Antonio saw it an hour later, and wanted to shriek; it looked exactly like a mountain-lion, but he knew it was not flesh and blood because it moved in impossible bounds. No natural creature could leap sixty feet; the mountain-lion shape did. But it was convincingly like its prototype to the eye. It stopped, and regarded the flock of sheep, made soaring progression to the front of the flock, and came back again. Salazar ignored it. Neither he nor the sheep scented carnivorous animal life. Antonio hysterically concluded that it was invisible to them; he began an elaborate, lunatic pattern of behavior to convince it that magic was at work against it, too.

He began to babble to his sheep with infinite politeness, spoke to blank-eyed creatures as Senor Gomez and Senora Onate. He chatted feverishly with a wicked-eyed ram, whom he called Senor Guttierez. A clumsy, wabbling lamb almost upset him, and he scolded the infant sheep as Pepito. He lifted his hat with great gallantry to a swollen ewe, hailing her as Senora Garcia, and observed in a quavering voice that the flies were very bad today. He moved about in his flock, turning the direction of its march and acting as if surrounded by a crowd of human beings. This should at least confuse the devil whom he saw. And while he chatted with seeming joviality, the sweat poured down his face in streams.

Salazar took no part in this deception. The sheep were fairly docile, once started; he was able to pause occasionally to scratch, and once even to do a luxurious, thorough job on that place in his back between his hind legs which is so difficult to reach. There was only one time when he had any difficulty. That was when there was a sort of eddying of the sheep, ahead. There were signs of panic. Salazar went trotting to the spot. He found sheep milling stupidly, and rams pawing the ground defying they had no idea what. Salazar found a deer-carcass on the ground and the smell of fresh blood in the air and the sheep upset because of it. He drove them on past, barking where barking would serve and nipping flanks where necessary—afterward disgustedly tonguing bits of wool out of his mouth.

The sheep went on. But Antonio, when he came to the deer-carcass, went icy-cold in the most exquisite of terror; the deer had been killed by a mountain-lion—there were tracks about. Then it, too, had been cut into as if by a dissector's scalpel, but the job was incomplete. Actually, the pseudo-mountain-lion had been interrupted by the approach of the flock. There were hardly blow-flies on the spot as yet. Antonio came to it as he chatted insanely with a sheep with sore eyes and a halo of midges about 

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