Adventure Magazine, April 10, 1924 — page 77: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The Longstriker . 75 comes on with them big fists a-swingin’. The fight didn’t come off. Owen simply jumps over the fence an’ starts away. “Take ’em,” he says. “It don’t make no difference. There’s a pen for oe shearer, I reckon.” A sheep couldn’t have acted more humble. It was as near to runnin’ from a fight as a man could come. Worst of it was every shearer, wrangler, an’ wool-jammer was there to see Owen back water. “YT don’t want to see you birds in this end o’ the shed again,” Chris Jensen fires after us. Me? What could I do? When I fatten up in the Winter time I don’t weigh a hun- dred an’ fifty, an’ I’m no fighter, nohow. I simply tagged along after my pardner. We passed Dad Shipman, an’ the old man looks at Owen kinda funny. “You fellers can take the pens in the other end of the shed,” he says coldly. ‘Why didn’t you call that bird, pong : {asks Owen as quick as we’re alone. The big feller twists up his face like bes S in pain, an’ for a minute that film seems to drift over his eyes. 7 “T dassn’t, Bill,” he says. “TI got to win that prize an’ every day counts. If me an’ Jensen mixes it’s just about a cinch that both of us will quit workin’ for a spell.” I let it go, for it sounded reasonable in a way, but all the same I knew there was somethin’ else back of it, an’ I hated to think that my pal was a plain coward. I didn’t. That was the beginnin’ of a persecution that got worse every day. That Sanpete crowd never let up on us a minute after that, an’ furthermore they cut down Owen’s tally every day. Losin’ that end pen cost him at least ten fleeces every day. To some people a sheep is a sheep, but there’s just as much difference in their dispositions as there is in people, an’ it all crops up in shearin’ time. Let me explain. The herd is corralled in a big pen in the back, an’ then filtered through smaller corrals an’ chutes till they git to the chute where the wranglers fill the shearer’s little pens in the shed. There’s no front to the shearers’ pens, but as it’s always a sheep’s inclination to go back that don’t bother. When the fleece is off a sheep the shearer just gives it a kick out into the middle o’ the shed where the fleece wranglers tie it up, an’ then the fleeces are collected by the wool-jammers an’ sixty or seventy of ’em are tramped into a wool sack. When a shearer has his pen all sheared the wranglers open the gate in the back, throw it across the first chute for a gate, an’ haze the sheared onés into a second chute where the owner brands ’em down at the end of it an’ they pass out into another big herd corral. But the point I’m bringin’ out is that every sheep had to pass by Chris Jensen’s pen, an’ whenever Pete saw a bare- belly, meanin’ a sheep that’s had the wool all scratched off its belly an’ sides on the brush, an’ so don’t have more than half the surface to shear, he’d pick it up an’ throw it in to Chris. Pen after pen would be filled an’ by the time they got down to us there wouldn’t be nothin’ left but the wrinkled sheep or the stubborn ones that had fought past every dodge gate to the last. It is a cinch that any old biddy who can fight her way past twenty-five or thirty dodge gates is goin’ to object plumb strenu- ous against bein’ disrobed by a stingin’, singin’ Stewart shearin’-machine. It works out that way. You can set a docile sheep up on end an’ it stays there doin’ nothin’ no worse than lookin’ reproachful, but you take a hundred pounds o’ mutton that’s —— bent to git away with the wool on an’ they can wear a man to a frazzle. An’ as I say Pete Jensen always contrived to give Owen most of the “wrinklies,” that kind with the rows o’ dew-laps flappin’ so that you have to hold your critter with your knees while you use one hand to stretch out the wrinkles an’ shear with the other. That’s why I say that Pete Jensen easy knocked Owen out of at least ten sheep a day. “T’ll say this. for Chris Jensen—he could sure shear. He was not a steady plugger like Owen. He’d go in an’ shear like a wild man for a couple o’ hours an’ then stretch out on the wool sacks to rest for an hour, but while he was at it I never saw a man faster. It was a race between Owen an’ the big Dane from the start. Of course we knew there would be a few shearers at other corrals after that prize money, but I couldn’t see how anybody could beat the best one of them two. Owen made a mis- take at the start. A man has to ease him- self into a graft of that kind gradual or his back goes back on him. The first day COMICLOOCKKS. GO