"No," he said, at last, "it is not Kitty." And then he lapsed back into silence, his head turned as before. The wind breathed through the _corredor_, bringing with it a distant, plaintive bleating--the sheep, waiting beyond the turbid river to cross. "I have forgotten about Kitty," he said absently. "For me there is nothing in the world but sheep. Can't you hear them bleating down there?" he cried, throwing out his hands. "Can't you smell them? Ah, Lucy, if you knew sheep as I do! I never hear a sheep now that I don't think of that day last year when they came pouring out of Hell's Hip Pocket with a noise like the end of the world. If I had been there to stop them they might never have taken the range--but after that, all through the hot summer when the cattle were dying for feed, every time the wind came up and roared in my ears I would hear sheep--_baaa_, _baaa_--and now I hear them again." He paused and looked up at her intently. "Do you know what that noise means to me?" he demanded, almost roughly. "It means little calves dying around the water hole; mothers lowing for their little ones that they have left to starve; it means long lines of cows following me out over the mesa for brush, and all the trees cut down. Ah, Lucy, how can your father talk of waiting when it means as much as that?" "But last year was a drought," protested Lucy pitifully. "Will it be as bad this year?" "Every bit! Did you notice that plain between Bender and the river? It will be like that in a week if we let them cross the river." "Oh," cried Lucy, "then you--do you mean to turn them back?" "The river is very high," answered Hardy sombrely. "They cannot cross." And then as a quail strikes up leaves and dust to hide her nest, he launched forth quickly upon a story of the flood. The Salagua was long in flood that Spring. Day after day, while the sheep wandered uneasily along its banks rearing up to strip the last remnants of browse from the tips of willows and burro bushes, it rolled ponderously forth from its black-walled gorge and flowed past the crossing, deep and strong, sucking evenly into the turbid whirlpool that waited for its prey. At the first approach of the invaders the unconsidered zeal of Judge Ware overcame him; he was for peace, reason, the saner judgment that comes from wider views and a riper mind, and, fired by the hope of peaceful truce, he rode furtively along the river waving a white handkerchief whenever he saw a sheep-herder, and motioning him to cross. But however anxious he was for an interview the desires of the sheepmen did not lean in that direction, and they only stared at him stolidly or pretended not to see.