There had even before been numberless difficult scenes with the sold lots; the effort to muster them for their new journeyings had sufficiently taxed the lungs and tempers of men and sheep-dogs. When Nip appeared, the normally stolid Master Peartree was waving a giant red handkerchief and screaming wildly, while demented-seeming drovers, formed into a half-ring, danced and shrieked like savages at a religious service, and waved sticks with a ritual air, and the sheep-dog leapt round and round, chevying the flock in the desired direction. In this delicate crisis, Nip’s rush of recognition at Master Peartree proved the last straw. One super-terrified wether threw the flock into a panic. The sheep rushed to and fro and everywhere (save where the sticks and shrieks pointed); and going thus everywhere, they went nowhere, jumping on and over one another’s backs as in a game of leap-lamb. Some darted back into alien pens, and the sheep-dog, itself distracted, leapt from back to back of these, baying and menacing with feverish futility. It was like a stormy sea of sheep, in which man was tossed about as in a tempest. There were sheep standing on their hind legs as if dancing, there were men clinging on to these legs or to tails or to rumps, and pushing, pulling, and wrestling with them, but never ceasing to yell and chevy. Finally a rescue party appeared with a five-barred gate, which they moved this way and that, striving to cut off at least one of the ways of escape. But this only drove more sheep back into the wrong pens, where they seemed hopelessly mixed up with lots still unsold. Jinny had never imagined sheep such lively and individual lunatics. Now the intruders were being dragged out by the wool of the head or the rump, or half-carried, or wholly kicked; again the five-barred gate was brought into play, this time to keep them away from the pens, and then, wherever the eye turned, were these tempestuous billows of sheep. They bounded, reared, wrestled, danced, pranced, flew wildly at tangents: some escaped towards the town, and everywhere men screamed, scurried, bellowed, waved hands, or brandished sticks. Nip, his head equally lost, seemed to be doing every one of these things at once, whether ovine or human. And Jinny, in her anxiety to capture him, to remove him, unseen, from the Witches’ Sabbath she feared he had called into being, forgot all about the other possible, if inferior, horses. By the time she had refastened Nip and returned to the sale, the stick had fallen for the last bid. She was just in time to see Will springing on one barebacked steed, and leading his beribboned brother by a cord. And despite all her anger and contempt, she could not avoid a thrill of admiration for the grace of his poise and the fearlessness of his carriage. And a dull aching pain began at her heart. She felt she wanted something; she had missed getting something—and obscurely she told herself it was the horses he was leading away.