; and the
brown mocking bird, leaping for joy from the ironwood tree where his
mate was nesting, whistled the praise of the desert in the ecstatic
notes of love. In all that land which some say God forgot, there was
naught but life and happiness, for God had sent the rain.

The sun was high in the heavens when, as they neared the summit of
the broad pass, a sudden taint came down the wind, whose only burden
had been the fragrance of resinous plants, of wetted earth, and of
green things growing. A distant clamor, like the babble of many
voices or the surf-beats of a mighty sea, echoed dimly between the
_chuck-a-chuck_ of their horses' feet, and as Hardy glanced up
inquiringly his companion's lip curled and he muttered:

"Sheep!"

They rode on in silence. The ground, which before had been furred with
Indian wheat and sprouting six weeks' grass, now showed the imprints
of many tiny feet glozed over by the rain, and Hardy noticed vaguely
that something was missing--the grass was gone. Even where a minute
before it had covered the level flats in a promise of maturity, rising
up in ranker growth beneath the thorny trees and cactus, its place was
now swept bare and all the earth trampled into narrow, hard-tamped
trail. Then as a brush shed and corrals, with a cook tent and a couple
of water wagons in the rear, came into view, the ground went suddenly
stone bare, stripped naked and trampled smooth as a floor. Never
before had Hardy seen the earth so laid waste and desolate, the very
cactus trimmed down to its woody stump and every spear of root grass
searched out from the shelter of the spiny _chollas_. He glanced once
more at his companion, whose face was sullen and unresponsive; there
was a well-defined bristle to his short mustache and he rowelled his
horse cruelly when he shied at the blatting horde.

The shearing was in full blast, every man working with such feverish
industry that not one of them stopped to look up. From the receiving
corral three Mexicans in slouched hats and jumpers drove the sheep
into a broad chute, yelling and hurling battered oil cans at the
hindmost; by the chute an American punched them vigorously forward
with a prod, and yet another thrust them into the pens behind the
shearers, who bent to their work with a sullen, back-breaking stoop.
Each man held between his knees a sheep, gripped relentlessly, that
flinched and kicked at times when the shears clipped off patches of
flesh; and there in t