The Market

The market was already awake when Dingbo led his sheep through the gate. Smoke rose from the cook-stalls; the drovers were already quarreling over the morning prices; the town began, as markets do, in noise.

Dingbo led his sheep to a place by the wall, and he squatted, and he waited. He had sold a thing or two on the road before, and he knew the rule: let the buyers come to you, and do not look too eager. Eager sellers sell cheap.

A butcher came by first, and looked the sheep over, and felt its legs, and said it was thin. Dingbo agreed that it was thin. The butcher offered a price that was not an insult, and Dingbo shook his head, and the buyer went on, and Dingbo did not call him back.

A second man came, a farmer who kept sheep of his own, and he looked at the animal longer. This is a queer sheep, he said. It looks at me too much. Dingbo said: All sheep look at you. The farmer laughed, because it was true, and he offered a little more, and Dingbo took him halfway to his price and left him there.

The sheep, throughout, said nothing. It stood by the wall and let itself be examined, and Dingbo could feel, without looking, that it was watching him with a patience that was not the patience of a sheep. It was the patience of a thing that had all the time in the world, and knew it.

Dingbo did not meet its eye. He was a salesman now, and a salesman does not meet the eye of his own goods. He haggled. He smiled. He let a third buyer, a wool merchant, talk him down, and then up, and then down again, and he sold the sheep at last for a fair price, with neither of them too pleased.

He took the buyer's coin, and he watched the buyer lead the sheep away, and he did not look back at the animal as it went. He had learned, overnight, that there is no profit in looking back. The sheep was gone, and the coin was in his hand, and the transaction was, so far as Song Dingbo was concerned, complete.

He bought himself a bowl of hot food at a stall, and he sat on his heels and ate it, and he thought, with a satisfaction he did not bother to hide, about the ghost's face when it understood that it had been sold. He could imagine it. He had sold things before. He knew the look.

The buyer, in the meantime, had taken the sheep to his own pen outside the town. He meant to fatten it over the winter. He had paid a fair price, and he was not a man who regretted fair prices. He closed the gate on the sheep, and went home to his breakfast.

That afternoon, the pen was empty. The buyer came back from his meal, and the gate was as he had left it, and the pen was empty. The sheep was gone. There was no hole under the wall, no broken slat, no sign of anything. The sheep had simply, quietly, ceased to be there.

The buyer stood a long while in his empty pen, and then he went and told the whole market, and the market decided, being a market, that the man had been cheated by a cleverer rogue, and had got what he paid for. No one connected the lost sheep with the cheerful young traveler who had eaten his breakfast at a stall and gone on his way, whistling, before the sun was properly up.