"Wonder whut all them buzzards are doin' yonder, squire," he said, pointing upward with his whipstock.
"Whut buzzards--where?" asked the squire with an elaborate note of carelessness in his voice.
"Right yonder, over Little Niggerwool--see 'em there?"
"Oh, yes," the squire made answer. "Now I see 'em. They ain't doin' nothin, I reckin--jest flyin' round same as they always do in clear weather."
"Must be somethin' dead over there!" speculated the man in the buggy.
"A hawg probably," said the squire promptly--almost too promptly. "There's likely to be hawgs usin' in Niggerwool. Bristow, over the other side from here--he's got a big drove of hawgs."
"Well, mebbe so," said the man; "but hawgs is a heap more apt to be feedin' on high ground, seems like to me. Well, I'll be gittin' along towards town. G'day, squire." And he slapped the lines down on the mare's flank and jogged off through the dust.
He could not have suspected anything--that man couldn't. As the squire turned away from the road and headed for his house he congratulated himself upon that stroke of his in bringing in Bristow's hogs; and yet there remained this disquieting note in the situation, that buzzards flying, and especially buzzards flying over Little Niggerwool, made people curious--made them ask questions.
He was halfway across the weedfield when, above the hum of insect life, above the inward clamor of his own busy speculations, there came to his ear dimly and distantly a sound that made him halt and cant his head to one side the better to hear it. Somewhere, a good way off, there was a thin, thready, broken strain of metallic clinking and clanking--an eery ghost-chime ringing. It came nearer and became plainer--tonk-tonk-tonk; then the tonks all running together briskly.
A cowbell--that was it; but why did it seem to come from overhead, from up in the sky, like? And why did it shift so abruptly from one quarter to another--from left to right and back again to left? And how was it that the clapper seemed to strike so fast? Not even the breachiest of breachy young heifers could be expected to tinkle a cowbell with such briskness. The squire's eye searched the earth and the sky, his troubled mind giving to his eye a quick and flashing scrutiny. He had it. It was not a cow at all. It was not anything that went on four legs.