"Well," commented Hardy, "that may be good Scripture, but what about my cows? There's plenty of feed out on The Rolls for Jim's sheep, but my cows have got to drink. We cowmen have been sheeped out of all the lower country down there, and here we are, crowded clear up against the rocks. You've stolen a march on us and of course you're entitled to some feed, but give us a chance. You've been sheeped out yourself, and you know what it feels like. Now all I ask of you is that you turn out through this pass and go down onto The Rolls. If you'll do that I can turn all the rest of the sheep and keep my cows from starving, but if you go through me they'll all go through me, and I'm done for. I don't make any threats and I can't offer any inducements, but I just ask you, as a white man, to go around." As he ended his appeal he stood with his hands thrown out, and the sheepman looked at him, smiling curiously. "Well," he said, at last, "you're a new kind of cowman on me, pardner, but I'll go you, if Jim throws a fit." He advanced, and held out his hand, and Hardy took it. "If all sheepmen were like you," he said, "life would be worth living in these parts." And so, in a friendship unparalleled in the history of the Four Peaks country, a sheepman and a cowman parted in amity--and the sheep went around. CHAPTER XI JUMPED Winter, the wonted season of torrential rains, six weeks' grass, and budding flowers, when the desert is green and the sky washed clean and blue, followed close in the wake of the sheep, which went drifting past Hidden Water like an army without banners. But alas for Hidden Water and the army of sheep!--in this barren Winter the torrential rains did not fall, the grass did not sprout, and the flowers did not bloom. A bleak north wind came down from the mountains, cold and dry and crackling with electricity, and when it had blown its stint it died down in a freezing, dusty silence. Then the mighty south--the rain--wind that blows up out of Papagueria, rose up, big with promise, and whirled its dust clouds a thousand feet high against the horizon. But, after much labor, the keen, steely, north wind rushed suddenly down upon the black clouds, from whose edges the first spatter of rain had already spilled, and swept them from the horizon, howling mournfully the while and wrestling with the gaunt trees at night. In shaded places the icicles from slow-seeping waters clung for days unmelted, and the migrant ducks, down from the Arctic, rose up from the half-frozen sloughs and winged silently away to the far south. Yet through it all the Dos S cattle came out unscathed, feeding on what dry grass and browse the sheep had left on Bronco Mesa; and in the Spring, when all hope seemed past, it rained.