him in sheep, or whether the herders had acted on orders predicated on the certainty that he would be ousted by that time. It was a trespass, any way they had worked it, for the sheep were on his land. He intended to send them out of there in short order. He wasn't going to have sheep in there ruining his hay crop.
Making a stealthy circuit of his premises, Rawlins encountered the sheep under the creek bank where he had tied his horse the day before. Along there the bank was high on one side of the stream only, the other being a pebbly slope which high water covered. At its present low stage the stream pressed against this high bank, only three or four yards wide, the pebbly shore making a sort of sheltered nook very good for a bedding-ground. Here the shepherds had brought their sheep while he slept, either ignorant of their proximity to his house or assured in their belief that all was safe.
What puzzled Rawlins was that no shepherd was in sight, no smell of his breakfast fire on the air. It is a law among sheep-herders of the north-west that flocks must be moved from the bedding-ground at dawn, faced into the wind and spread to graze while the dew is on the herbage. By careful attention to this rule of the craft, a flock is able to subsist for many days without water. It saves the shepherd labor, and the sheep flesh in long drives to tanks and streams.
There was no voice of sheep-herder rising in the age-old cry that marshaled the sheep forth from the bedding-ground; there was no shepherd to be seen. Not even a dog to bristle and give the alarm of the peering
