The Fighting Shepherdess

The lead sheep started for the bed-ground.

"Kick up your dust piles good, Mother Biddies, and git comfortable. Hurry up and blow out your lights so I can git to my readin'."

The light had faded, and the dingy gray-white backs became indistinguishable from the rounded tops of the sagebrush, as night came upon the mountain. With much sniffling, bleating, asthmatic coughing and crackling of small split hoofs, each sheep settled itself in practically the same little hollow it had previously pawed out to fit itself. A soft rumble came from the band as they stirred in their little wallows.

Then Bowers fired a barrel of his shotgun into the air as a reminder to possible coyotes in the rim rocks that he was present, and lighted the lantern in his tepee.

"I'll have to warsh that chimbly in a couple o' years," he commented as he set the lantern down and reached for a worn and tattered mail-order catalogue in the corner.

Fumbling under his pillow, he produced the stub of a pencil and a tablet, after which, crosslegged on his blankets and soogan, he pored over the catalogue. Jewelry, clothing, cooking utensils and upholstered furniture were on the list which Bowers, with corrugated forehead and much chewing of the pencil, made out laboriously. When the amount reached three hundred and sixty-five dollars, he hesitated over a further expenditure of nine for a manicure set and a pair of pink satin sleeve holders. That was a good deal of money to spend in one evening.

"Thunder!" he finally said recklessly. "No use to deny myself! I ain't goin' to send it, anyway!"

Having written it all in proper form and affixed his signature, he folded the paper and slipped it under his bed along with some three dozen other such orders that never got any farther.

This was Bowers's evening diversion, one in which he experienced all the thrills of purchasing without the pain of paying. He entertained a peculiar feeling of friendship for the House whose catalogue had helped him through long winter evenings, when night came at four, and interminable spells of wet weather, so when he sent a bona fide order to Chicago he never failed to inquire as to the health of each member of the firm and inform them that his own was excellent at time of writing, adding such items concerning the condition of the range and stock as he thought would interest them.

Bowers now slipped the lantern inside a flour sack, went outside in his stocking feet, and wedged the lantern between two rocks. The light "puzzled" coyotes, according to his theory, and gave them something to think about besides getting into his sheep.