The shearers this year were a band of forty or so Mexicans from Uvalde and other border towns, jollily travelling two hundred miles up the country in charge of a _capitan_ and _grande capitan_ responsible fellows, who had contracted with the ranchmen of the neighborhood to do their shearing. Early in May we heard of them on the creeks, and made preparation for them, the shed and corrals being put to rights in every detail, the supply of bacon and _frijoles_ augmented at the store, and all hands, including the stranger within the gates, set to hemming wool-sacks with coarse twine and sailors' needles. One evening, but shrewdly in time for supper, a couple of Mexicans on horses, thridding their way through the mesquites, came into the ranch, quickly followed by others, one or two on _burros_, more on ponies, most on the skeleton of a prairieschooner drawn by four horses,--and the shearers had arrived. They were a dark, black-eyed, hilarious set, some forty odd in all, rather ragged as a crew, but with extremes of full and neat attire or insufficient tatters according as the goddess Fortune or the Mexican demi-goddess Monte had smiled or frowned; but all were equally jolly, and almost all fiercely armed, the greatest tatterdemalion and sans-culotte of all with a handsome Winchester, in a case, slung over brown shoulders that would have been better for a whole shirt. The hat, though cheap, was, even among the ragged, frequently elaborate, and served excellently to carry off a protruding toe or knee, or to reconcile the association in one person of an ancient boot with a still more ancient shoe. Many of these fellows were undoubtedly trustworthy, other some as undoubtedly, if they had had consciences, would have had homicides on them; but all were light-hearted. Life is one thing to the man who lets the breath out of his companion with a knife, and, leaving his body in the brush, straightway goes about his idleness laughing, and quite another to him who cannot get over the hideous fact that he has tied his cravat awry.