For eleven years Bess had barked at somebody. Every day. Somebody. Nobody in Brent could remember who. A dog that barks at all of us is nobody's dog. Wat carried her water twice a day from the tap at the green. He mended the sheep yard wall and counted things, because he had nothing else to do. “Why do you bark at people, Bess?” Old Frisk was coming down the lane with his crook. He stopped.

“She barks at a person while an untrue thing they said still stands unsaid again. Only that. If a man tells the truth after he has lied, she has no more business with him, and she never barks at one of us who has told only truth.” “Then why did she bark at me?” “She didn’t,” said Old Frisk. “You would know.”

The spring was dry. The beck went to stones. The trough was a smell by noon, and the villagers left buckets on their doorsteps. And Bess stopped barking. Not once in a month. She walked behind people instead, nose down and tail low, never lifting her head. That frightened the village more than a thief. “They are not fools, our dog,” said Ada, who kept the tally at the tap. “If she has gone quiet, she has found the one, and she is waiting on him.” “Who?”

That was when they turned to Coll. He carted for the whole parish, and nobody had ever heard him say a thing that was not so. Everybody had heard each other lie. Coll, no. So the quiet dog had found Coll. So a quiet dog had found a thief. Said twice, it was a fact.

He cut a stroke on the post by the tap for every person Bess walked behind that day, in twos and threes so he could count quicker. By the ninth day he had a hundred strokes and no name against any of them. A thief would have one name and nine hundred blanks. He told Ada at the tap. She looked at the post. “Well,” she said. “Then she is not after anybody.” “She is after something somebody said.” “Say that again,” said Ada, “and say it slower.”

There was ninety-nine pails of water in it. Ada chalked a stroke for every pail anybody drew, and had done it since she was a girl. Wat copied her and counted them. Nine pails a night for eleven nights, and the village drank none. They asked Coll at the green, and he stood there with his hat in his hands.

“I carried it to Widow Cray’s,” he said. “Her pot boiled dry. There is fever in that house and nobody to fetch for it. I asked the reeve twice and the green said no.” “And you took it anyway.” “And I took it anyway,” said Coll, “and I would do it again tomorrow.” Wat watched Bess while he said it. Her nose stayed down.

“Then she has found his mouth is clean,” said Old Frisk. Nobody liked that. “If you want to see her work, try a thing on her.”

Wat had never told a lie in his life. He looked at the hundred strokes with no names on them, and at Coll holding his hat over a kindness. The post said nobody else had a lie standing, so he knew it would be him. And he said, “Bess. I took the water. I took it down to the mill myself, eleven nights, and never told a word.” The green went quiet. He did not stop. “And I never will tell it. That is the end of it.”

Bess lifted her head. She came up off the ground as if she had been thrown and barked at him, hard, again and again. The reeve said nobody believed a word of it, and Bess barked at his boots. Then Wat swallowed and said it plain. “I did not. I never did. I said that so she would speak.” And she stopped. Not slowly. She came the last of the way and put her nose into his hands.

“She has stopped,” said Old Frisk. “And a dog that barks at you, boy, is not saying that you did it. She is saying you said it and have not said it true again since. That is all she has said for eleven years, and we had our ears shut.” He lifted his crook. “There is no thief in Brent. There is a man who carried pails to a house where the pot had boiled dry, and a dog with nothing to say about him.”

Ada ran her finger down the post. “Then it was the lies she was counting,” she said. “Not the water. Not the thief. The lies. And it never struck us to ask a dog what she wanted.”