The herder spoke with loud defiance and altogether too much vehemence. Scott felt sure now that there were more than sixteen hundred sheep in that band, but he knew now that he could never count them in the open and he wanted more evidence before he was ready to order them back to the chute for a recount. In the meanwhile he was willing to let the herder believe that he had bluffed him. “Well,” he said with well assumed cheerfulness, “the man who counted them knows a lot more about it than I do. So long,” and he rode away to see another band, leaving the herder laughing in his sleeve.
Scott rode over to the next driveway and was not long in locating another band. He avoided the mistake he made the first time of catching them in a narrow place and selected an open park for his observations. He waited till the sheep had all spread out contentedly and then rode up to the herder.
“How are they traveling?” he asked genially.
The herder, a surly looking fellow, was slow to answer. He sized Scott up slowly and contemptuously. At last he replied sullenly, “I ain’t got no complaint.”
In the meanwhile Scott was trying to estimate the band by counting a few and comparing them with the others. “How many are there in this band? Twenty-five hundred?”
“Some guesser,” the herder snorted. “There were fourteen hundred in the chute yesterday.”
“I’ll learn after a while,” Scott laughed.
“Fourteen hundred,” he exclaimed to himself as he rode past the band, “if there are not more than two thousand there I’ll eat them wool and all.”
Scott felt certain now that there were too many sheep in these bands, but he wanted to be perfectly sure before he made a move. He visited two more bands and was strengthened in his impression.
“The thing for me to do now,” he thought, “is to see sixteen hundred sheep somewhere and find out what they look like.”