When Rawlins arrived at Jasper on a day late in May, the clip was already coming down from distant shearing-pens, the long wool-sacks heaped on wagons coupled in trains. The pens at Jasper were crowded with thousands of dusty sheep waiting their turn at the shearers' hands, their coats brown from sun, soil and storm, their lamentations sounding as the wailings of Israel beside the waters of Babylon, rising in sad chorus night and day.
There was plenty of land left to the homesteader in the place where Rawlins had put his finger on the map, he found by inquiry at the United States land office in Jasper. The commissioner was a newspaper man on the side, very much of the kind Rawlins himself had been. He gave what information he had cheerfully enough, but seemed to look on Rawlins as a sort of oddity wanting to range off that way and go in for sheep. Rawlins thought he scorned him a little for his apostasy to the fraternity.
No stage ran from Jasper into the Dry Wood region, as that particular section upon which Rawlins had fixed his preference was called. He should have gone in on the railroad that skirted the Dry Wood country on the north, they said. A stage ran between the railroad and Lost Cabin, the business center of the locality for which he was bound.
The only way to get into Dry Wood from Jasper was to buy a horse, hire one, or walk. For a man with less than five hundred dollars in the corner of his sack, buying a horse for which he might not have any future need would be folly; to hire one, extravagance.
