t make his fortune, a bit of grey moss, which
always made him wonder what there was about it, dry as punk, brittle and
tasteless, to make sheep prefer it to far better feed, to his
notion--salt sage, black sage, grease wood, or even cactus with the
thorns pawed off. No accounting for sheep anyway--"the better you knew
'em the less you understood 'em."

"Git to the high hills, Sister!" He tossed a pebble at a lagging ewe.
"Want to feed all day in the same spot? Climb, there, Granny! Better
look out or you'll git throwed in with the gummers and shipped afore you
know it!"

While the sheep fed slowly toward the summit, Bowers sauntered
after--tall, lank, neutral-tinted, his thoughts going round and round in
the groove peculiar to herders--the sheep before him and their
individual characteristics, the condition of the range, the weather,
religion, the wickedness of "High Society," the items on the next list
he would send to the mail-order house in Chicago.

And so the afternoon passed as had hundreds like it in Bowers's life
until he sat down finally on a rock to watch the rays of the setting sun
paint the clouds in ever-changing colors and lose himself in
reflections, studying the gorgeous sea surrounding him.

It would be a great place up there for a feller's soul to
float--provided he had one--restin' a while in that yaller one, or the
rose-colored one up yonder, or takin' a dip into that hazy purple and
disappearin'. Personally, he told himself, he believed that when he was
dead he was dead as a nit, and he'd never seen anything about dying
folks to make him think otherwise.

That Scissor-bill from back East in Ioway that died of heart failure
jest slipped and slid off his chair, slow and easy like a sack of
bran--he didn't show in his eyes any visions of future glory when he
stretched on the floor behind the stove in the bunkhouse and closed 'em
for good. Sometimes they kicked and struggled like pizened sheep in
their sufferin', and again they went off easy and comfortable, but
without any glimpses of Paradise brightenin' their countenances, so far
as he could notice.

If he had a soul, all right; if he didn't, all right; that's the way he
figgered it.

The lead sheep started for the bed-ground.

"Kick up your dust piles good, Mother Biddies, and git comfortable.
Hurry up and blow out your lights so I can git to my readin'."

The light had faded, and the dingy gray-white backs became
indistinguishable from