price awfully low for me, just because I was a lady, you know.”

Starr, was (as he put it) kicking himself for having lied himself into this dilemma.  Also he was wondering how best he might lie himself out of it.

“You want to look out for these marks that say they’re giving you the big end of a bargain just because you’re a lady,” he said.  “Chances are they’re figuring right then on doing you.  If that fellow had got twenty-five dollars for his dog, take it from me, he wouldn’t have lost anything.”

“Well, but do you think it would he right to keep this dog?”

Since she put it that way, Starr felt better.  “I sure do.  Keep him anyway till he’s called for.  When I go back, I’ll find out where he comes from; and when I’ve located the owner, maybe I’ll be able to fix it up with him somehow.  You sure ought to have a dog.  So let it stand that way.  I’ll tell yuh when to give him up.”

Helen May opened her lips, and Starr, to forestall argument and to save his soul from further sin, turned toward the dog.  “Bring ’em home, Pat,” he said, and then started toward the corral, which was down below the spring.  “Watch him drive,” he said to Helen May and so managed to distract her attention from the ethics of the case.