t, there came
no nibbling wethers, nor starving cattle; and the mountain sheep which
had browsed there in the old days were now hiding on the topmost crags
of the Superstitions to escape the rifles of the destroyers. All the
world without was laid waste and trampled by hurrying feet, but the
garden of Hidden Water was still kept inviolate, a secret shrine
consecrated to Nature and Nature's God.

As she stood in the presence of all its beauty a mist came into Lucy's
eyes and she turned away.

"Oh, Rufus," she cried, "why don't you live up here always instead of
wasting your life in that awful struggle with the sheep? You
could--why, you could do anything up here!"

"Yes," assented Hardy, "it is a beautiful spot--I often come up here
when I am weary with it all--but a man must do a man's work, you know;
and my work is with the sheep. When I first came to Hidden Water I
knew nothing of the sheep. I thought the little lambs were pretty; the
ewes were mothers, the herders human beings. I tried to be friends
with them, to keep the peace and abide by the law; but now that I've
come to know them I agree with Jeff, who has been fighting them for
twenty years. There is something about the smell of sheep which robs
men of their humanity; they become greedy and avaricious; the more
they make the more they want. Of all the sheepmen that I know there
isn't one who would go around me out of friendship or pity--and I have
done favors for them all. But they're no friends of mine now," he
added ominously. "I have to respect my friends, and I can't respect a
man who is all hog. There's no pretence on either side now,
though--they're trying to sheep us out and we are trying to fight them
off, and if it ever comes to a show-down--well--"

He paused, and his eyes glowed with a strange light.

"You know I haven't very much to live for, Miss Lucy," he said
earnestly, "but if I had all that God could give me I'd stand by Jeff
against the sheep. It's all right to be a poet or an artist, a lover
of truth and beauty, and all that, but if a man won't stand up for his
friends when they're in trouble he's a kind of closet philosopher that
shrinks from all the realities of life--a poor, puny creature, at the
best."

He stood up very straight as he poured out this torrent of words,
gazing at her intently, but with his eyes set, as if he beheld some
vision. Yet whether it was of himself and Jeff, fighting their
hopeless battle against the sheep,