in every detail, the supply of bacon and frijoles augmented at the store, and all hands, including the stranger within the gates, set to hemming wool-sacks with coarse twine and sailors’ needles.  One evening, but shrewdly in time for supper, a couple of Mexicans on horses, thridding their way through the mesquites, came into the ranch, quickly followed by others, one or two on burros, more on ponies, most on the skeleton of a prairieschooner drawn by four horses,—­and the shearers had arrived.  They were a dark, black-eyed, hilarious set, some forty odd in all, rather ragged as a crew, but with extremes of full and neat attire or insufficient tatters according as the goddess Fortune or the Mexican demi-goddess Monte had smiled or frowned; but all were equally jolly, and almost all fiercely armed, the greatest tatterdemalion and sans-culotte of all with a handsome Winchester, in a case, slung over brown shoulders that would have been better for a whole shirt.  The hat, though cheap, was, even among the ragged, frequently elaborate, and served excellently to carry off a protruding toe or knee, or to reconcile the association in one person of an ancient boot with a still more ancient shoe.  Many of these fellows were undoubtedly trustworthy, other some as undoubtedly, if they had had consciences, would have had homicides on them; but all were light-hearted.  Life is one thing to the man who lets the breath out of his companion with a knife, and, leaving his body in the brush, straightway goes about his idleness laughing, and quite another to him who cannot get over the hideous fact that he has tied his cravat awry.

On the morning of the first day we turned out at four o’clock, and, while we were getting a dew-bite of crackers and a sip of coffee, el capitan circulated among the recumbent figures that had dotted the prairie over-night:  with a shake and a pull of the big hat by way of toilet, they proceeded in twos and threes toward the shearing-shed, their shears in their hands and all their personal property in weapons dangling about them.  The burrers, too, Mexicans hired in the neighborhood, put in an appearance and ranged themselves behind their tables, A flock had been penned at the shed over-night, and, while a fraction of it was being driven through the movable panels into the space behind the shearing—­table, the shearers were ranged along it by the captain:  they hung up their rifles and revolvers to the posts, some their hats and jackets, and fell to chattering, lighting their cigarettes, and sharpening their shears.  When the supply of sheep was in and the panels closed, the captain gave the shrill cry, “Vaminos_” and all hands rushed in among the frightened animals and dragged out their chosen victims by the leg.  They showed great shrewdness in selecting the small, the light-woolled, the easy-to-be-shorn.  “The loud clapping of the shears” at once filled the shed, and it was not five minutes before a light