peach and two damsons
in my mouth, I asked Uncle Emsley how Miss Willella was.

"'Why,' says Uncle Emsley, 'she's gone riding with Jackson Bird, the
sheep man from over at Mired Mule Canada.'

"I swallowed the peach seed and the two damson seeds. I guess somebody
held the counter by the bridle while I got off; and then I walked out
straight ahead till I butted against the mesquite where my roan was
tied.

"'She's gone riding,' I whisper in my bronc's ear, 'with Birdstone
Jack, the hired mule from Sheep Man's Canada. Did you get that, old
Leather-and-Gallops?'

"That bronc of mine wept, in his way. He'd been raised a cow pony and
he didn't care for snoozers.

"I went back and said to Uncle Emsley: 'Did you say a sheep man?'

"'I said a sheep man,' says Uncle Emsley again. 'You must have heard
tell of Jackson Bird. He's got eight sections of grazing and four
thousand head of the finest Merinos south of the Arctic Circle.'

"I went out and sat on the ground in the shade of the store and leaned
against a prickly pear. I sifted sand into my boots with unthinking
hands while I soliloquised a quantity about this bird with the Jackson
plumage to his name.

"I never had believed in harming sheep men. I see one, one day,
reading a Latin grammar on hossback, and I never touched him! They
never irritated me like they do most cowmen. You wouldn't go to work
now, and impair and disfigure snoozers, would you, that eat on tables
and wear little shoes and speak to you on subjects? I had always let
'em pass, just as you would a jack-rabbit; with a polite word and a
guess about the weather, but no stopping to swap canteens. I never
thought it was worth while to be hostile with a snoozer. And because
I'd been lenient, and let 'em live, here was one going around riding
with Miss Willella Learight!

"An hour by sun they come loping back, and stopped at Uncle Emsley's
gate. The sheep person helped her off; and they stood throwing each
other sentences all sprightful and sagacious for a while. And then
this feathered Jackson flies up in his saddle and raises his little
stewpot of a hat, and trots off in the direction of his mutton ranch.
By this time I had turned the sand out of my boots and unpinned myself
from the prickly pear; and by the time he gets half a mile out of
Pimienta, I singlefoots up beside him on my bronc.

"I said that snoozer was pink-eyed, but he wasn't. His seeing
arrangement was grey enough, but his eye-lashes