"There'll not be much profit in feeding all winter," Rawlins remarked.
"Sheep eat their heads off in three months of winter feedin' in this country, away from the railroad as far as we are," Clemmons agreed, gloomily. "It ain't like it is back in Kansas where hay and corn-fodder grows. There'll be so many feeders throwed on the market this fall them easterners won't be able to take half of 'em. They'll name their own price, and that won't be enough to pay the freight. Might as well let 'em starve on the range as lose 'em that way. That's the way I look at it."
"But fat lambs are going to be worth money along about November," Rawlins said, in his thoughtful, judicial way.
"Nine or ten dollars a hundred, maybe fifteen. I've known 'em to fetch that for the Thanksgivin' and Christmas trade. But mine'll be so lean they won't be fit for anything but glue."
Rawlins let the old man unwind his long bill of complaints against the country, the elements, the sheep business and the unwise men such as he who had put in the best years of their lives to establish it against such overwhelming odds. Speaking of himself, specifically, his bitterness increased. He had stuck to the business so long he had used up all of his hope, he said, and dissipated what little sense he had at the beginning. If it hadn't been that his stock of hope, courage and common horse sense was used up long ago, he'd have quit the struggle and turned somewhere else.
Rawlins heard it for what he knew it to be worth.
