e him fight
if I have to put high-life on 'im!"

He stopped and looked out over the hillside where the heat quivered in
rainbows from the rocks, and the naked _palo verdes_, stripped of
their bark, bleached like skeletons beside their jagged stumps.

"Say, Rufe," he began, abruptly, "I'm goin' crazy."

He shook his head slowly and sighed. "I always thought I was," he
continued, "but old Bill Johnson blew in on me the other day--he's
crazy, you know--and when I see him I knowed it! W'y, pardner, Bill is
the most _reas-on-able_ son-of-a-gun you can imagine. You can talk
to him by the hour, and outside of bein' a little techy he's all
right; but the minute you mention _sheep_ to him his eye turns glassy
and he's off. Well, that's me, too, and has been for years, only
not quite so bad; but then, Bill is plumb sheeped out and I
ain't--quite!"

He laughed mirthlessly and filled a cigarette.

"You know," he said, squinting his eyes down shrewdly, "that old
feller ain't so durned crazy yet. He wanted some ammunition to shoot
up sheep-camps with, but bein' a little touched, as you might say, he
thought I might hold out on 'im, so he goes at me like this: 'Jeff,'
he says, 'I've took to huntin' lions for the bounty now--me and the
hounds--and I want to git some thirty-thirtys.' But after I'd give him
all I could spare he goes on to explain how the sheep, not satisfied
with eatin' 'im out of house and home, had gone and tolled all the
lions away after 'em--so, of course, he'll have to foller along, too.
You catch that, I reckon."

Creede drooped his eyes significantly and smoked.

"If it hadn't been for old Bill Johnson," he said, "we wouldn't have a
live cow on our range to-day, we'd've been sheeped down that close.
When he'd got his ammunition and all the bacon and coffee I could
spare he sat down and told me how he worked it to move all them sheep
last Spring. After he'd made his first big play and see he couldn't
save the Pocket he went after them sheepmen systematically for his
revenge. That thirty-thirty of his will shoot nigh onto two miles if
you hold it right, and every time he sees a sheep-camp smoke he
Injuned up onto some high peak and took pot-shots at it. At the
distance he was you couldn't hear the report--and, of course, you
couldn't _see_ smokeless powder. He says the way them Mexican herders
took to the rocks was a caution; and when the fireworks was over they
didn't wait for orders, jest rounded up their