It required more courage, and vastly greater hope, to stick there than to quit. It had been a big drain on these essential qualities from the very start, and would continue so as long as those dusty, sage-dotted hills sustained their flocks. That would be a long time, as far as the young man was able to foresee, for if nature had worked with any design in shaping that country, sheep had been the purpose when the plans of that fretfully tossed land lay on the trestle-board of creation. It was good for nothing else, but admirable beyond any other place for that.
Clemmons would no more quit the business than he would stop breathing voluntarily. He would die in his old wagon, or propped up against a bush on some hillside, his last effort given to the welfare of his sheep.
"I came by to talk over with you a plan for saving your sheep, and not only saving them, but putting your lambs in condition for market," Rawlins told him, when the old flockmaster appeared to have come to the end of his scroll.
"I heard they had rainmakers in Kansas," Clemmons said with dry sarcasm, "but I didn't reckon they let 'em get loose and wander off."
"You're wrong. I've not got any scheme for making rain. That's one of the sciences I never took up."
"What else in the kingdom of cats is goin' to save the sheep on this range but rain? If you've got any kind of a scheme that ain't got rain back of it, you might as well pass on."
Rawlins told of taking up a claim behind Galloway's fence, on a stream of living water, where the grass was tall and green. He proposed that Clemmons pick
