hears. When the supply of sheep was in
and the panels closed, the captain gave the shrill cry, "_Vaminos__" and
all hands rushed in among the frightened animals and dragged out their
chosen victims by the leg. They showed great shrewdness in selecting the
small, the light-woolled, the easy-to-be-shorn. "The loud clapping of
the shears" at once filled the shed, and it was not five minutes before
a light fleece was tossed upon the burring-table, and a grinning fellow
came running up to the ranchman seated in a chair thereon, the better to
supervise affairs, and called out, "Check-e!" amid _vivas_ for the first
sheep shorn. He received a tin token, which he thrust into his pocket,
and plunged over the low platform after another sheep. Calls of
"_Cole_!" "_Colero_" "_Cole, muchacho, echale_" began to ring out, and,
with an answering call of "_Onde?_" ("Where?"), two little, laughing
Mexican boys, with tumbled, curly black wigs, and cheeks like bronzed
peaches, darted about with boxes of powdered charcoal, and clapped a
pinch of it on the cut made by careless shears. The burrers threw out
the fleeces smooth upon the table, and, one on either side, patted them
over with their hands to discover the cockle-burrs entangled in the
wool; these removed, they folded and rolled the fleeces up with care and
handed them to a man who, with the aid of a small, square box, tied them
tightly with two strings, and tossed them out of the shed, where they
were received by the ranchman who was grading the wool and supervising
the packing.

The packing was done in two frames, seven feet high, in which an iron
ring held the sacks open. To a man on one of these frames the fleeces in
their compact little bundles were tossed up, and he trod them down,
packing them in the sack. Then the sack was let down, sewed up, rolled
to the scales and weighed, marked with the ranch-mark, the weight, the
grade, and was ready for the freighters and a market. About ten
thousand pounds of wool were sheared, burred, packed, marked, and
perhaps shipped, in a day.

Inside and out, seventy men were at work about the shed: the fleeces
rapidly piled up on the burring-tables; tied and tossed out, they grew
into little mountains, and around the scales for a wide space the packed
sacks cumbered the ground. The ranchmen moved about to see that coal was
used where needed, and that it was not needed too frequently, that
fleeces were not broken, and were thoroughly burred and