Page:Sheep Limit (1928).pdf/14

 tainly. He had gone out with the paint of the university still wet on him to put brains into Kansas politics, where that essential had been wanting, it appeared, for a long time. One who aspired to the governorship, with the United States Senate in the distant offing, had put young Rawlins into the editorship of a little boiler-plate weekly out in the short grass region. After a little more than a year of it the man who owned the paper decided Rawlins was not big enough for the task ahead of him. As for the editor, he had come to the emphatic conclusion quite a while ahead of his patron that Horace Greeley himself could not have boosted that man over the political fence.

Perhaps this is as far back as it is necessary to go in the history of a man who never became much of a hero at the best, and only mildly notable in a purely local way. Yet to explain that stockyards job it is only fair to Rawlins to say he was well qualified for it by early training. He was a product of the short grass region; he had left the cow camp for the campus; put down the branding-iron and reata to stumble along with the sage of the Sabine farm.

It was while on the stockyards job, shuttling cattle from pen to pen, that Rawlins became inoculated by the thought of sheep. He saw sheepmen come pouring trainload after trainload of lambs into the market for the Christmas trade, the increase and profit of their distant flocks, realizing such sums of money as newspaper reporters and editors could not hope to earn through the course of long and laborious lives. These sheepmen were so accustomed to gathering in the reward of their virtuous foresight that it seemed to