Dan took the card. The stranger thanked him and departed with his quail in his expensive car. And this morning Dan Pelly sat at the highest point on his so-called ranch and looked down into Little Antelope Valley and was unhappy. He needed five hundred dollars to meet a mortgage; he could get a thousand dollars within twenty-four hours by sending a telegram collect to the man who had admired Tiny Tim--and he didn't have the courage to send the telegram. In fact, he hadn't had sufficient courage to tell Martha, his wife, of the stranger's offer. Martha was made of sterner stuff than her husband and a terrible panic of fear had seized Dan at the mere thought of telling her. What if she should accept the thousand dollars? Dan loaded his pipe and smoked ruminatively. He thought of his wasted and futile life. Twenty-five years wasted as a professional dog trainer. Faugh! And all he had to show for it was a host of memories, sweet and bitter; sweet as he remembered the dear days afield with good dogs and good fellows, the thrill of many a hard-fought field trial; bitter as he thought of dogs he had loved and which had been sold or poisoned or died of old age or disease; bitterer still as he reflected that he and Martha had come to a childless old age with naught between them and the county poor farm save a thousand acres of rough sage-covered land which, with the exception of about twenty-five acres of rich, sub-irrigated bottom land, was worthless save as a training ground for dogs. It had numerous springs on it, good cover and just enough scrub oaks to form safe roosting places for quail. It was a rather decent little game preserve and occasionally Dan made a few dollars by granting old customers the privilege of a shoot on it. He ran about a hundred head of goats on it, while in the bottom land he and Martha eked out a precarious existence with a few chickens and turkeys, a few hogs, a few stands of bees, three cows, a couple of horses and Tiny Tim. For Tim was known to a few dog fanciers as the last of the old Keepsake-Kenwood Boy strain in the state and not infrequently they sent their bitches to Tiny Tim's court. Poor Martha! Hers had not been a very happy life with Dan Pelly. A dog trainer is--a dog trainer. He can't very well be anything else because God has made him so. And in his heart of hearts he doesn't want to be. He trains dogs ostensibly for money but in reality because he loves them and the job affords him a legitimate excuse to be afield with them, to enjoy their society and that of the jovial devotees of upland game-shooting. Dan Pelly wasn't an ambitious man. He had no desire to dip coupons or wear fine raiment; his taste in automobiles went no further than an old ruin he had picked up for two hundred dollars for the purpose of carting his dogs around in the days before Martha took over the handling of the Pelly fortunes, when Dan had had dogs to cart around.