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I did not like to hunt in a country where cattle ranged, no matter how wild they were. Then when we came to a forested ridge bare of grass and smelling of sheep, that robbed the forest of a little more glamour. Mexican sheep-herders drove their flocks up this far sometimes. Haught said bear, lion, lynx, and coyote, sometimes the big gray wolves, followed the sheep.
The Indians of the Southwest came in, in 1848, under the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, although with some of them other treaties have been made and their lands added to by executive order. The Navajoes, about twenty-two thousand in number, now own more than twelve million acres in Arizona and New Mexico. They are sheep-herders and blanket-weavers, and are entirely self-supporting.
The Basques are fearless and daring, and are noted throughout the world as excellent sailors and sheep-herders. When you visit the Basques, you will notice that they all like to eat enormous meals, they like to gamble, and they like to play "jai alai," a very fast ball game which they invented.
"Walker, I'm worried," Bentley confessed as they stood outside the last and lowest place of diversion that remained to be visited in the town. "I tell you, it flies up and hits a man that way," protested Walker. "Sheep-herders go that way all of a sudden after a year or two without a taste of booze, sometimes.
"Up in Utah there's a wild region called Pink Cliffs. A few poor sheep-herders try to raise sheep in the valleys. They wouldn't be so poor if it was not for the grizzly and black bears that live on the sheep. We'll go up there, find a place where grass and water can be had, and camp. We'll notify the sheep-herders we are there for business.
To be alone, to live with nature, to feel the elements, to labor and dream and idle and climb and sleep unhampered by duty, by worry, by restriction, by the petty interests of men this had always been his ideal of living. Cowboys, riders, sheep-herders, farmers these toiled on from one place and one job to another for the little money doled out to them.
"Don't happen to have a picture of the girl, do you?" "If I did, would I show it to you?" "You might. You might even give it to me." Cavanagh looked at the man as if he were dreaming. "You must be crazy." "Oh no, I'm not. Sheep-herders do go twisted, but I'm not in the business long enough for that. I'm just a bit nutty about that girl." He paused a moment.
It had a famous bar, to which rode the sheep-herders, the cowboys, the ranchers, the dry-farmers of the surrounding country yes, and sometimes, thirstiest of all, the workmen from more distant oil-fields, a dangerous crew. Millings at that time had not yielded to the generally increasing "dryness" of the West.
"I considered that, too," said the philosopher. "But I watched you. I'll never be fool enough to entirely trust a woman again. You all lie!" She wondered how he had arrived there so quickly and silently, for he gave no evidence of fatigue or heat. She did not know the dry endurance which a life like his builds up in a man. Sheep-herders in that country are noted for their fleetness.
It was in following up this belated clue that the pilgrims had come to the Ferry inn, crossing by team from valley to valley, cutting off a great bend of the Oregon Short Line as it traverses the Snake River desert; those bare high plains escarped with basalt bluffs that open every fifty miles or so to let a road crawl down to some little rope-ferry supported by sheep-herders, ditch contractors, miners, emigrants, ranchmen, all the wild industries of a country in the dawn of enterprise.
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