The Fighting Shepherdess

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 lagging 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!"

While the sheep fed slowly toward the summit, Bowers sauntered after--tall, lank, neutral-tinted, his thoughts going round and round in the groove peculiar to herders--the sheep before him and their individual characteristics, the condition of the range, the weather, religion, the wickedness of "High Society," the items on the next list he would send to the mail-order house in Chicago.

And so the afternoon passed as had hundreds like it in Bowers's life until he sat down finally on a rock to watch the rays of the setting sun paint the clouds in ever-changing colors and lose himself in reflections, studying the gorgeous sea surrounding him.

It would be a great place up there for a feller's soul to float--provided he had one--restin' a while in that yaller one, or the rose-colored one up yonder, or takin' a dip into that hazy purple and disappearin'. Personally, he told himself, he believed that when he was dead he was dead as a nit, and he'd never seen anything about dying folks to make him think otherwise.

That Scissor-bill from back East in Ioway that died of heart failure jest slipped and slid off his chair, slow and easy like a sack of bran--he didn't show in his eyes any visions of future glory when he stretched on the floor behind the stove in the bunkhouse and closed 'em for good. Sometimes they kicked and struggled like pizened sheep in their sufferin', and again they went off easy and comfortable, but without any glimpses of Paradise brightenin' their countenances, so far as he could notice.

If he had a soul, all right; if he didn't, all right; that's the way he figgered it.