stigma of their contempt, yet afraid to go out into the street where his
enemy might be waiting for him. Much of death and blood and recklessness
"Town" had seen and condoned, but cowardice was the unforgivable sin. It
balked the rude justice of these frontiersmen and tampered with their
code, and Simpson knew that the game had gone against him.

"What was it all about? Were they in earnest, or was it only their way of
amusing themselves?" inquired Mary Carmichael, who had slipped into Mrs.
Clark’s kitchen after the men at the table had taken things in hand.

"Jim Rodney was in earnest, an’ he had reason to be. That man Simpson was
paid by a cattle outfit—now, mind, I ain’t sayin’ which—to get Jim
Rodney’s sheep off the range. They had threatened him and cut the throats
of two hundred of his herd as a warning, but Jim went right on grazin’
’em, same as he had always been in the habit of doing. Well, I’m told they
up and makes Simpson an offer to get rid of the sheep. Jim has over five
thousand, an’ it’s just before lambing, and them pore ewes, all heavy, is
being druv’ down to Watson’s shearing-pens, that Jim always shears at. Jim
an’ two herders and a couple of dawgs—least, this is the way I heard it—is
drivin’ ’em easy, ’cause, as I said before, it’s just before lambing. It
does now seem awful cruel to me to shear just before lambing, but that’s
their way out here.

"Well, nothing happens, and Jim ain’t more’n two hours from the pens an’
he comes to that place on the road that branches out over the top of a
cañon, and there some one springs out of a clump of willows an’ dashes
into the herd and drives the wether that’s leading right over the cliff.
The leaders begin to follow that wether, and they go right over the cliff
like the pore fools they are. The herder fired and tried to drive ’em
back, they tell me, an’ he an’ the dawg were shot at from the clump of