Lippincotts Magazine, October 1885 | Page 8

certainty, and the lamb the answering
cry of its dam. With this sound ringing in his ears, and daily becoming
more and more insufferable from monotony and increase, the

sheep-man rides out in the morning among his Mexicans, and returns to
camp 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