"Watch him!" commanded the Master. "_Watch_ him!" It was an order Lad had learned to follow in the many times when the Mistress and the Master left him to guard the car or to do sentry duty over some other article of value. He understood. He would have preferred to deal with this enemy according to his own lights. But the Master had spoken. So, standing at view, the collie looked longingly at Schwartz's throat. "Keep perfectly still!" the Master warned the prisoner, "and perhaps he won't go for you. Move, and he most surely will. _Watch_ him, Laddie!" Maclay and the Master left the captive and his guard, and set forth on a flashlight-illumined tour of the knoll. It was a desolate spot, far back in the swamp and more than a mile from any road; a place visited not three times a year, except in the shooting season. In less than a half-minute the plaintive ba-a-a of a sheep guided the searchers to the left of the knoll where stood a thick birch-and-alder copse. Around this they circled until they reached a narrow opening where the branch-ends, several feet above ground, were flecked with hanks of wool. Squirming through the aperture in single file, the investigators found what they sought. In the tight-woven copse's center was a small clearing. In this, was a rudely wattled pen some nine feet square; and in the pen were bunched six sheep. An occasional scared bleat from deeper in the copse told the whereabouts of the sheep Schwartz had taken from the barnyard that night and which he had dropped at Lad's onslaught before he could put it in the pen. On the ground, just outside the enclosure, lay the smashed lantern. "Sheep on the hoof are worth $12.50 per, at the Paterson Market," mused the Master aloud, as Maclay blinked owlishly at the treasure trove. "There are $75 worth of sheep in that pen, and there would have been three more of them before morning if we hadn't butted in on Herr Schwartz's overtime labors. To get three sheep at night, it was well worth his while to switch suspicion to Lad by killing a fourth sheep every time, and mangling its throat with a stripping-knife. Only, he mangled it too efficiently. There was too much _Kultur_ about the mangling. It wasn't ragged enough. That's what first gave me my idea. That, and the way the missing sheep always vanished into more or less thin air. You see, he probably----" "But," sputtered Maclay, "why four each night? Why----"