Badly run as she thought the world, for a time it was more favorable to her material prosperity than she had ever known it.  Lem’s flock of sheep grew and thrived.  For years nobody in our valley has tried to do much with sheep because of dogs, and all Lem’s neighbors told him that some fine morning he would find his flock 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, that “Lottie was a fool not to make that drummer marry her.  She could have, if she’d gone the right way to work.”  But the drummer remained persistently absent.