acious,
I'll get me a job holdin' yarn in an old ladies' hone," Andy cut in
hastily, and got up from the table. "Being a truthful man, I can't say
I'm stuck on the job; but I'm game for it. And I'll promise you there
won't be no more sheep of that brand lickin' our doorsteps. What darned
outfit is it, anyway? I never bumped into any Dot sheep before, to my
knowledge."

"It's a new one on me," Weary testified, heading the procession down
to the stable. "If they belonged anywhere in this part of the country,
though, they wouldn't be acting the way they are. They'd be wise to the
fact that it ain't healthy."

Even while he spoke his eyes were fixed with cold intensity upon a
fringe of gray across the coulee below the little pasture. To the
nostrils of the outraged Happy Family was borne that indescribable aroma
which betrays the presence of sheep; that aroma which sheepmen love and
which cattlemen hate, and which a favorable wind will carry a long way.

They slapped saddles on their horses in record time that morning, and
raced down the coulee ironically shouting commiserating sentences to
the unfortunate Andy, who rode slowly up to the mess-house for the lunch
which Patsy had waiting for him in a flour sack, and afterward climbed
the grade and loped along outside the line fence to a point opposite
the sheep and the shouting horsemen, who forced them back by weight of
numbers.

This morning the herders were not quite so passive. The bug-killer still
scowled, but he spoke without the preliminary sulky silence of the day
before,

"We're goin' across the coulee," he growled. "Them's orders. We range
south uh here."

"No, you don't," Weary dissented calmly. "Not by a long shot, you don't.
You're going back where you come from--if you ask me. And you're going
quick!"

CHAPTER VI. What Happened to Andy

With the sun shining comfortably upon his back, and with a cigarette
between his lips, Andy sat upon his horse and watched in silent glee
while the irate Happy Family scurried here and there behind the band,
swinging their ropes down upon the woolly backs, and searching their
vocabularies for new and terrible epithets. Andy smiled broadly as a
colorful phrase now and then boomed across the coulee in that clear,
snappy atmosphere, which carries sounds so far. He did not expect to
do much smiling upon his own account, that day, and he was therefore
grateful for the opportunity to behold the spectacle before him.

T