rangled over
the wording of the message after their usual contentious manner.

"Better tell 'em everything is fine, at this end uh the line," Cal
suggested, and was hooted at for a poet.

"Just say," Weary began, when he was interrupted by the discordant
clamor from a trainload of sheep that had just pulled in and stopped.
"'Maa-aa, Ma-a-aaa,' darn yuh," he shouted derisively, at the peering,
plaintive faces, glimpsed between the close-set bars. "Mamma, how I do
love sheep!" Whereupon he put spurs to his horse and galloped down to
the station to rid his ears of the turbulent wave of protest from the
cars.

Naturally it required some time to compose the telegram in a style
satisfactory to all parties. Outside, cars banged together, an engine
snorted stertorously, and suffocating puffs of coal smoke now and
then invaded the waiting-room while the Happy Family were sending that
message of cheer to Chicago. If you are curious, the final version of
their combined sentiments was not at all spectacular. It said merely:

"Everything fine here. Take good care of the Old Man. How's the Kid
stacking up?"

It was signed simply "The Bunch."

"Mary's little lambs are here yet, I see," the Native Son remarked
carelessly when they went out. "Enough lambs for all the Marys in the
country. How would you like to be Mary?"

"Not for me," Irish declared, and turned his face away from the stench
of them.

Others there were who rode the length of the train with faces averted
and looks of disdain; cowmen, all of them, they shared the range
prejudice, and took no pains to hide it.

The wind blew strong from the east, that day; it whistled through the
open, double-decked cars packed with gray, woolly bodies, whose voices
were ever raised in strident complaint; and the stench of them smote
the unaccustomed nostrils of the Happy Family and put them to disgusted
flight up the track and across it to where the air was clean again.

"Honest to grandma, I'd make the poorest kind of a sheepherder," Big
Medicine bawled earnestly, when they were well away from the noise and
smell of the detested animals. "If I had to herd sheep, by cripes, do
you know what I'd do? I'd haze 'em into a coulee and turn loose with a
good rifle and plenty uh shells, and call in the coyotes to git a square
meal. That's the way I'd herd sheep. It's the only way you can shut 'em
up. They just 'baa-aa, baa-aa, baa-aa' from the time they're dropped
till somebody kills