with his stick the bugs, as if the
whole subject were squeezed dry of interest.

For a minute Weary stared unwinkingly down at him, uncertain whether to
resent this as pure insolence, or to condone it as imbecility. "Mamma!"
he breathed eloquently, and grinned at Andy and Pink. "This is a real
talkative cuss, and obliging, too. Come on, boys; he's too busy to
bother with a little thing like sheep."

He led the way around to the far side of the band, the nearest sheep
scuttling away from then as they passed. "I don't suppose we could work
the combination on those dogs--what?" he considered aloud, glancing back
at them where they still sat upon their haunches and watched the strange
riders. "Say, Cadwalloper, you took a few lessons in sheepherding, a
couple of years ago, when you was stuck on that girl--remember? Whistle
'em up here and set 'en to work."

"You go to the devil," Pink's curved hips replied amiably to his boss.
"I've got loss-uh-memory on the sheep business."

Whereat Weary grinned and said no more about it.

On the opposite side of the coulee, the boys seemed to be laboring
quite as fruitlessly with the other herder. They heard Big Medicine's
truculent bellow, as he leaned from the saddle and waved a fist close to
the face of the herder, but, though they rode with their eyes fixed upon
the group, they failed to see any resultant movement of dogs, sheep or
man.

There is, at times, a certain safety in being the hopeless minority.
Though seven indignant cowpunchers surrounded him, that herder was
secure from any personal molestation--and he knew it. They were seven
against one; therefore, after making some caustic remarks, which
produced as little effect as had Weary's command upon the first man, the
seven were constrained to ride here and there along the wavering, gray
line, and, with shouts and swinging ropes, themselves drive the sheep
from the coulee.

There was much clamor and dust and riding to and fro. There was language
which would have made the mothers of then weep, and there were faces
grown crimson from wrath. Eventually, however, the Happy Family faced
the north fence of the Flying U boundary, and saw the last woolly back
scrape under the lower wire, leaving a toll of greasy wool hanging from
the barbs.

The herders had drawn together, and were looking on from a distance, and
the four dogs were yelping uneasily over their enforced inaction. The
Happy Family went back and rounded up the h