“What if I did keep it? You’re fussy, and you’re a fool! What is my father’s is mine, or it will be mine some day; I just took a little of it ahead of time, that’s all. It will all be mine, when he goes over the divide.” Justin was horrified. Ben had expressed reckless and defiant views on many subjects, but nothing like this flippant speculation concerning his father’s death. “I won’t listen to you when you talk that way,” he declared; and he moved away. CHAPTER X PIPINGS OF PAN The result of this quarrel was that Justin was banished temporarily from the ranch, though it was not assigned as the reason for his exile. Fogg had been forced to take a flock of sheep in payment for a debt owed him by a sheepman. The sheep were already in Paradise Valley, and were to be sent at once into the mountains. Davison ordered Justin to take charge of these sheep, and hurried shepherd and flock into the hills, while Lucy was temporarily away from home. Justin could not rebel against this order except mentally, if he wished to remain in Davison’s employment and retain, or regain, his good-will. Before setting forth he left a letter for Lucy with Pearl Newcome, and was sure she would get it. Yet he departed from the ranch with a heavy heart; and as he went on his way he questioned why he and not another had been selected for this life of lonely exile in the mountains. He was almost sure it was because of his trouble with Ben. Justin was assisted in driving the sheep to the high altitudes, where they were to graze until cold weather would make it advisable to bring them into the lower foot-hills. A sufficient supply of food for a month or more was taken along, and he was helped in the work of erecting a brush-and-pole house. He was well up among the pines and aspens, where the nights are always cool, with often a sharp frost even in mid-summer. Snow banks were in sight, and here and there streams and small lakes of the purest ice water. Occasionally a lordly elk crashed through a grove, or came out with such suddenness on the lonely herder and his woolly charges that it whistled and fled in astonishment. Black-tailed deer passed frequently on the slopes, and now and then Justin came upon the track of a bear. The only animals he could not love were the worthless coyotes, that made life a burden to him and murdered sleep in their efforts to slay the sheep. Of all, the sheep were the most vexatious and stupid, having no originality of impulse, and being maddeningly, monotonously alike. When hungry, in the earlier part of the day, they exhausted his strength and that of his dog, as he followed them, while they swarmed everywhere, nibbling, nibbling, with a continual, nerve-racking “baa-a-a! baa-a-a!” Justin could not wonder that sheep-herders often go mad. The sheep were more than two thousand in number; and to keep anything like a count of them, so that he might be sure that the flock was not being devastated by the sly coyotes, was trying work.