fleece was tossed upon the burring-table, and a grinning fellow came running up to the ranchman seated in a chair thereon, the better to supervise affairs, and called out, “Check-e!” amid vivas for the first sheep shorn.  He received a tin token, which he thrust into his pocket, and plunged over the low platform after another sheep.  Calls of “Cole!” “Colero” “Cole, muchacho, echale” began to ring out, and, with an answering call of “Onde?” ("Where?"), two little, laughing Mexican boys, with tumbled, curly black wigs, and cheeks like bronzed peaches, darted about with boxes of powdered charcoal, and clapped a pinch of it on the cut made by careless shears.  The burrers threw out the fleeces smooth upon the table, and, one on either side, patted them over with their hands to discover the cockle-burrs entangled in the wool; these removed, they folded and rolled the fleeces up with care and handed them to a man who, with the aid of a small, square box, tied them tightly with two strings, and tossed them out of the shed, where they were received by the ranchman who was grading the wool and supervising the packing.

The packing was done in two frames, seven feet high, in which an iron ring held the sacks open.  To a man on one of these frames the fleeces in their compact little bundles were tossed up, and he trod them down, packing them in the sack.  Then the sack was let down, sewed up, rolled to the scales and weighed, marked with the ranch-mark, the weight, the grade, and was ready for the freighters and a market.  About ten thousand pounds of wool were sheared, burred, packed, marked, and perhaps shipped, in a day.

Inside and out, seventy men were at work about the shed:  the fleeces rapidly piled up on the burring-tables; tied and tossed out, they grew into little mountains, and around the scales for a wide space the packed sacks cumbered the ground.  The ranchmen moved about to see that coal was used where needed, and that it was not needed too frequently, that fleeces were not broken, and were thoroughly burred and nicely tied; and the Mexicans, ceaselessly chattering, singing, laughing, calling jokes to each other, crying, “Viva Rito!” “Viva Encarnacion!” ran for their checks, dashed in for their sheep, and kept the shears clashing, while the perplexed ewe, with an uproar perhaps more distinctly justifiable, called to the lamb she had left in the pen, and the lamb answered cry for cry.  All this went on in a strong south wind heavy with dust and the acrid sheep smell.  It was the liveliest possible spectacle of organized confusion, and the accompanying noise was calculated to split the ears of the groundlings.  As the number unshorn of the installment of sheep in the pen dwindled toward zero, little groups of unoccupied shearers gathered round the posts near the low tables, lit fresh cigarettes, whipped out cards, and started a little game of monte for the checks they had in their pockets, continuing till the captain’s revenons a nos moutons once more started their shears.  The sun crept up in the sky, a fitting cessation occurred, and, a ranchman having given the signal, a tide set in for the cook-house and breakfast.