As he raised his eyes he saw a sight charged with significance to one familiar with it.
Neifkins’s sheep were coming down the side of the mountain like a woolly avalanche. In the shape of a wedge with a leader at the point of it, they were running with a definite purpose and as though all the dogs in sheepdom were heeling them. The very thing against which he had come to warn the herders was about to happen—the band was making straight for Dibert’s sheep, which were still feeding peacefully on the hillside.
With an imprecation that was not flattering to either herder, Bowers wrapped the lines around the brake and leaped over the wheel to head them if it were possible. But they seemed possessed by all the imps of Satan, as they came on bleating, hurdling boulders, letting out another link of speed at Bowers’s frantic shoutings.
The leaders of the two bands were not fifty feet apart when Bowers, realizing he could not get between them, reached for a rock with a faint hope that he might hit what he aimed for. His prayer was answered, for the ewe in the lead of Neifkins’s band blinked and staggered as the rock bounced on her forehead. With a surprised bleat she turned and started back up the mountain, the rest of the band following.
The perspiration was streaming from under Bowers’s hat as his eyes searched the surrounding country. Not a sign of either herder! A cactus thorn that had penetrated his shoe leather did not improve Bowers’s temper. As he sat down to extract it, he considered whether it would be advisable to pound Dibert to a jelly when he found him or wait until they got a herder to replace him.
The man’s horse and saddle were missing in camp, Bowers discovered, so it was fairly safe to assume that he was over visiting Neifkins’s herder.
After Bowers had brought the supply wagon up and unloaded, he secured the horses and started on foot up the mountain.
From the summit he could see the white canvas top of Neifkins’s wagon gleaming among the quaking asp well down the other slope of the mountain. No one was visible, but as he got closer he saw Dibert’s horse tied to the wheel. Bowers felt “hos-tile.”
“What you doin’ here?” he demanded unceremoniously, as Dibert, hearing the rocks rattle, all but tumbled out of the wagon in his eagerness.
“I never was so tickled to see anybody in my life!” he cried.