"No denyin' 'twould have made a preacher peevish to have you land in the pit of his stummick with them sharp hoofs of yourn. But you're only an innercent little sheep, and they wan't no sense in his tryin' to stomp on you. "Well, I got to be stirrin' up them woolies. Sorry I got to tie you, but you're gittin' such a durned nuisance, with playin' half the night and slidin' down my tepee. I'll give you the big feed when I come down in the mornin', so say your prayers and go to bed like a good lamb orta." Bowers tied Mary to the wagon wheel, and, with a final rub and pat and admonition, left the lamb, to start the herd feeding toward their bed-ground on the summit. "Come out o' that, Mother Biddies! Better start now and go to fillin' up. I want them children of yourn to weigh sixty poun' each, come fall." The sheep, which had been lying in the shade or standing in a circle with their heads together as a protection against the flies, obeyed slowly, and Bowers followed as they grazed their way toward his tepee gleaming white among the rocks on the top of the mountain. Occasionally he stopped to pick up something and examine it--a curious pebble, a rock that might make his fortune, a bit of grey moss, which always made him wonder what there was about it, dry as punk, brittle and tasteless, to make sheep prefer it to far better feed, to his notion--salt sage, black sage, grease wood, or even cactus with the thorns pawed off. No accounting for sheep anyway--"the better you knew 'em the less you understood 'em." "Git to the high hills, Sister!" He tossed a pebble at a lagging ewe. "Want to feed all day in the same spot? Climb, there, Granny! Better look out or you'll git throwed in with the gummers and shipped afore you know it!" While the sheep fed slowly toward the summit, Bowers sauntered after--tall, lank, neutral-tinted, his thoughts going round and round in the groove peculiar to herders--the sheep before him and their individual characteristics, the condition of the range, the weather, religion, the wickedness of "High Society," the items on the next list he would send to the mail-order house in Chicago. And so the afternoon passed as had hundreds like it in Bowers's life until he sat down finally on a rock to watch the rays of the setting sun paint the clouds in ever-changing colors and lose himself in reflections, studying the gorgeous sea surrounding him. It would be a great place up there for a feller's soul to float--provided he had one--restin' a while in that yaller one, or the rose-colored one up yonder, or takin' a dip into that hazy purple and disappearin'. Personally, he told himself, he believed that when he was dead he was dead as a nit, and he'd never seen anything about dying folks to make him think otherwise.