and humanity amounts to. Over on the range west of Galloway's there was places along the cricks where you could 'a' walked on dead cattle and never put your foot on the ground for a mile at a stretch."
"I remember the big winter kill of that year," Rawlins said.
"It wasn't the winter killed them cattle as much as it was the improvidence and shiftlessness of the cowmen. You never heard of no big winter kill of sheep. We lose a lot of lambs sometimes, when a late storm catches the little things before they're hardly dry, but that ain't because the sheepmen and herders, and every mother's son and daughter of their fam'lies, ain't out in the weather workin' night and day to save the lambs. Maybe we ain't as brash as some onery yelpin' people about pullin' out a gun and shootin' some poor feller, but that's because we think more of other folkses' rights, and law and humanity."
"Sheep raisin' always has been the business of peaceable men," Rawlins remarked. "They never have been fighters, as far as sacred or profane history tells us. Abraham was a notable example of a sheepman, but he hasn't got much of a record with a gun."
"These cowmen say it takes the fight out of a man to live around with sheep, the peaceablest creatures in the world, I guess, and the most dependent on the care of humans. It'd do me good to see some sheepman take the conceit out of them fellers. I'd nearly give forty dollars to see some sheepman step out of the end of his wagon some night when them cowboys 're raidin' his band and knock a few of 'em stiff with a gun. It sure is the dose they need—not that they bother us
