he clamor of a thousand voices they shuttled
their keen blades unceasingly, stripping off a fleece, throwing it
aside, and seizing a fresh victim by the foot, toiling and sweating
grimly. By another chute a man stood with a paint pot, stamping a
fresh brand upon every new-shorn sheep, and in a last corral the naked
ones, their white hides spotted with blood from their cuts, blatted
frantically for their lambs. These were herded in a small inclosure,
some large and browned with the grime of the flock, others white and
wobbly, newborn from mothers frightened in the shearing; and always
that tremendous wailing chorus--_Ba-a-a_, _ba-a-a_, _ba-a-a_--and men
in greasy clothes wrestling with the wool.

To a man used to the noise and turmoil of the round-up and branding
pen and accustomed to the necessary cruelties of stock raising there
was nothing in the scene to attract attention. But Hardy was of
gentler blood, inured to the hardships of frontier life but not to its
unthinking brutality, and as he beheld for the first time the waste,
the hurry, the greed of it all, his heart turned sick and his eyes
glowed with pity, like a woman's. By his side the sunburned swarthy
giant who had taken him willy-nilly for a friend sat unmoved, his lip
curled, not at the pity of it, but because they were sheep; and
because, among the men who rushed about driving them with clubs and
sacks, he saw more than one who had eaten at his table and then
sheeped out his upper range. His saturnine mood grew upon him as he
waited and, turning to Hardy, he shouted harshly:

"There's some of your friends over yonder," he said, jerking his thumb
toward a group of men who were weighing the long sacks of wool. "Want
to go over and get acquainted?"

Hardy woke from his dream abruptly and shook his head.

"No, let's not stop," he said, and Creede laughed silently as he
reined Bat Wings into the trail. But just as they started to go one of
the men by the scales hailed them, motioning with his hand and, still
laughing cynically, the foreman of the Dos S turned back again.

"That's Jim Swope," he said, "one of our big sheep men--nice
feller--you'll like him."

He led the way to the weighing scales, where two sweating Mexicans
tumbled the eight-foot bags upon the platform, and a burly man with a
Scotch turn to his tongue called off the weights defiantly. At his
elbow stood two men, the man who had called them and a wool
buyer,--each keeping tally of the cou