The Fighting Shepherdess | Page 4

out a marred violin case and laid it carefully on the ground, apart. A couple of cowhide paniers contained his meager food supply and blackened cooking utensils. These, with two army blankets, some extra clothing and a bell for the burro, completed his outfit.
The sheep dog lay with his head on his paws, following every movement with loving eyes.
The sheepherder scraped a smooth place with the side of his foot, set up his tepee and spread the blankets inside. Then he built a tiny sagebrush fire, filled his battered coffee pot at the spring in the "draw," threw in a small handful of coffee, and, when the sagebrush was burned to coals, set it to boil. He warmed over a few cooked beans in a lard can, sliced bacon and laid it with great exactness in a long-handled frying pan and placed it on the coals. Then unwrapping a half dozen cold baking-powder biscuits from a dish towel he put them on a tin cover on the ground near a tin cup and plate and a knife and fork.
The man moved lightly, with the deftness of experience, stopping every now and then to cast a look at the sheep that were slowly feeding back preparatory to bedding down. And each time he did so, his eyes unconsciously sought the road in the direction from which he had come, and as often his face clouded with a troubled frown.
When the bacon was brown and the coffee bubbled in the pot, he sat down crosslegged with his plate in his lap and the tin cup beside him on the ground. He ate hungrily, yet with an abstracted expression, which showed that his thoughts were not on his food.
After he had finished he broke open the biscuits which remained, soaked them in the bacon grease and tossed them to the dog, which caught them in the air and swallowed them at a gulp. Then he got to his feet and filled his pipe. He looked contemplatively at a few sheep feeding away from the main band and said as he waved his arm in an encircling gesture:
"Way 'round 'em, Shep! Better bring 'em in."
The dog responded instantly, his handsome tail waving like a plume as he bounded over the sagebrush and gathered in the stragglers.
By the time the herder had washed his dishes and finished his pipe the sun was well below the horizon and the sky in the west a riot of pink and amber and red. The well-trained sheep fed back and dropped down in twos and threes on a spot not far from the tepee where it pleased their fancy to bed. Save for the distant tinkle of the bell on the burro, and the stirring of the sheep, the herder might have been alone in the universe. When he had set his dishes and food back in the paniers and covered them with a piece of "tarp," in housewifely orderliness, he opened the black case and took out the violin with a care that amounted to tenderness. The first stroke of the bow bespoke the trained hand. He did not sit, but knelt in the sand with his face to the west as he played like some pagan sun-worshiper, his expression rapt, intent. Strains from the world's best music rose and fell in throbbing sweetness on the desert stillness, music which told beyond peradventure that some cataclysm in the player's life had shaken him from his rightful niche. It proclaimed this travel-stained sheepherder in his faded overalls and peak-crowned limp-brimmed hat another of the incongruities of the far west. The sagebrush plains and mountains have held the secrets of many Mysteries locked in their silent breasts, for, since the coming of the White Man, they have been a haven for civilization's Mistakes, Failures and Misfits.
While he poured out his soul with only the sheep and the tired collie sleeping on its paws for audience, the gorgeous sunset died and a chill wind came up, scattering the gray ashes of the camp fire and swaying the tepee tent. Suddenly he stopped and shivered a little in spite of his woolen shirt. "Dog-gone!" he said abruptly, aloud, as he put the violin away, "I can't get that kid out of my thoughts!" Though he could not have told why he did so, or what he might, even remotely, expect to hear, he stood and listened intently before he stooped and disappeared for the night between the flaps of the tent.
He turned often between the blankets of his hard bed, disturbed by uneasy dreams quite unlike the deep oblivion of his usual sleep.
"Oh, Mister, where are you?"
The sheepherder stirred uneasily.
"Please--please, Mister, won't you speak?"
The plaintive pleading cry was tremulous and faint like the voice of a disembodied spirit floating somewhere in the