He came very close to the edge and found them surrounded by a low hedge of chaparral; but what little things they were compared with that great and terrible ram that he dimly remembered!  The blood-thirst came on him.  He swept the low hedge aside, charged into the mass of sheep that surged away from him with rushing sounds of feet and murmuring groans, struck down one, seized it, and turning away, he scrambled back up the mountains.

The sheep-herder leaped to his feet, fired his gun, and the dog came running over the solid mass of sheep, barking loudly.  But Jack was gone.  The sheep-herder contented himself with making two or three fires, shooting off his gun, and telling his beads.

That was Jack’s first mutton, but it was not the last.  Thenceforth when he wanted a sheep—­and it became a regular need—­he knew he had merely to walk along the ridge till his nose said, “Turn, and go so,” for smelling is believing in Bear life.

VII.  THE FRESHET

Pedro Tampico and his brother Faco were not in the sheep business for any maudlin sentiment.  They did not march ahead of their beloveds waving a crook as wand of office or appealing to the esthetic sides of their ideal followers with a tabret and pipe.  Far from leading the flock with a symbol, they drove them with an armful of ever-ready rocks and clubs.  They were not shepherds; they were sheep-herders.  They did not view their charges as loved and loving followers, but as four-legged cash; each sheep was worth a dollar bill.  They were cared for only as a man cares for his money, and counted after each alarm or day of travel.  It is not easy for any one to count three thousand sheep, and for a Mexican sheep-herder it is an impossibility.  But he has a simple device which answers the purpose.  In an ordinary flock about one sheep in a hundred is a black one.  If a portion of the flock has gone astray, there is likely to be a black one in it.  So by counting his thirty black sheep each day Tampico kept rough count of his entire flock.

Grizzly Jack had killed but one sheep that first night.  On his next visit he killed two, and on the next but one, yet that last one happened to be black, and when Tampico found but twenty-nine of its kind remaining he safely reasoned that he was losing sheep—­according to the index a hundred were gone.

“If the land is unhealthy move out” is ancient wisdom.  Tampico filled his pocket with stones, and reviling his charges in all their walks in life and history, he drove them from the country that was evidently the range of a sheep-eater.  At night he found a walled-in canon, a natural corral, and the woolly scattering swarm, condensed into a solid fleece, went pouring into the gap, urged intelligently by the dog and idiotically by the man.  At one side of the entrance Tampico made his fire.  Some thirty feet away was a sheer wall of rock.