A Cowboy Turned Sheepherder

He’d been a good hand on the ranches he’d worked, and while he was out on the ranches, he’d stayed out of trouble. It was when he went to town and got drunk that he got into trouble. He was sitting in his parole officer’s outer office weighing out his options when he was called into the officer’s office. ‘Had any luck finding a job?’ asked the parole officer. ‘Nope,’ answered the ex-con. ‘What kind of work are you looking for?’ ‘Anything on a ranch or farm. I ran a lot of farm machinery on the prison farm.’ ‘Have you tried herding sheep?’ The ex-con felt a little insulted being asked the question. ‘No,’ he answered flatly. He was a good cowboy before he went to prison and had a distain for sheep and anybody that had anything to do with them. He almost felt like he should have been born a century earlier, when the cattle and sheep wars were going on. He’d never had anything to do with sheep, and had the old time cowman’s opinion of them.

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