ing the promise of a hot rainless spring.
Bitter Creek was drying up rapidly and the water holes, stagnant and
strongly alkaline, had already poisoned a few sheep. The herders could
not understand the sheep woman's delay in moving to the mountains.

"I'm runnin' myself ragged over these hills tryin' to hold back them
yearlin's," Bunch declared. Bowers, too, having his own special brand of
grief with the buck herd, had looked the interrogation he had not
voiced. Kate herself knew that the sheep should have been higher up,
away from the ticks and flies and on good food and water all of two
weeks ago, but, on one pretext or another, had postponed giving the
order to start, though she knew in her heart that the real reason was
because Disston had said he was coming again.

Now she told herself contemptuously that she was no different from the
homesick Nebraskan, and, having made up her mind, lost no time in giving
each herder his instructions as to when and where to move his sheep.

Kate never paid wages for anything that she could do herself, so the
morning after her decision to start for the mountains she was in the
saddle and leading two work horses on the way to move Oleson's and
Bowers's camps before the sun was up.

The two sheep wagons were a considerable distance apart and the road
over the broken country to the spot where Kate wished Oleson to make his
first camp was a rough one, therefore it was late in the afternoon when
Kate reached Bowers's camp--too late to pull the wagon toward the
mountains that night.

She pulled the harness from the tired horses, slipped on their nose bags
with their allowance of oats, and, when they had finished, hobbled and
turned them loose to graze in the wide gulch where the wagon stood. Then
she warmed up a few pieces of fried mutton--and this, with a piece of
baking-powder bread and a cup of water from the rivulet that trickled
through the gulch, constituted her frugal supper.

While driving the sheep wagon it had required all her attention to throw
the brake to keep the wagon off the horses' heels, and release it as
quickly, to select the best of a precarious road and maintain the
wagon's equilibrium, but immediately the strain was over and her mind
free to ramble, her thoughts reverted at once to Disston, in spite of
her efforts to direct them elsewhere.

Activity is the recognized panacea for a heavy heart, and efficacious
while it lasts, but with a lull it makes itself fe