"You can't understand the feelin's of a fambly man away from home." He rolled his eyes sentimentally. The subject was one which was dear to the uxorious herder. He pulled out the tremolo stop in his voice and quavered: "You feel like you're goin' 'round with nothin' inside of you--a empty shell--or a puff-ball with the puff out of it. You got a feelin' all the time like somethin's pullin' you." He looked so hard towards Nebraska that he all but toppled. "Somethin' here," he laid a hand on his heart, approximately, "like a plaster drawin'. Love," eloquently, "changes your hull nature. It makes lambs out o' roughnecks and puts drunks on the wagon. It turns you kind and forgivin' and takes the fight out o' you. It makes you--" "Maudlin! And weak! And inefficient!" Kate interrupted savagely. "It distracts your thoughts and dissipates your energy. It impairs your judgment, lessens your will power. It's for persons who have no ambition or who have achieved it. For the struggler there's nothing worth bothering with that doesn't take him forward." "That's a pretty cold-blooded doctrind," declared the shocked herder. "If 'twant for love--" "If 'twant for love," Kate mimicked harshly, "you wouldn't be indulging in a spell of homesickness and leaving your sheep to the coyotes! Sentiment is lovely in books, but it's expensive in business, so I'm going to fire you. Bowers will be here with the supply wagon to-morrow, so I'll take the sheep until he can relieve me. I'll pay you off and you can walk back to the ranch or," grimly, "take a short cut through the Pass up there--to 'Nebrasky.'" CHAPTER XVIII A WARNING "I can't hold dem ewes and lambs on de bed-ground no more! Dey know it's time to be gettin' up to deir summer range; nobody has to tell a sheep when to move on." The Swede swirled his little round hat on his equally round little head and winked rapidly as he gave vent to his indignant protest. Kate looked at him in silence for a moment and then said in sudden decision: "You can start to-morrow, Oleson." The early summer was fulfilling the promise of a hot rainless spring. Bitter Creek was drying up rapidly and the water holes, stagnant and strongly alkaline, had already poisoned a few sheep. The herders could not understand the sheep woman's delay in moving to the mountains. "I'm runnin' myself ragged over these hills tryin' to hold back them yearlin's," Bunch declared. Bowers, too, having his own special brand of grief with the buck herd, had looked the interrogation he had not voiced. Kate herself knew that the sheep should have been higher up, away from the ticks and flies and on good food and water all of two weeks ago, but, on one pretext or another, had postponed giving the order to start, though she knew in her heart that the real reason was because Disston had said he was coming again.