le outfit--now, mind, I ain't sayin' which--to get Jim
Rodney's sheep off the range. They had threatened him and cut the throats
of two hundred of his herd as a warning, but Jim went right on grazin'
'em, same as he had always been in the habit of doing. Well, I'm told they
up and makes Simpson an offer to get rid of the sheep. Jim has over five
thousand, an' it's just before lambing, and them pore ewes, all heavy, is
being druv' down to Watson's shearing-pens, that Jim always shears at. Jim
an' two herders and a couple of dawgs--least, this is the way I heard it--is
drivin' 'em easy, 'cause, as I said before, it's just before lambing. It
does now seem awful cruel to me to shear just before lambing, but that's
their way out here.

"Well, nothing happens, and Jim ain't more'n two hours from the pens an'
he comes to that place on the road that branches out over the top of a
canon, and there some one springs out of a clump of willows an' dashes
into the herd and drives the wether that's leading right over the cliff.
The leaders begin to follow that wether, and they go right over the cliff
like the pore fools they are. The herder fired and tried to drive 'em
back, they tell me, an' he an' the dawg were shot at from the clump of
willows by some one else who was there. Three hundred sheep had gone over
the cliff before Jim knew what was happening. He rode like mad right
through the herd to try and head 'em off; but you know what sheep is
like--they're like lost souls headin' for damnation. Nothing can stop 'em
when they're once started. And Jim lost every head--started for the
shearing-pens a rich man--rich for Jim--an' seen everything he had swept
away before his eyes, his wife an' children made paupers. My son he come
by and found him. He said that Jim was sittin' huddled up in a heap, his
knees drawed up under his chin, starin' straight up into the noonday sky,
same as if he was askin' God how He could be so cruel. His dead dawg, that
they had shot, was by the side of him. The herder that was with Jim had
taken the one that was shot into Watson's, so when my son found Jim he was
alone, sittin' on the edge of the cliff with his dead dawg, an' the sky
about was black with buzzards; an' Jim he just sat an' stared up at 'em,
and when my son spoke to him he never answered any more than a dead man.
He shuck him by the arm, but Jim just sat there, watchin' the sun, the
buzzards, and the dead sheep."

"Was nothing done to this man