watered by few streams, blank-staring, repellent. It could not be any bleaker in fact than it was in print, Rawlins well believed, even when winter had it locked under a pressure of thirty below zero, as he knew it frequently fell in that latitude so favorable to a long and heavy fleece.
There was public land to be entered in that place, millions of acres of it, for civilization had reached only a sprangling branch into that country at the time Rawlins put his finger down on the map and made his selection, his determined eyes toward the west. Right there, said Rawlins; that was the very spot. All that was wanting was a few pounds of something in the corner of a sack.
Rawlins began to count his money and make long calculations, to palpitate and sweat over it in anxiety lest sheepmen should have all that white place on the map gobbled up before he could break away from the stockyards job with enough in his pocket to justify the dash. He was dubious over the efficiency of this hoard, even when he cashed in on the job one spring day and turned his face toward the sheeplands of the west.
At the end of the railroad reaching into the sheep country in those days the little city of Jasper lay. Jasper was the wool capital of the north-west, as it remains, even to this day. Wool buyers from Boston, which is the wool capital of the world, came to Jasper in the spring to buy the clip. They took away millions of pounds of wool, leaving millions of dollars in the banks of Jasper and the far-lying villages of the great, grey sheeplands.
