Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/457

 'Then comes a frost, a killing frost.' Well, not exactly that, though frosts of considerable severity do occur, hot as is the climate; but it ' sets in dry.' No rain comes after spring; none during summer; none in autumn; curious to remark, none even in winter—except, of course, insignificant or partial showers. That seems strange, does it not? Instead of from sixteen to twenty-six inches of rain in twelve months, there fall but six—even less perhaps. What is the consequence of all this? The creeks, the dams, the rivers dry up; the grass perishes; what little pasturage there may be, is eaten up by the famishing flocks.

During the summer it does not appear that the evil will be of such magnitude. The stock look pretty well. There is water; and the diet of dust, leaves, and sticks, with unlimited range, and no shepherds to bother, does not seem to disagree with them. Then the autumn comes, with shorter days; longer, colder nights. Still no rain! The sheep, the cattle, even the wild horses, begin now to feel the cruel pinch of famine. The weakest perish; the strong become weak; day by day numbers of the enfeebled victims are unable to rise after the weakening influences of the chilly night. The waterholes become muddy; defiled and poisoned with the carcases of animals which have had barely strength to drag themselves to the tempting water, over many a weary mile, have drunk their fill, and then lacked power to ascend the steep bank or extricate themselves from the clinging mud. What a time of misery and despair is this for the luckless proprietor! He sees before his eyes the thousands and tens of thousands of delicately woolled sheep, in whose breeding and multiplication he has taken so much pains,—on behalf of which he has studied treatises, and gone into all the history of the merino family since the days of ancient Spanish Cabanas, Infantados, Escurials, what not,—converted into a crowd of feeble skeletons, perishing in thousands before his eyes without hope or remedy, save in the advent of rain, which, as far as appearances go, may come next year or the year after that.

Is it possible to imagine a condition more melancholy, more hopeless, more calculated to drive to suicide the hapless victim of circumstances, beyond his—beyond any man's ontrol? It has had the effect ere now. The torturing doubt, the