Page:Edison Marshall--Shepherds of the wild.djvu/105

Rh. He had been what men call—without greatly bothering to discriminate—a gentleman. He had lived the life that men of his class were expected to live, drinking rather more than was good for him, wasting time, and being frightfully and immeasurably bored. Now—by the exigencies of the hour, by a single prank of fate—he was simply a herder of sheep. He was giving all he possessed of time and skill to a job that as a rule only Mexicans and uneducated foreigners deigned to accept. He suddenly laughed when he remembered that—although the flock owner and himself had not yet agreed on terms—he would probably secure wages for the time spent. Two dollars a day, perhaps,—such a sum as he ordinarily spent for cigarettes. Thinking of cigarettes he delved into his pocket, searching for a new pipe that on the advice of the Old Colonel at his club he had brought with him to Smoky Land and which had not yet been tried.

It had cost, he remembered, something less than a dollar. The Old Colonel himself had passed upon it, explaining certain virtues in regard to it that Hugh had since forgotten. "You'll like a pipe," the old gentleman had said, "if you ever get into a real outdoor-man's mood. Cigarettes are all right, of course—probably don't give you the nicotine kick that a pipe does—but a pipe has been the woodsman's smoke from Sir Walter Raleigh and the Indians down."

He found the pipe and meditatively filled it