Sheepmen had tried to run their flocks in there, in times past, Clemmons said. Not right around there; farther south. Two or three had been killed, and nothing done to the killers. That was enough for most people. Around there they kept their hands off that fence, for they knew Galloway, and the extent of his power.
"My opinion is he's simply got you all buffaloed," Rawlins told him.
"Go up agin him, then," said Clemmons, grimly.
"I'm going," Rawlins replied, quietly, firmly; no brag or bluster about him.
For—a dry summer, Clemmons was suffering a "powerful misery in the j'ints," he said. This led him off on a discourse concerning "j'ints," and the necessity of brass ones in a sheepman, so they would not corrode. He berated the discomforts of that life and its small rewards, dismissing the homestead and its perils as a distasteful, at least a profitless, subject upon which there remained no more to be said.
"If I was a young man," he said, "I'd go back east and get me a good eighty in Iowa and marry me a woman and settle down. A man can see life and enjoy the world back in that country. Here he's bound down by sheep, unless he's a herder or a shearer, or one of them loose-footed boys, free to pick up his bundle and light out whenever he feels like it.
"What good does money do a sheepman if he makes it? He don't dast to turn his back on his flock a week without something goin' wrong that wipes out all he's made. He's got to stay with 'em, and nuss 'em day and night, year in and year out. Other men can go to
