After awhile the ghost began to appear in western Utah and still later on in Nevada, always digging a never-ending imaginary line of post-holes. No one never knew where the actual post-holes left off and the imaginary ones commenced.
As the Routt County cattlemen in western Colorado never allowed any sheepmen to encroach on their range, and they always killed all the sheep and sheepmen who dared to intrude, of course, the Warren Live Stock had to stop building fence west and turn north before they got there.
When the ghastly skeletons of Rambolet Bill and Cottswool Canvasback were found lying by this fence, their bones picked clean by coyotes and vultures, a small book was picked up near them which proved to be a diary of their adventures and last hours of suffering. It will be remembered that Rambolet Bill and Cottswool Canvasback couldn't write, but they had drawn pictures in the book, and when we had gotten another sheepman who couldn't write to examine them he read them just like print. The first picture was a mountain with a lot of marks, which was interpreted as the flood, and two men drawn crosswise laying down was the sheepmen being washed away. The next picture was a wire fence with two men clinging to it. He said that was when they washed into the fence. The next was another fence picture showing two men walking along it. There was about fifty pictures after this one, but they always had a section of a wire fence in them. Several pictures in the front part of the book showed the two men eating jackrabbits, but later on some of the pictures showed them chasing a prairie dog, or trying to slip up on one, indicating that they couldn't find any more jackrabbits. There was pictures of them chewing bits of their clothes to get the sheep grease out of them. Then there was pictures of them pointing to their mouths and stomachs, finally in the last picture they were in the act of eating a piece of paper with some writing on it, which was probably the receipt for cooking jackrabbits. They probably had walked hundreds of miles along this fence before they finally succumbed, and as it was a country where they had herded large bands of sheep the grass had become so exterminated that no jackrabbits could live there, and consequently Rambolet Bill and Cottswool Canvasback had gradually starved to death.
Two guileless sheepmen lay sleeping on the side of a barren hill,
One's name was Cottswool Canvasback, the other was Rambolet Bill.
They were dreaming, sweetly dreaming, the fore part of the night
Of grazing their sheep on a homesteader's claim when he was out of sight.
But hark! to the wind that's rising; 'tis coming fast and warm;
Little recked the sleepers that it would do them harm;
But the roar was growing louder, as the pine trees bent and shook,
And the birds were screaming loudly, "Beware of the warm chinook."
When that hot blast struck their hut, built out of walls of snow,
That house turned into a river in a way that wasn't slow;
Washed off these dreaming sheepmen in the middle of the night.
As the waters swept the dreamers away, what must have been their fright,
Till tangled up in Warren's fence that's built o'er mountain and vale,
They followed it the rest of their lives, winding o'er hill and dale.
When found by the annual fence rider, they long since had been dead,
Their bones picked clean by coyotes, with vultures hovering o'erhead.
[CHAPTER XIII.]
Grafting.
Dillbery Ike as a Shipper.