Hugh got up, stood a moment in the gleam of the late September moon, then piled more wood upon the fire. The circle of twin lights was a reality to-night. The days of drought had brought ever more of the wild hunters about his flock, and almost anywhere he looked he saw their luminous eyes, two by two, as they waited in the darkness. He glanced down—but a rifle, not a dagger of flint, lay at his side. He looked out over the flock, instinctively counting up his markers. Most of the sheep were asleep, but one—the greatest of them all—stood erect, with lowered horns, as if on guard. It was Spot the yearling ram, and his horns looked oddly large in the soft light of the moon. “Spot, old boy,” the man said, “I believe you’ve got memories too. I believe you’ve been dreaming—just as I have.” CHAPTER XX Dreams, dreams! Spot, the young ram, waking or sleeping, never escaped from them. They came to him through the long, still hours of night, they disturbed his sleep in the mid-afternoon rest when the flock sought the deep shade, he knew them even in the hours of grazing. They were so plain, so real that they seemed more like memories,—events that had transpired before he came to lead Crowson’s flock. Yet his damming was not the least in doubt. Crowson himself knew Spot’s full record as far as his own immediate life was concerned. He had been born in the lower foothills,—the first lamb of the season. And his mother had died to give him birth. Such casualties do not happen often among the domestic sheep. There were a few such losses each year, usually due to an unnatural delivery, but in this case there was a simpler explanation. Little Spot was oversized; in a remote way that Crowson could not quite identify, he differed in outline from any other lamb in the flock. The same divergence could still be noticed now as Spot reached his second autumn. “Good Lord,” Crowson had said, when he marked the lamb’s coloring and size. “Here’s a little devil that would be worth watching if his ewe were just alive to keep him fed. I’d like to see just what kind of a ram he’d grow to be.” He supposed that Spot would die; a motherless lamb in western flocks can’t be counted on to survive. But in this case Spot obviously had other plans. Before the end of his first day he had attached himself—with an instinct that was seemingly miraculous—to the largest, strongest ewe in the flock, one whose own lamb had died. Crowson himself fastened the skin of the dead lamb on his back until the ewe gave him her breast. It was as if he already knew his destiny and needed full-feeding and rich milk to attain it. Spot grew fast. And in the castration and docking season little Spot was spared,—just to see what kind of a white-rumped, miscolored, heavy-headed ram he would grow to be.