Fortunately Hugh was blessed with a sense of humor, and soon it came to his aid. After the first doleful hour he found considerable amusement in his own predicament,—a clubman with three thousand sheep suddenly thrust upon his hands. He had read stories of men who had been given the care of one or more babies,—and he laughed when he thought how his own experiences had put them out of the running. Fifteen hundred babies, and as many helpless mothers, all of them wholly in his care. He was tickled all over, and after that he had no place in his mind for worry and doubt about the outcome.
And the fact that he regained his poise was the best thing that ever happened for the sheep. Realizing his own ignorance he made no attempt to herd or guide them. He was not in the least nervous or excited himself, and thus there was no contagion of alarm to carry to the flock. “After all,” he thought, “these brutes know what’s best for ’em better than I know myself. Let nature take its course. Let ’em do what they want and I’ll follow along and keep off the cougars; and of course, get ’em back to the camp at night.”
The wisest herdsman on earth could not have given him better advice. He didn’t hurry the sheep. But it was not because he had heard that old Hebrew maxim,—that a lame herder takes the best care of sheep. The idea is, of course, that a lame man does not walk fast and hurry his animals. By letting them follow their own ways, he avoided the usual mistake of an inexperienced herder in trying to keep his flock too close together. They were Rambouillets—a breed in which the gregarious instinct is highly developed—and they hung close enough together for general purposes. They grazed slowly: Hugh had time to see the sky and the pines and all the miracle and magic of the wonderland about him.
Never, he thought, had there been a more sudden change in human fortunes. Two little weeks before his own sphere of life had been restricted by a few blocks of an eastern metropolis; he had been a clubman, possibly—and he thought upon the phrase with a strange derision—a social favorite. He had been what men call—without greatly bothering to discriminate—a gentleman. He had lived the life that men of his class were expected to live, drinking rather more than was good for him, wasting time, and being frightfully and immeasurably bored. Now—by the exigencies of the hour, by a single prank of fate—he was simply a herder of sheep. He was giving all he possessed of time and skill to a job that as a rule only Mexicans and uneducated foreigners deigned to accept. He suddenly laughed when he remembered that—although the flock owner and himself had not yet agreed on terms—he would probably secure wages for the time spent. Two dollars a day, perhaps,—such a sum as he ordinarily spent for cigarettes. Thinking of cigarettes he delved into his pocket, searching for a new pipe that on the advice of the Old Colonel at his club he had brought with him to Smoky Land and which had not yet been tried.
It had cost, he remembered, something less than a dollar. The Old Colonel himself had passed upon it, explaining certain virtues in regard to it that Hugh had since forgotten. “You’ll like a pipe,” the old gentleman had said, “if you ever get into a real outdoor-man’s mood. Cigarettes are all right, of course—probably don’t give you the nicotine kick that a pipe does—but a pipe has been the woodsman’s smoke from Sir Walter Raleigh and the Indians down.”
He found the pipe and meditatively filled it with fragrant tobacco. It was new, the taste of burning varnish was not wholly absent, yet he couldn’t remember that his expensive cigarettes had ever given him the same delight. It was a herdsman’s smoke, he thought, and for the time being at least he was a herdsman. And the thought of refusing the meager wage that the flock owner would be willing to pay for his inexperienced services didn’t even occur to him. He wasn’t, he remembered, devoting his time for nothing. And he was somewhat startled by the thought that for the first time in his life his—Hugh Gaylord’s—time was actually worth somebody’s good money.
There would be a satisfaction in that little wage that he had never received from the handsome checks that he got monthly from his trust company. The clinking dollars would be worth showing to the boys at his club,—trophies greater than the cups he had occasionally won at golf and tennis. A herder of sheep,—that was the title and degree of Hugh Gaylord, late of the Greenwood Club. The whole idea amused him more than he could tell.
The best of it was that no one would mistake his calling. He looked the part. He hadn’t shaved—he remembered by the sudden feel of scratchy whiskers on his chin—for three days, and he had the disreputable look that usually results from such an omission. His outing clothes were torn, drenched, soiled, and dust-covered. At first he had felt somewhat uncomfortable in his unsightly togs; he had regretted the departure of his usual well-groomed appearance, but now he actually rejoiced in his disreputability. He wouldn’t have any trouble convincing the camp-tender—when that mysterious gentleman should reveal himself—that sheep-herding was his fitting station in life. He would make, he thought with a laugh, a fairly plausible tramp.
He had been greatly fatigued by his hard swim in Silver Creek, but now he felt refreshed. And he found himself wondering at the ease with which laughter came to his lips. It wasn’t the usual thing with Hugh Gaylord at all. He found to his surprise that life was full of things to laugh at: the incongruity of his position, the awkward antics of the lambs, the grandmotherly concern of the ewes, the whole irresistible joke of existence. Before, Hugh had laughed in really but two ways—one at wit (usually the forced wit of a professional comedian) and the other in scorn. One of these two ways, it seemed to him, had wholly left him now. The ability to be really scornful of anything in the wide world had seemingly passed away. The vision of himself watching the flocks had brought a new tolerance, a new breadth of view toward all the world. Never in his life, so far as he could remember, had he laughed from the simple joy of life, the laugh of sheer delight. Somehow, he had never learned to know delight in its true sense.
Then Hugh came to a curious conclusion. He denied it a long time, but slowly the facts to support it became too many to resist. It was simply that in his past life—the life between which mighty mountains now raised a formidable barrier—he had grown old before his time. Nor was it kindly and wholesome old age that had come to him: the ripened wisdom of venerable years. It was a false age, and it had given him a wholly false outlook on life. Two weeks ago he had felt infinitely old and tired, and now he had been born again.