"Yes!" spoke up the Master harshly, entering the talk for the first time, and tearing his disgusted attention from the Gold Hat. "Yes, it's Glure, and it's unbelievable! And it's worse than either of those, if anything can be. Don't you see the full rottenness of it all? Half the world is starving or sick or wounded. The other half is working its fingers off to help the Red Cross make Europe a little less like hell; and, when every cent counts in the work, this--this Wall Street Farmer spends sixteen hundred precious dollars to buy himself a Gold Hat; and he does it under the auspices of the Red Cross, in the holy name of charity. The unsportsmanlikeness of it is nothing to that. It's--it's an Unpardonable Sin, and I don't want to endorse it by staying here. Let's get Lad and go home." "I wish to heaven we could!" flamed the Mistress, as angry as he. "I'd do it in a minute if we were able to. I feel we're insulting loyal old Lad by making him a party to it all. But we can't go. Don't you see? Mr. Glure is unsportsmanlike, but that's no reason we should be. You've told me, again and again, that no true sportsman will back out of a contest just because he finds he has no chance of winning it." "She's right," chimed in the Superintendent. "You've entered the dog for the contest, and by all the rules he'll have to stay in it. Lad doesn't know the first thing about 'working.' Neither does the only other local entrant that the first two rules have left in the competition. And Lochinvar is perfect at every detail of sheep-work. Lad and the other can't do anything but swell his victory. It's rank bad luck, but----" "All right! All right!" growled the Master. "We'll go through with it. Does anyone know the terms of a 'Kirkaldie Association's Preliminaries,' for 'Working Sheepdog Trials?' My own early education was neglected." "Glure's education wasn't," said the Superintendent. "He has the full set of rules in his brand new Sportsman Library. That's, no doubt, where he got the idea. I went to him for them this morning, and he let me copy the laws governing the preliminaries. They're absurdly simple for a 'working' dog and absurdly impossible for a non-worker. Here, I'll read them over to you." He fished out a folded sheet of paper and read aloud a few lines of pencil-scribblings: "Four posts shall be set up, at ninety yards apart, at the corners of a square enclosure. A fifth post shall be set in the center. At this fifth post the owner or handler of the contestant shall stand with his dog. Nor shall such owner or handler move more than three feet from the post until his dog shall have completed the trial. "Guided only by voice and by signs, the dog shall go alone from the center-post to the post numbered '1.' He shall go thence, in the order named, to Posts 2, 3 and 4, without returning to within fifteen feet of the central post until he shall have reached Post 4.