There was nobody at the sheep-wagon, although Rawlins could hear the distant voice of the herder and the barking of his dogs, urging the flock along with the same lonesome, far-reaching cry that he had heard the drivers lift when scuttling a shrinking drove of sheep through the chutes to the slaughter-houses in Kansas City. He was to know this cry better still in the sheeplands, lonely and long-wailing; appealing, supplicating, the inheritance of the craft older than the memory of man.
Rawlins never had seen a sheep-wagon before, although he knew in a general way that such vehicles were the homes of those who follow the flocks year in and year out. This was an old one, its hubs were cracked by age and weather, the canvas of its top was patched. The body, or box, was deeper than that of an ordinary farm wagon, the bows high enough to give a man standing room beneath them. A stove-pipe projected through the front end of the canvas, surrounded by a broad piece of tin, a little door opened at the tail, where a step eased down to the ground.
A water keg was slung to one side of the wagon, an axe to the other. A little pile of fuel, cut from the scrub pines which grew sparsely on the hills around, lay under it, as if the herder expected a rain.
