There they were, all right, but what under the sun were they doing there? And where were the herders?
The bands were grouped around the heads of two of the largest cañons in the valley cliffs, but Scott remembered very distinctly examining them both carefully. He knew that there was no possibility of getting sheep down through them. They both ended in a sheer drop of three hundred feet to the valley below. He had crawled to the very brink of the cliff and inspected it with great care. He had tried to imagine a man climbing it and had come to the conclusion that it could not be done.
Scott noted a tiny wisp of smoke floating up from the mouth of one of the cañons.
“There is certainly something doing down there,” Scott said to himself, “and both my official duty and my own personal curiosity demand an investigation of it.”
He dismounted, left Jed in a clump of timber, and walked slowly down toward the cañon.
The sheep were bunched so tightly around the mouth of the cañon that Scott had to make quite a circle to reach the rim of the cliffs. He then followed the edge of the cliffs back to the cañon which cut back into the plateau like the mouth of a great chute fringed along the sides with aspen. The bottom of it was fairly smooth at the upper end and quite wide, narrowing rapidly and becoming rougher till it ended in the knife-like cut where it broke through the face of the cliff. There it dropped sheer to the valley three hundred feet below.
A queer sight met Scott’s astonished gaze when he peered through the screen of aspen down into the little triangular amphitheater. He had no idea of secrecy when he came down there. He had merely wanted to see what was going on and he had walked openly across the bench. It was only the presence of the sheep which had prevented him from walking straight into the mouth of the cañon. But now that he found himself so fortunately located and found the game so well worth watching he nestled quietly down in his screen of aspens and decided to lay low.
He knew now why there were no herders with the sheep. Six men were working desperately building a fence across the mouth of the cañon. Five of them were sheep herders and the sixth was Heth. They were cutting posts from the aspen trees, driving them rather close together, and weaving the tops of the trees between them to form a solid barricade. They had evidently been at the work for some time for the fence was more than two thirds completed. Even then Scott did not understand the significance of it all. Why should they be building a fence across there? There did not seem to be any more reason why the sheep should go down there than over the edge of the cliffs anywhere else.