Naturally it required some time to compose the telegram in a style satisfactory to all parties. Outside, cars banged together, an engine snorted stertorously, and suffocating puffs of coal smoke now and then invaded the waiting-room while the Happy Family were sending that message of cheer to Chicago. If you are curious, the final version of their combined sentiments was not at all spectacular. It said merely: “Everything fine here. Take good care of the Old Man. How's the Kid stacking up?” It was signed simply “The Bunch.” “Mary's little lambs are here yet, I see,” the Native Son remarked carelessly when they went out. “Enough lambs for all the Marys in the country. How would you like to be Mary?” “Not for me,” Irish declared, and turned his face away from the stench of them. Others there were who rode the length of the train with faces averted and looks of disdain; cowmen, all of them, they shared the range prejudice, and took no pains to hide it. The wind blew strong from the east, that day; it whistled through the open, double-decked cars packed with gray, woolly bodies, whose voices were ever raised in strident complaint; and the stench of them smote the unaccustomed nostrils of the Happy Family and put them to disgusted flight up the track and across it to where the air was clean again. “Honest to grandma, I'd make the poorest kind of a sheepherder,” Big Medicine bawled earnestly, when they were well away from the noise and smell of the detested animals. “If I had to herd sheep, by cripes, do you know what I'd do? I'd haze 'em into a coulee and turn loose with a good rifle and plenty uh shells, and call in the coyotes to git a square meal. That's the way I'd herd sheep. It's the only way you can shut 'em up. They just 'baa-aa, baa-aa, baa-aa' from the time they're dropped till somebody kills 'em off. Honest, they blat in their sleep. I've heard 'em.” “When you and the dogs were shooting off coyotes?” asked Andy Green pointedly, and so precipitated dissension which lasted for ten miles. CHAPTER V. Sheep Slim rising first from dinner on the next day but one opened the door of the mess-house, and stood there idly picking his teeth before he went about his work. After a minute of listening to the boys “joshing” old Patsy about some gooseberry pies he had baked without sugar, he turned his face outward, threw up his head like a startled bull, and began to sniff. “Say, I smell sheep, by golly!” he announced in the bellowing tone which was his conversational voice, and sniffed again. “Oh, that's just a left-over in your system from the dose yuh got in town Sunday,” Weary explained soothingly. “I've smelled sheep, and tasted sheep, and dreamed sheep, ever since.” “No, by golly, it's sheep! It ain't no memory. I--I b'hieve I hear 'em, too, by golly.” Slim stepped out away from the building and faced suspiciously down the coulee.