Come on, boys; he's too busy to bother with a little thing like sheep." He led the way around to the far side of the band, the nearest sheep scuttling away from then as they passed.

"I don't suppose we could work the combination on those dogs--what ?" he considered aloud, glancing back at them where they still sat upon their haunches and watched the strange riders.

"Say, Cadwalloper, you took a few lessons in sheepherding, a couple of years ago, when you was stuck on that girl--remember?
Whistle 'em up here and set 'en to work." "You go to the devil," Pink's curved hips replied amiably to his boss.
"I've got loss-uh-memory on the sheep business." Whereat Weary grinned and said no more about it.
On the opposite side of the coulee, the boys seemed to be laboring quite as fruitlessly with the other herder.

They heard Big Medicine's truculent bellow, as he leaned from the saddle and waved a fist close to the face of the herder, but, though they rode with their eyes fixed upon the group, they failed to see any resultant movement of dogs, sheep or man.
There is, at times, a certain safety in being the hopeless minority.
Though seven indignant cowpunchers surrounded him, that herder was secure from any personal molestation--and he knew it.

They were seven against one; therefore, after making some caustic remarks, which produced as little effect as had Weary's command upon the first man, the seven were constrained to ride here and there along the wavering, gray line, and, with shouts and swinging ropes, themselves drive the sheep from the coulee.
There was much clamor and dust and riding to and fro.