Page:Caroline Lockhart--The Fighting Shepherdess.djvu/238

 have you land in the pit of his stummick with them sharp hoofs of yourn. But you're only an innercent little sheep, and they wan't no sense in his tryin' to stomp on you.

'* Well, I got to be stirrin' up them wooUes. Sorry I got to tie you, but you're gittin' such a durned nuisance, with playin' half the night and slidin' down my tepee. I'll give you the big feed when I come down in the mornin', so say your prayers and go to bed like a good lamb orta."

Bowers tied Mary to the wagon wheel, and, with a final rub and pat and admonition, left the lamb, to start the herd feeding toward their bed-ground on the sunmiit

" Come out o' that. Mother Biddies ! Better start now and go to fillin' up. I want them children of yourn to weigh sixty poun' each, come fall."

The sheep, which had been lying in the shade or standing in a circle with their heads together as a protection against the flies, obeyed slowly, and Bowers followed as they grazed their way toward his tepee gleaming white among the rocks on the top of the mountain.

Occasionally he stopped to pick up something and examine it — a curious pebble, a rock that might 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 lading 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 I"

While the sheep fed slowly toward the summit, Bowers