University of Virginia Library

II.

SO the years went over him, and his heart warmed toward the big new land where any meadow might hold his son, or any coyote-scaring fire might be Jean Baptiste's.

By as many shepherds as he met Gabriel Lausanne was respected for his knowledge of ailing sheep, and laughed at for his simple heart, but as yet he had not come up with the shepherds of Los Alamos. The Los Alamos grant covered thousands of acres of good pasture-lands, but they counted their flocks and herds by tens of thousands, and reached out as far as they could or dared into the free forest-lands and the glacier meadows set between.

They sent out large flocks, strong and well

shepherded; and what they could not get by the fair right of first comers, they took by force and wile. They wrested the best feeding-grounds from small shepherds by the sheer force of numbers, and when they met with bands strong and adventurous as their own, the shepherds cracked one another's heads merrily with their long staves, and the pasture went to the men with the thickest skulls.

They were bold rogues, those shepherds of Los Alamos. They would head their flocks away from the line of the Forest Reserve, under the ranger's eye, and as soon as his head was turned cut back to the forbidden pastures, and out again before he could come up with them.

They turned streams out of their courses, and left uncovered fires behind them to run unchecked in the wood, for the sake of the new feed that grew up in the burned districts. For them the forest existed only to feed sheep, and Los Alamos sheep at that.

There are shepherds in the Sierras who from long association grow into a considerable knowledge of woodcraft and have respect for the big trees, but not the shepherds of Los Alamos. No doubt there was much mischief charged to them which was not properly their own, but in any event they had never been loved, and were even dreaded because of that one of them who was called "The Mule."

Every shepherd has two names—the one he signs to his contract and the one he is known by. The Mule, so called because of a certain manner of surly silence and the exceeding breadth and strength of his back, had been picked up by Le Berge, the head shepherd, at a shearing, poorly clad and wholly at the end of his means. There was that in his look and the way in which he handled a sheep that made it plain that he had been born to it; and when he had plucked up a man who annoyed him and pitched him over his shoulder, Le Berge loved him as a brother. He hired him forthwith, though he had to discharge another man to make place for him. And now it was said that whoever came in the way of the shepherds of Los Alamos must try a fall with The Mule for the right of the feeding-grounds; and the fame of his wrestling was such that timid shepherds kept well away from his trail.