# Sheep Limit/Chapter 14

Rawlins saw no more of Peck, that errant partner of the sheeplady having gone on according to his intention. Let Mrs. Peck learn as she might of her husband's desertion, Rawlins said; he was not going around to the ranch to carry the news.
He was not sorry for her, knowing that it had been pretty much as Peck had said. She had married him to save the expense of a hired man, and he had married her in the lure of that bundle of money which Tippie had complained of as being troublesome to carry around. Both of them had been properly soaked.
Beyond the track of the storm that had driven them to shelter last night, Rawlins found the range parched under the ardent sun of July. It looked as if no rain had fallen in the Dry Wood country for months. The meager grass, standing in bunches, thin-bladed, feeble, was dry; the sage grey and dusty, showing little of the bright green at its tips upon which the sheep thrived, their flesh taking its flavor, making the mutton of the inter-mountain ranges the choicest in all the world.
It looked as if hard days might be ahead for the sheepmen in that country, as Clemmons had predicted, with half their flocks left to eat this sparse grazing ​by the Government restrictions shutting them out of the forest reserves. Winter must bring heavy losses unless copious rains fell soon, of which there was no promise in the placid skies.
Rawlins left the road along about noon, to strike across the range to the place where he had left Clemmons on his way down, not expecting to find the old sheepman readily, owing to the constant shifting this dry range would make necessary. Clemmons had figured largely in Rawlins' scheme for taking up land inside Galloway's fence. So much, indeed, depended on Clemmons' co-operation that it amounted almost to a gamble.
Rawlins calculated correctly that Clemmons would be found in the neighborhood of one of his tanks. He rode down a hillside upon the venerable shepherd that evening as he was yelling at the edge of his flock to get it started toward the resting-place for the night.
Clemmons was hobbling lamely along in the dust of his complaining sheep, putting dependence on a stick where he never had depended on anything outside his own bodily and mental strength before. He appeared glad to see Rawlins, although he eyed him questioningly, unable to understand why a man should spend so much time riding up and down the country when he might employ it to so much better purpose looking after sheep.
Rawlins relieved the ancient flockmaster of his task, telling him to go ahead to camp and rest. It was dusk when Rawlins got the sheep huddled in the hollow below the wagon; the old man's fire was twinkling on the hill. Graball was tied to a wagon wheel, a bag ​of oats on his nose, when his master went to inquire about water to wash off the day's dust.
Clemmons was sitting on a box beside his little tin stove, assembling the components of supper in coffee-pot, saucepan and skillet, the three utensils which he employed on special occasions such as this. Ordinarily he used but two: coffee-pot and skillet, warming his beans or whatever he might turn out of a can, in the skillet after frying the bacon, the cooked slices meantime laid out neatly across his knee.
There wasn't any water for washing, he said. They were lucky in Dry Wood that summer to have a swig to put down the inside of them once in a while. Dry Wood was no place that season for people who were afraid to carry dirt around on their hides a few months.
"I noticed the range was pretty dry, but I didn't know it was as bad as that," Rawlins said, very much concerned.
"It'll be worse," Clemmons predicted. "We can't expect any rain till September, except these little streaks like I saw pass south of here last night."
"I just got to Lineberger's ahead of it. Rained like fury for half an hour, but it was only a streak, as you say. How are sheep holding up on the range?"
"I ain't lost any yet, but one of my tanks is dry. Sheepmen that's got livin' water'll pull through, but they'll have to feed all winter. This range'll be gnawed to the ground if we don't get rains between now and fall. I don't look for any. There ain't nothing in any of the signs of heaven or earth that promises rain."
​"There'll not be much profit in feeding all winter," Rawlins remarked.
"Sheep eat their heads off in three months of winter feedin' in this country, away from the railroad as far as we are," Clemmons agreed, gloomily. "It ain't like it is back in Kansas where hay and corn-fodder grows. There'll be so many feeders throwed on the market this fall them easterners won't be able to take half of 'em. They'll name their own price, and that won't be enough to pay the freight. Might as well let 'em starve on the range as lose 'em that way. That's the way I look at it."
"But fat lambs are going to be worth money along about November," Rawlins said, in his thoughtful, judicial way.
"Nine or ten dollars a hundred, maybe fifteen. I've known 'em to fetch that for the Thanksgivin' and Christmas trade. But mine'll be so lean they won't be fit for anything but glue."
Rawlins let the old man unwind his long bill of complaints against the country, the elements, the sheep business and the unwise men such as he who had put in the best years of their lives to establish it against such overwhelming odds. Speaking of himself, specifically, his bitterness increased. He had stuck to the business so long he had used up all of his hope, he said, and dissipated what little sense he had at the beginning. If it hadn't been that his stock of hope, courage and common horse sense was used up long ago, he'd have quit the struggle and turned somewhere else.
Rawlins heard it for what he knew it to be worth. ​It required more courage, and vastly greater hope, to stick there than to quit. It had been a big drain on these essential qualities from the very start, and would continue so as long as those dusty, sage-dotted hills sustained their flocks. That would be a long time, as far as the young man was able to foresee, for if nature had worked with any design in shaping that country, sheep had been the purpose when the plans of that fretfully tossed land lay on the trestle-board of creation. It was good for nothing else, but admirable beyond any other place for that.
Clemmons would no more quit the business than he would stop breathing voluntarily. He would die in his old wagon, or propped up against a bush on some hillside, his last effort given to the welfare of his sheep.
"I came by to talk over with you a plan for saving your sheep, and not only saving them, but putting your lambs in condition for market," Rawlins told him, when the old flockmaster appeared to have come to the end of his scroll.
"I heard they had rainmakers in Kansas," Clemmons said with dry sarcasm, "but I didn't reckon they let 'em get loose and wander off."
"You're wrong. I've not got any scheme for making rain. That's one of the sciences I never took up."
"What else in the kingdom of cats is goin' to save the sheep on this range but rain? If you've got any kind of a scheme that ain't got rain back of it, you might as well pass on."
Rawlins told of taking up a claim behind Galloway's fence, on a stream of living water, where the grass was tall and green. He proposed that Clemmons pick ​up bodily—wagon, flock, dogs and all, work over to the fence, and leave the rest of it to him. Rawlins proposed to take the sheep at that point, drive them to his homestead and care for them on the usual arrangement of half the increase, with the altogether unusual stipulation that half the profit from the sale of the present crop of imperiled lambs be paid to him for his work of breaking down sheep limit and saving the flock.
Clemmons heard him through without comment. If he was surprised to learn of the young man's intention to homestead beyond sheep limit he did not indicate it in his dusty, hard-whiskered face.
"No, I'd ruther let 'em die in peace here on the range than have 'em murdered in there," he said.
"I'll have the United States Government behind me; I've got it behind me," Rawlins said.
"But Galloway is a standin' in between," Clemmons said. "They'd murder my sheep and they'd murder you, and no more recourse on 'em for one than the other. But if you pull out a gun and plug one of them fellers they'll hang you higher than Samson ever hung his hat. No, son, there ain't no salvation for me in that scheme."
The flockmaster's stand put a crimp in Rawlins' plans. He had worked along on the belief, unfounded except on Clemmons' complaints and gloomy forecast, that the old man would be glad to stock him up with at least two or three hundred sheep for the venture into the rich grazing-lands inside the fence. For Rawlins believed it would be a safe venture. Galloway ​would not go to any severe measures to dislodge him, he believed, once he saw he was not a speculator.
If the fence-riders began throwing lead, they'd get lead thrown back at them. Rawlins had come provided with the means for protecting himself on his homestead. And the Government stood behind him. A man could go a long way on that assurance.
"You don't seem to get it through your head that Galloway's the Gover'ment around here," Clemmons complained. "The only cure for you will be to go up agin that man and his outfit once—just once. That'll be plenty, that'll cure you if it don't kill you, as the widder woman said. I don't want to see a bright young feller like you go wrong when he might as well go right. Take a band of my sheep and run 'em out here where they'll be safe from everything but the wolves and the weather, and I'll learn you the business as well as I can, but I wouldn't even give you a sheepskin to sleep on inside of Jim Galloway's fence. I wouldn't even sell 'em to you, for that'd be the same as robbin' the dead."
Rawlins said he was sorry, but determined to go ahead. If he couldn't get sheep he'd go without sheep, and buy them when he was able. There was no way the Government officials in that State could evade their responsibility to him, even if Galloway did own them. They were obliged to protect him in his rights, and his rights were undeniable. What warrant did Clemmons have, or anybody around there have, for saying Galloway's men would murder anybody who tried to homestead inside the fence? Had anybody ever tried to do it?
​Sheepmen had tried to run their flocks in there, in times past, Clemmons said. Not right around there; farther south. Two or three had been killed, and nothing done to the killers. That was enough for most people. Around there they kept their hands off that fence, for they knew Galloway, and the extent of his power.
"My opinion is he's simply got you all buffaloed," Rawlins told him.
"Go up agin him, then," said Clemmons, grimly.
"I'm going," Rawlins replied, quietly, firmly; no brag or bluster about him.
For—a dry summer, Clemmons was suffering a "powerful misery in the j'ints," he said. This led him off on a discourse concerning "j'ints," and the necessity of brass ones in a sheepman, so they would not corrode. He berated the discomforts of that life and its small rewards, dismissing the homestead and its perils as a distasteful, at least a profitless, subject upon which there remained no more to be said.
"If I was a young man," he said, "I'd go back east and get me a good eighty in Iowa and marry me a woman and settle down. A man can see life and enjoy the world back in that country. Here he's bound down by sheep, unless he's a herder or a shearer, or one of them loose-footed boys, free to pick up his bundle and light out whenever he feels like it.
"What good does money do a sheepman if he makes it? He don't dast to turn his back on his flock a week without something goin' wrong that wipes out all he's made. He's got to stay with 'em, and nuss 'em day and night, year in and year out. Other men can go to ​town and take a little toot for a week or two once in a while, but a sheepman can't. He's a slave to them nigger-headed beasts."
Rawlins enlarged on his designs of becoming a sheepman in the country he was about to open, but without moving the old man from his avowed intention of keeping his feet clear of Galloway's domain. In the end Rawlins was forced to the conclusion that all the talk Clemmons had made on a previous occasion about becoming a big sheepman if he had room to expand was nothing but gab. He had weathered it there in his small way all those years, and there he would stick, no matter if the earth were spread before him and the best of it offered for his taking.
There was no better place for sheep than the well-watered homestead he had chosen; Rawlins believed. It lay in a little valley where the offrun of rain from the hills soaked deep into the earth, storing moisture against drought such as the range was suffering at that time. The grass would be ready to mow now. He considered the feasibility of harvesting the crop and selling it to the hard-pressed sheepmen the coming winter.
That would call for an outlay of more money for machinery and help than he could command, after making such improvements as the law required on his claim. His haymaking would have to be confined to scythe and rake that summer, in which primitive fashion he could put up enough to make Graball comfortable. He'd have to run a double wire around that hayland of his to keep Galloway's stock out of it. There must be close to a hundred acres fit for mowing, ​he estimated. That would take a heavy outlay for wire, granting that he could cut posts in the hills on a permit from the forestry supervisor.
So Rawlins sat with the old flockmaster at the tail of the sheep-wagon, thinking and planning for the—future in what he still thought of as that big white spot of unrevealed opportunities on the map. Only there was one persistent little oasis in it now which no amount of adversity or opposition ever should erase and throw back again into the unchartered desert of white. He saw it all as clearly as if the labor of twenty years lay behind him. There was his oasis, his flocks ranging out from it, his prosperity centered there, all as plain to his far-leaping vision as a thing accomplished.
In fact, there was nothing more than a half-section of what the United States Government designated semi-arid agricultural and grazing land, lying inside a guarded fence that must restrict his coming and going for a long time to come, as it had hampered the free movement of people in that section for many years in the past. Overhead there were stars as bright as youth's untarnished hopes; around him the huddled hills of the sheeplands, silent as a sleeping flock. And there facing him in the gloom of starlight sat old Al Clemmons, a man who had remained little to balance, in the arbitrary apportionment of fate, it seemed, the ambitions of a man who was determined to become big.
The situation did not have its warning for Rawlins, confidently extending his plans, comfortably designing for the homestead inside the fence, for youth believes, always has believed, always shall believe, that excep​tions will be made for it, opening the way to its triumph. It is that sanguine confidence of youth that saves the civilization of human kind.
Clemmons was not able to get out of the wagon next morning. If Rawlins had not been there it would have been a sorry day for the old man, for he had spun out the thread of his endurance against his pangs and miseries so long he hadn't the strength left in him to bend his stiffened joints and spread the sheep out while the dew was on the sage.
Rawlins volunteered to stand by until the crippled flockmaster could hire a man to follow his flock. Perhaps the young man was not entirely unselfish in the business; maybe he hoped the old man's affliction might turn out to be his own profit. It might work Clemmons round to contributing at least part of his flock to the design for breaking down sheep limit and opening that land to the oppressed.
Clemmons said if he had a rattlesnake to render down and rub the grease on his joints he would make a speedy recovery. It never had failed in the past, and he was without that specific remedy now only because he had not been able to find a snake.
That was another indication of what the Dry Wood country was coming to, Clemmons said. Time was when he was as limber as any rattlesnake that ever crawled, and look at him now! Tied up in the wagon, flat on his back, not worth the baking powder in his biscuits, and all because that country had degenerated to that low plane, under the crowding of big sheepmen and the fencing-up by land hogs, that a good, decent rattlesnake was no longer to be found.