“Snooze! How can I snooze with a million little devils runnin’ up and down my backbone and adancin’ all over my head? You knowed I couldn’t sleep! You knowed I hain’t slep’ for a week! Snooze! O damn it! Hain’t I goin’ to get plenty of snoozin’ when they drag the cart out from ’n under me in the mornin’?” Sheep’s voice broke; the fire went out of his eyes; his teeth chattered as though a sudden gust of winter had struck him. “Now, Sheep,” said Hank, “don’t be so riled up like. I know it’s hard to go out that away; but it won’t last long, and it can’t hurt much after the first jerk. I reckon it don’t matter much how a feller goes out after he’s gone.” “Oh, shut that up!” The little man leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. After a considerable silence the big man produced a flask of liquor and spoke soothingly. “Want a drink, Sheepy, old man?” The little man leaped up with a glimmer of hope in his eyes. “‘Course I do! What made you keep a-hidin’ it when you knowed all along that’s what I been wantin’?” He grasped the flask and drank with great eager gulps until it was empty. Then he sat down against the cabin wall, staring fixedly at the candle flame. The empty, sheepish, cowardly face began to gain expression as the liquor mounted to his head. A light of fearlessness began to grow in his eyes. Lines appeared and deepened in his thin face, suggesting at once a certain degree of mastery and infinite malevolence. The wolf that lurks somewhere in the fastness of every man’s soul had come forth and routed the sheep. “What in thunder you doin’ with all that heavy artillery hangin’ to you, Hank? Take ’em off! I don’t need no guards. Who said I was thinkin’ of breakin’ camp? I hain’t tryin’ to run, am I? Damn me, I’m glad I done it and I’m a-goin’ to walk right straight into hell a-grinnin’! Sheep, am I?” The little man laughed a strange laugh that had the snarl of a mad wolf in it; a moment since he had been bleating like a scared lamb. “You set there and listen. Sheep, sheep, sheep! That’s what they all been a-callin’ me, but when I get done tellin’ you about it, I guess you won’t call me no sheep. Hain’t a danged one of you big fellers as would ’ve done it up better ’n me! “You’ve knowed me quite a spell, Hank; and you never knowed no bad of me till now, did you? And I hain’t had any easy trail most of the time neither. When I was jest a little feller goin’ to country school back East, the other fellers always picked onto me ’cause I was so easy to pick onto. Never had a fight in my life. Always scared to death of fightin’; sucked it in with my mother’s milk, I guess. Used to get off alone and bawl ’cause I couldn’t make myself fight. “Never was a real boy; always a kind of a stray sheep, bleatin’ around in lonesome places. Guess I must look like a sheep; anyway the boys called me that; and it stuck. Pretty hard bein’ a sheep amongst wolves, Hank!