Treve had known from the first that she did not like him. This bothered him not at all. For he didn’t like her, either. Her pungent lily-of-the-valley perfume was as distressing to his sensitive nostrils as would be the reek of carrion to a human nose. Moreover, she was not the type of human that dogs like. Also, she took up too much of his master’s attention. Intuitively, Treve realized Mack was not as fond of him as once he had been and that the man was not the jolly chum of yore. It grieved the sensitive collie. He sought wistfully to draw Royce’s attention more to himself and less to this painfully-scented outsider. But it was all in vain. Royce Mack was blindly and deliriously in love. The world, for the time, contained for him only one person. That person was far more like an angel than a mere woman. And she exhaled in some occult way a faintly angelic perfume from her garments. Sheepishly, Mack told his partner of the engagement. Joel’s reply was a grunt which implied nothing or anything. Fenno made precisely the same reply, a week afterward, when news came to Royce of his comfortable legacy of cash and of pleasant farmland in southern Vermont. Risking monotony, Joel had achieved a third grunt when Mack went on to inform him of the projected eastward move. This move meant a breaking up of the partnership. Mack could not run a dairy farm in Vermont and also a ranch in the West. Joel came out of the silences and out of a maze of calculations long enough to make an offer for Royce’s share of the Dos Hermanos. The offer was as meager as was Fenno himself; but it was as reliable. Too foolishly happy to barter, Mack closed with it. Thus, in another three days, Joel Fenno was to become sole owner of the ranch. Both men had evaded the question of Treve’s ownership. The collie belonged jointly to them. Yet he was not included in the list of land, buildings and livestock set forth in the bill of sale. From the first, Mack had regarded the dog as his own, and had made Treve his particular chum. Joel had scoffed at such folly, and had pretended to hold the collie in utter contempt. But Treve had grown to be everything to the gnarl-souled oldster. For the first time in his sixty-odd warped years, he had learned to care about some living creature. It was with a twinge that he saw how much fonder the dog seemed to be of Mack than of Fenno’s unlovable self. Now, at the possibility of parting with his loved dog-comrade, his heart was as sore as a boil. Wherefore, as usual, he held his peace on the theme so close to him; and he was outwardly the more savage in his comments on Treve’s worthlessness. Treve lifted his head from between his paws, and stared down the road toward the coulée. His trained ears not only caught the rattle and chug of an approaching car, but they recognized it as a car belonging to the ranch.