You know Jim claims to be religious--he's one
of the elders in the church down there--and he likes to keep his word
good. After you was gone he come around to me and said: 'That's all
right, Shep, about what I said to that cowman, but there's one thing I
want you always to remember--feed my sheep!' Well, them's my orders."

"Well," commented Hardy, "that may be good Scripture, but what about
my cows? There's plenty of feed out on The Rolls for Jim's sheep, but
my cows have got to drink. We cowmen have been sheeped out of all the
lower country down there, and here we are, crowded clear up against
the rocks. You've stolen a march on us and of course you're entitled
to some feed, but give us a chance. You've been sheeped out yourself,
and you know what it feels like. Now all I ask of you is that you turn
out through this pass and go down onto The Rolls. If you'll do that I
can turn all the rest of the sheep and keep my cows from starving, but
if you go through me they'll all go through me, and I'm done for. I
don't make any threats and I can't offer any inducements, but I just
ask you, as a white man, to go around."

As he ended his appeal he stood with his hands thrown out, and the
sheepman looked at him, smiling curiously.

"Well," he said, at last, "you're a new kind of cowman on me, pardner,
but I'll go you, if Jim throws a fit."

He advanced, and held out his hand, and Hardy took it.

"If all sheepmen were like you," he said, "life would be worth living
in these parts." And so, in a friendship unparalleled in the history
of the Four Peaks country, a sheepman and a cowman parted in
amity--and the sheep went around.

CHAPTER XI

JUMPED

Winter, the wonted season of torrential rains, six weeks' grass, and
budding flowers, when the desert is green and the sky washed clean and
blue, followed close in the wake of the sheep, which went drifting
past Hidden Water like an army without banners. But alas for Hidden
Water and the army of sheep!--in this barren Winter the torrential
rains did not fall, the grass did not sprout, and the flowers did not
bloom. A bleak north wind came down from the mountains, cold and dry
and crackling with electricity, and when it had blown its stint it
died down in a freezing, dusty silence.

Then the mighty south--the rain--wind that blows up out of Papagueria,
rose up, big with promise, and whirled its dust clouds a thousand feet
high against the horizon. But, after much labor