Lippincotts Magazine, October 1885 | Page 8

at night aweary, with haply a couple of little ones abandoned by their mothers in his arms, to be brought up on that _pis-aller_ of infancy,--and, alas! occasionally of age,--the bottle.

V.
When the prickly pear had made a golden garden of the prairie and the heart of Cereus phoeniceus was warm with the intention of lighting its gorgeous crimson torch on the divides; when the arroyo, but lately a pretty streamlet, had told wellnigh all its beads to the sun-god, and had but here and there in its parched length an isolated pool; when the flock at noon no longer flushed the last teal from the creek, because that lingering bird had finally winged its way toward Manitoba or some other favorite retreat northerly,--at this time the constant wind, gentle but never-failing, and almost always from the south, was overweighted with a roar of multitudinous bleating and befouled with dust; for shearing was going on at the ranch. It is a very picturesque occupation, but it soils the most delightful season of the year, the fresh month of May, with a fortnight of dusty toil, anticipating the sun, and not halting promptly on his setting.
The shearing-shed lay somewhat apart from the other ranch buildings, with a system of pens at its back, with chutes and swinging wickets for "cutting out" lambs from their mothers destined for the shears, and other incidental purposes. The shed was a roof of bearded mesquite-grass, stayed by boughs and supported on live-oak or pecan posts, the outside or bounding rows of which were sheathed up with boards four feet or so, the remainder space up to the roof being open for draught. On these boards Baleriano Torres, Secundino Ramon, and others their companions of the shears, who had worked and played beneath this shade in springs past, had written their names in large characters of stencil-ink. One could see in the county roofs made of fresh boughs, through which the sunlight sifted, flecking the swarthy faces and arms of the shearers and the mantles of the sheep with a very picturesque effect; but it is probably best to resist the temptation to treat the shearing-shed as an artistic composition. The ground-plan of the shed was one hundred feet or so long by twenty-five wide. The floor was of trampled earth, and on it were placed shearing-tables, s s s, and burring-and tying-tables, B B. The shearing-tables were about fifteen inches high, the burring-tables high enough for a man to stand up to. It is the custom in many parts of the country to shear on the floor. In Mr. Hardy's picturesque novel, "Far from the Madding Crowd," the shearers shear in a cathedral-like barn, on a shining black-oak floor,--probably for purposes of contrast. Round the ranch, however, shearers preferred very generally the low wooden tables. The space back of the shearing-tables was occupied, when shearing was going on, by a "bunch" of sheep admitted through the movable panels from a pen containing the unshorn: after shearing, they departed through the panels into another pen, and eventually over the prairie to their pleasant grazing-grounds, angular and grotesque in appearance, but happy, their troubles past, their year's chief purpose served.
[Illustration: Movable Panels. CORRALS.]
The shearers this year were a band of forty or so Mexicans from Uvalde and other border towns, jollily travelling two hundred miles up the country in charge of a capitan and grande capitan responsible fellows, who had contracted with the ranchmen of the neighborhood to do their shearing. Early in May we heard of them on the creeks, and made preparation for them, the shed and corrals being put to rights in every detail, the supply of bacon and frijoles augmented at the store, and all hands, including the stranger within the gates, set to hemming wool-sacks with coarse twine and sailors' needles. One evening, but shrewdly in time for supper, a couple of Mexicans on horses, thridding their way through the mesquites, came into the ranch, quickly followed by others, one or two on _burros_, more on ponies, most on the skeleton of a prairieschooner drawn by four horses,--and the shearers had arrived. They were a dark, black-eyed, hilarious set, some forty odd in all, rather ragged as a crew, but with extremes of full and neat attire or insufficient tatters according as the goddess Fortune or the Mexican demi-goddess Monte had smiled or frowned; but all were equally jolly, and almost all fiercely armed, the greatest tatterdemalion and sans-culotte of all with a handsome Winchester, in a case, slung over brown shoulders that would have been better for a whole shirt. The hat, though cheap, was, even among the ragged, frequently elaborate, and served excellently to carry off a protruding toe or knee, or to reconcile the association in one person of an