Candelária's Curse by Charles Fletcher Lummis

What a snip-click! snip-click! snip-click! of the big steel shears, till the corral rang like an exaggerated telegraph office! Hoarse voices kept calling out "_Numer' uno! _" "_dieziseis! _" "_veintetres! _" and tall, handsome Lorenzo, standing in a corner with the tally card in his hand, penciled a mark opposite No. 1, No. 16, No. 23, and so on as each man called out the number by which he was known. The calls came fast, and for each one a shabby gray shadow, looking like the ghost of a boy with a home hair-cut, "only more so," went scurrying into the ranks of his yet unshorn fellows. The big corral was full as it could hold. Fifteen hundred sheep were there, so tightly packed that a mouse tossed upon their backs could hardly have found its way to the ground between them. Only in the triangular corners of the fence (which was built of logs laid up in zigzags) was there a trifle of room; and it was from these that all the noise came.

In each was a fast-swelling heap of dirty, gray wool, and just in front of it the shearer. Each, as he turned a victim loose, yelled out his number, to be tallied one, and running upon the huddled mass of sheep, caught one by the fleece with each hand, dragged it to his corner, flopped it upon its side, knotted its four sharp feet together with a dextrous movement, and, snatching the shears from his belt, fell instantly to work. It was a scene to bewilder an Eastern sheep-grower. There were no shearing tables. Each man bent over, as though there were a hinge in his waist, until his hands were within six inches of the ground, and thus worked all day long. Holding and turning the sheep with the left hand, with the right he drove the sharp blades snipping through the wool with startling rapidity-till, almost before one knew it, the whole fleece rolled off to one side, very much as if it had been an unbroken pelt.