make them sad to pack up a few more bales of it to bulge out the sides of the banks back in Wyoming and Montana.
It was just one recurring cycle of money in the sheepmen's life, Rawlins came to see clearly. After cashing in on the Christmas lambs, or the Easter lambs, the sly fellows had nothing to do but go back home, knock around in their way of silent, greasy contentment until spring, when they would shear the fathers and mothers of the Christmas lambs, gather in another large mass of money for the clip, and grin a little, maybe, over the heft of it in their jeans. Better still, and more of it, the lady sheep, duly shorn, would be suckling then and there another crop of Christmas lambs. So it went in the sheepman's happy life.
To add to the felicity of the sheepman's condition, he had neither rent nor taxes to pay on the land that nurtured his flocks. He roamed them over the wide, unclaimed public domain of his vast States, into the hills and mountains for summer grazing, back to the open spaces, wind-swept and bare of snow, for winter feeding on grass that had cured on the stem as sweet as the most succulent hay of eastern meadows. Nature fed his sheep, nature fended them, with nothing more expensive than a herder to every two or three thousand to keep them from straying off and falling to the wolves.
That was the life for a fellow; that was the short cut to fortune, although there might not be any to either learning or political success. A sheepman's life was the life for him, Rawlins decided, determined to
