“’I’ll bring out your tent and camping outfit and rations in the buckboard before night,’ says he.

“‘Fine,’ says I.  ’And don’t forget the rations.  Nor the camping outfit.  And be sure to bring the tent.  Your name’s Zollicoffer, ain’t it?”

“‘My name,’ says he, ‘is Henry Ogden.’

“‘All right, Mr. Ogden,’ says I.  ‘Mine is Mr. Percival Saint Clair.’

“I herded sheep for five days on the Rancho Chiquito; and then the wool entered my soul.  That getting next to Nature certainly got next to me.  I was lonesomer than Crusoe’s goat.  I’ve seen a lot of persons more entertaining as companions than those sheep were.  I’d drive ’em to the corral and pen ’em every evening, and then cook my corn-bread and mutton and coffee, and lie down in a tent the size of a table-cloth, and listen to the coyotes and whip-poor-wills singing around the camp.

“The fifth evening, after I had corralled my costly but uncongenial muttons, I walked over to the ranch-house and stepped in the door.

“‘Mr. Ogden,’ says I, ’you and me have got to get sociable.  Sheep are all very well to dot the landscape and furnish eight-dollar cotton suitings for man, but for table-talk and fireside companions they rank along with five-o’clock teazers.  If you’ve got a deck of cards, or a parcheesi outfit, or a game of authors, get ’em out, and let’s get on a mental basis.  I’ve got to do something in an intellectual line, if it’s only to knock somebody’s brains out.’

“This Henry Ogden was a peculiar kind of ranchman.  He wore finger-rings and a big gold watch and careful neckties.  And his face was calm, and his nose-spectacles was kept very shiny.  I saw once, in Muscogee, an outlaw hung for murdering six men, who was a dead ringer for him.  But I knew a preacher in Arkansas that you would have taken to be his brother.  I didn’t care much for him either way; what I wanted was some fellowship and communion with holy saints or lost sinners—­anything sheepless would do.

“‘Well, Saint Clair,’ says he, laying down the book he was reading, ’I guess it must be pretty lonesome for you at first.  And I don’t deny that it’s monotonous for me.  Are you sure you corralled your sheep so they won’t stray out?’

“‘They’re shut up as tight as the jury of a millionaire murderer,’ says I.  ’And I’ll be back with them long before they’ll need their trained nurse.’

“So Ogden digs up a deck of cards, and we play casino.  After five days and nights of my sheep-camp it was like a toot on Broadway.  When I caught big casino I felt as excited as if I had made a million in Trinity.  And when H. O. loosened up a little and told the story about the lady in the Pullman car I laughed for five minutes.

“That showed what a comparative thing life is.  A man may see so much that he’d be bored to turn his head to look at a $3,000,000 fire or Joe Weber or the Adriatic Sea.  But let him herd sheep for a spell, and you’ll see him splitting his ribs laughing at ’Curfew Shall Not Ring To-night,’ or really enjoying himself playing cards with ladies.