“Puppy,” apostrophized Brean, “you’re a most honored dog. Do you realize that the hand operating on you might now be operating on the King of England, if the luck had broken differently for me? They all said nothing could stop me from going straight to the top. And then a little oblong of scribbled paper sent me straight to the bottom, puppy. But it’s lucky for you that it did. For if I were back in Harley Street, with a ‘Sir’ stuck in front of my name for my surgical preëminence,--why, don’t you see I couldn’t be working over you, now? “That’d mean you’d have to go through life with one-half of your grand head looking like a lop-eared rabbit’s. Yes, you’re an honored dog; and a lucky dog, too.... Now don’t shake your head or rub it against anything, before that dressing gets set! “This is known as the ‘Treve Operation.’ Because I tried it, first, on Noel Treve’s dog, you see. I think I’ll name you ‘Treve’ in honor of your own operation. Like the name? “How about something to eat? I ask the question merely as a bit of rhetoric. For there isn’t a crumb of food in the larder. We’re on our way to the Dos Hermanos ranch, Treve. Last year, when I dropped in there, they gave me a sumptuous breakfast and told me if I was caught on their land again, they’d shoot me. Let’s hope their memory for faces is short, puppy. I’m taking you along as my welcome. It’s only a matter of twelve miles to the ranch house. Now, let’s go back to sleep, shan’t we?” Neither Royce Mack nor his sour old partner, Joel Fenno, had or ever would have the right to prefix their names with “Honorable”;--either by dint of being the sons of British lords or by election to legislature or Congress. But, unlike the Honorable Lionel Arthur Montagu Brean, they never had had to worry as to where the next meal was coming from. Their big sheep ranch covered eighteen hundred acres of grazing land. And, in the dry season, their flocks went northward, at an absurdly small price per head, into the richer government grazing lands, on the upper slopes of the twin Dos Hermanos peaks. They were working hard and they were making fair money. Their chief cause for woe in life was that their neighbors, the cattle ranchers, looked upon them and on all sheepmen as something lower than skunks. This contemptuous hostility on the part of the cattlemen did not annoy Joel Fenno in the very least; so long as it was confined to mere words and looks. Fenno was ancient and hardbitten and surly and with the mental epidermis of a rhinoceros. Mack, being younger and more sensitive, girded at the thought that any man or collection of men on earth could look on him as an inferior. The partners had ridden out from the ranch house before daylight this morning to their Number Three camp, where the spring “marking” was going on. Having seen that the marking gang was satisfactorily at work, they walked over to the Number Three foreman’s shack, for breakfast.