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Updated: June 25, 2025
Can't you remember when you and me set on the gate of the big pasture, with our rifles acrost our knees, and waited for them sheepmen to come up and try to get them sheep through us? Did they get through? No; no one had us buffaloed. That was when you and me was men, Curly. "What have we done now? We let this damn hypocrite, Dave Wisner, get the best of us all the way down the line.
So persistent had been these that the Professor and Mr. Simms found themselves yawning in sympathy. Old Hicks, who was sitting up to prepare hot coffee for any of the sheepmen who might come in, was affected in a like manner. Had it not been for the presence of the owner of the herd Hicks might have adopted heroic measures to put a stop to Stacy's yawns.
Says there's free grass enough for all of us and that the sheepmen have just as much right to it as the cowmen. I'll ride over to his ranch this afternoon and talk with him. I can tell him the story without his giving it away." "Just as you think best. You know your man and I don't." "Yes. And if there's any such plan on foot, he'll be likely to know about it."
He turned his horse's head toward Hidden Water, never looking back at the sheep; and the cowmen fell in behind him, glad of an excuse to retreat. What were a bunch of cowboys, armed with six-shooters, to half a hundred sheepmen armed with repeating rifles and automatic revolvers?
The writer himself in the dry Southwest once knew a flock of six thousand sheep to be rounded up and killed by the cattlemen of a range into which they had intruded. The herders went with the sheep. All over the range the feud between the sheepmen and the cowmen was bitter and implacable. The issues in those quarrels rarely got into the courts but were fought out on the ground.
Simms, with Phil and the sheepmen, looked on approvingly. "You boys go at it like troopers," he smiled. "You'll have to pitch your own, too, after to-day, Philip." "We'll help him," chorused the boys. "We've got to do something to earn our board," said Ned.
"Come up, fellers," he said, waving the other in invitation, "and drink to Arizona. With a little more rain and good society she'd be a holy wonder, as the Texas land boomer says down in hell." They came up willingly, cowpunchers and sheepmen, train hands, prospectors, and the saloon bums that Black Tex kept about to blow such ready spenders as he, whenever they came to town.
The stampede of the sheep and the big kill made by Breed's pack up in the hills had enraged the sheepmen. They had confidently expected that some man would collect Breed's scalp on a fresh tracking snow, but while every rider had scoured the foothills for Breed's tracks after every storm, no man had cut his trail.
So most of what followed was seen by Injun, and heard about by Whitey. There came the time when the surviving sheepmen could no longer remain in the house. Like a wise leader, Donald Spellman divided his forces, and ten crouching figures emerged from the front of the house, and ten from the back, and were outlined against the flames, as they scurried away.
But those same orders, if they ever became known, would call in the rapacious sheepmen like vultures to a feast, and the bones of his cattle that last sorry remnant of his father's herds would bleach on Bronco Mesa with the rest, a mute tribute to the triumph of sheep.
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