No man, he considered—not even the Innuits of the Arctic—knew less concerning the white grazers than he himself. He had read no books about them, and except for the fact that he had bought various all-wool fabrics for his clothes and had eaten many a lamb chop, he had had no dealings with them whatsoever. He hadn’t the least idea how to control or care for the vast flock, when to water them and when to feed them salt, at what hours they should bed down and what orders to give his one faithful assistant, the dog. This animal, he concluded, knew worlds more about the business than he himself. In his new humbleness he seriously regretted that the barrier of speech prevented him from taking orders from the dog.
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.
