“Well, neither that one you mention, nor this one of Pierce’s man is any of our funeral. We’re on the trail with Lovell’s cattle. You should keep nearer the earth.” There was a long silence after this reproof of the foreman. It was evident there was a gloom settling over the outfit. Our thoughts were ranging wide. At last Rod Wheat spoke up and said that in order to get the benefit of all the variations, the blues were not a bad thing to have. But the depression of our spirits was not so easily dismissed. In order to avoid listening to the gloomy tales that were being narrated around the camp-fire, a number of us got up and went out as if to look up the night horses on picket. The Rebel and I pulled our picket pins and changed our horses to fresh grazing, and after lying down among the horses, out of hearing of the camp, for over an hour, returned to the wagon expecting to retire. A number of the boys were making down their beds, as it was already late; but on our arrival at the fire one of the boys had just concluded a story, as gloomy as the others which had preceded it. “These stories you are all telling to-night,” said Flood, “remind me of what Lige Link said to the book agent when he was shearing sheep. ‘I reckon,’ said Lige, ‘that book of yours has a heap sight more poetry in it than there is in shearing sheep.’ I wish I had gone on guard to-night, so I could have missed these stories.” At this juncture the first guard rode in, having been relieved, and John Officer, who had exchanged places on guard that night with Moss Strayhorn, remarked that the cattle were uneasy. “This outfit,” said he, “didn’t half water the herd to-day. One third of them hasn’t bedded down yet, and they don’t act as if they aim to, either. There’s no excuse for it in a well-watered country like this. I’ll leave the saddle on my horse, anyhow.” “Now that’s the result,” said our foreman, “of the hour we spent around that grave to-day, when we ought to have been tending to our job. This outfit,” he continued, when Officer returned from picketing his horse, “have been trying to hold funeral services over that Pierce man’s grave back there. You’d think so, anyway, from the tales they’ve been telling. I hope you won’t get the sniffles and tell any.”