turned off to the west, stringing
in long bleating columns out across The Rolls, he did not begrudge the
hard labor. After Jasper Swope came Jim, and Donald McDonald, as jolly
a Scottish shepherd as ever lived, and Bazan, the Mexican, who traced
his blood back to that victorious general whom Maximilian sent into
Sonora. There were Frenchmen, smelling rank of garlic and mutton
tallow; Basques with eyes as blue and vacant as the summer skies;
young Mormons working on shares, whose whole fortune was wrapped up in
the one huddle of sheep which they corralled and counted so carefully;
and then the common herders, fighting Chihuahuanos, with big round
heads and staring eyes, low-browed Sonorans, slow and brutal in their
ways, men of all bloods and no blood, lumped together in that
careless, all-embracing Western term "Mexicans."

But though they were low and primitive in mental processes, nearer to
their plodding burros than to the bright-eyed sensitive dogs, they
were the best who would consent to wander with the sheep through the
wilderness, seeing nothing, doing nothing, knowing nothing, having
before them nothing but the vision of a distant pay day, a drunk, the
_calabozo_, and the kind boss who would surely bail them out. Ah, that
was it--the one love and loyalty of those simple-minded creatures who,
unfit for the hurry and competition of the great world, sold their
lives by spans of months for twenty dollars and found; it was always
to the boss that they looked for help, and in return they did his
will.

When the great procession had drifted past, with its braying clamor,
its dogs, its men on muleback and afoot, the herders with their
carbines, the camp rustlers with their burros, belled and laden with
water casks and kyacks of grub, the sheep owners hustling about with
an energy that was almost a mania, Hardy sat beneath the _ramada_ of
the ranch house with dog-fighting Tommy in his lap and pondered deeply
upon the spectacle. A hundred thousand sheep, drifting like the
shadows of clouds across the illimitable desert, crossing swift
rivers, climbing high mountains, grazing beneath the northern pines;
and then turning south again and pouring down through the passes like
the resistless front of a cloudburst which leaves the earth bare and
wasted in its wake. For this one time he had turned the stream aside
and the tall grass still waved upon the upper range; but the next
time, or the next--what then?

Long and seriou