fore beginning for themselves. Sheep-herders had told him they were employed on the same condition. That would not be so bad for a man of timid spirit, but for one who had been in the business of making governors and senators, it appeared too servile, too tame. The dried-apple chaps were the kind.
Rawlins had learned that a rigorous climate was most favored by sheepmen. The same conditions which cause the sheep-herder to wear three coats and several layers of shirts bring out the long thick wool on the backs of his charges. A flockmaster of the north-west will tell you that sheep spread out and lie far apart, even on the coldest nights of that bleak and bitter land; that they are as warm as stoves; that they thaw the snow around them for several feet as they lie asleep in comfort, without fold or fending except for a hill behind them to break the rough of the wind. All of which a greenhorn may believe or reject, according to his wisdom, and general judgment of the veracity of men and the heat of sheep.
Rawlins had chosen the latitude for his future operations. Concerning the longitude, he was yet uncertain. Five hundred miles, as has been said, makes little difference in a country so wide and deep as that Rawlins had fixed his hopes upon. He had maps from the Department of the Interior, covering public lands in two States of the north-west. After much investigation he had settled in his mind upon one, the exact spot in that one, where the foundation of his fortunes was to be laid.
On the map—Rawlins never had been west of Kansas—the region selected appeared white and sterile,
