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
