The crux of the situation was this. Dog trainers are so busy with their dogs that they neglect to send out bills for board and training, and the men who can afford to buy expensive dogs and have them boarded and trained seldom think of their dogs until fall. Then they pay the bill and sometimes wonder why it is so large. In a word, the income of a dog trainer is never what one might term staggering, and it is more or less uncertain. Martha had grown weary of this uncertainty and when distemper for the second time had cleaned out Dan Pelly's kennels, taking all of his own dogs with the exception of Tiny Tim and either killing or ruining the dogs of his customers, Mrs. Pelly felt that it was time to act. She knew it would be years before Dan's old customers would send dogs to him again. Friendship and a reputation as a great trainer are undoubtedly first aids to a dog trainer's success, but men who love their dogs hesitate to send them to a kennel where the germs of virulent distemper are known to exist. It was up to Dan Pelly to burn his old kennels and build new ones far removed from the location of the old. He could not afford to do this and since Martha was desirous of seeing him engage in something more constructive, Dan Pelly had gone out of business and become a farmer in the trifling manner heretofore described. Martha told him she was weary of dogs. She had shed too many tears over dead favorites; she had assisted at too many operations for the cure of canker of the ear, fistula, tumor and cancer, broken legs, smashed toes and cuts from barbed wire. She was already too learned in the gentle art of healing mange and exorcising tapeworms. She loved dogs, but to have thirty pointers and setters set up a furious barking whenever a stranger appeared at the Pelly farm had finally "gotten on her nerves." She understood Dan better than he understood himself and she knew how bitter was the sacrifice she demanded; yet she realized that she must be firm and lead Daniel in the way he must go, else would they come to want and misery in a day when Dan would be too old to tramp over hill and dale training dogs. Dan had readily consented to her direction--particularly after she had wept a little. Poor Martha! From where he sat Dan Pelly could this morning see great activity on the floor of Little Antelope Valley, just below him. Half a dozen men on horseback were riding backward and forward and at least a dozen white specks that Dan Pelly knew for hunting dogs were ranging here and there among the low sage cover.