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saw no more of Peck, that errant partner of the sheeplady having gone on according to his intention. Let Mrs. Peck learn as she might of her husband's desertion, Rawlins said; he was not going around to the ranch to carry the news.

He was not sorry for her, knowing that it had been pretty much as Peck had said. She had married him to save the expense of a hired man, and he had married her in the lure of that bundle of money which Tippie had complained of as being troublesome to carry around. Both of them had been properly soaked.

Beyond the track of the storm that had driven them to shelter last night, Rawlins found the range parched under the ardent sun of July. It looked as if no rain had fallen in the Dry Wood country for months. The meager grass, standing in bunches, thin-bladed, feeble, was dry; the sage grey and dusty, showing little of the bright green at its tips upon which the sheep thrived, their flesh taking its flavor, making the mutton of the inter-mountain ranges the choicest in all the world.

It looked as if hard days might be ahead for the sheepmen in that country, as Clemmons had predicted, with half their flocks left to eat this sparse grazing