"It's a new one on me," Weary testified, heading the procession
down to the stable. "If they belonged anywhere in this part of
the country, though, they wouldn't be acting the way they are.
They'd be wise to the fact that it ain't healthy."

Even while he spoke his eyes were fixed with cold intensity upon
a fringe of gray across the coulee below the little pasture. To
the nostrils of the outraged Happy Family was borne that
indescribable aroma which betrays the presence of sheep; that
aroma which sheepmen love and which cattlemen hate, and which a
favorable wind will carry a long way.

They slapped saddles on their horses in record time that morning,
and raced down the coulee ironically shouting commiserating
sentences to the unfortunate Andy, who rode slowly up to the
mess-house for the lunch which Patsy had waiting for him in a
flour sack, and afterward climbed the grade and loped along
outside the line fence to a point opposite the sheep and the
shouting horsemen, who forced them back by weight of numbers.

This morning the herders were not quite so passive. The
bug-killer still scowled, but he spoke without the preliminary
sulky silence of the day before,

"We're goin' across the coulee," he growled. "Them's orders. We
range south uh here."

"No, you don't," Weary dissented calmly. "Not by a long shot, you
don't. You're going back where you come from--if you ask me. And