it and cooking breakfast and packing, Jean did not make a very early
start. On this last lap of his long journey he had slowed down.
He was weary of hurrying; the change from weeks in the glaring sun
and dust-laden wind to this sweet coot darkly green and brown forest
was very welcome; he wanted to linger along the shaded trail. This
day he made sure would see him reach the Rim. By and by he lost the
trail. It had just worn out from lack of use. Every now and then
Jean would cross an old trail, and as he penetrated deeper into the
forest every damp or dusty spot showed tracks of turkey, deer, and
bear. The amount of bear sign surprised him. Presently his keen
nostrils were assailed by a smell of sheep, and soon he rode into
a broad sheep, trail. From the tracks Jean calculated that the
sheep had passed there the day before.

An unreasonable antipathy seemed born in him. To be sure he had been
prepared to dislike sheep, and that was why he was unreasonable. But
on the other hand this band of sheep had left a broad bare swath,
weedless, grassless, flowerless, in their wake. Where sheep grazed
they destroyed. That was what Jean had against them.

An hour later he rode to the crest of a long parklike slope, where
new green grass was sprouting and flowers peeped everywhere. The
pines appeared far apart; gnarled oak trees showed rugged and gray
against the green wall of woods. A white strip of snow gleamed like
a moving stream away down in the woods.

Jean heard the musical tinkle of bells and the baa-baa of sheep and
the faint, sweet bleating of lambs. As he road toward these sounds
a dog ran out from an oak thicket and barked at him. Next Jean smelled
a camp fire and soon he caught sight of a curling blue column of smoke,