velope. Scrawled with a lead pencil on a piece of 
brown paper were these words: “‘Squatters ain’t 
wanted in these mountains. I run cattle here 
and don’t allow no sheep. Git out.” It was 
signed ‘‘ Winchester,” an ominous word and full 
of meaning in that wild country. 
When the quails came up to the water-hole that 
evening the man was sitting very still on a rock 
with a gun between his knees. The woman with 
wide-open eyes was staring into the campfire and 
little Pearl lay with her head in her mother’s lap. 
What were they to do? Where could they go? 
The whole world seemed to be against a poor 
sheep-man. What else was there that this one 
could do and yet live away from other people? 
If he gave up life in the open and went to a town 
to try to find work he might be seen by someone 
who knew him and be arrested for the crime he 
had committed away back in Missouri several 
years before. They never talked much about 
their great secret trouble, and little Pearl, of 
course, knew nothing of it. And so the sun 
went down leaving this unhappy family away out 
there in the desert canyon of Arizona to lie 
210 
