The Flockmaster of Poison Creek
by George W. Ogden · English · Gutenberg #29668 · 468,478 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Flockmaster of Poison Creek
Author: George W. Ogden
Illustrator: P. V. E. Ivory
Release date: August 11, 2009 [eBook #29668]
Most recently updated: January 5, 2021
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29668
Credits: Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FLOCKMASTER OF POISON CREEK ***
Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
[Illustration: Neither spoke, a daze over them, the dull shock of death's
close passing bewildering and deep. _Page_ 120]
THE FLOCKMASTER OF POISON CREEK
BY
G. W. OGDEN
AUTHOR OF
THE DUKE OF CHIMNEY BUTTE, THE LAND OF LAST CHANCE, Etc.
FRONTISPIECE BY P. V. E. IVORY
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
Made in the United States of America
Copyright
A. C. McClurg & Co.
1921
Published March, 1921
Copyrighted in Great Britain
CONTENTS
I The Sheep Country 1
II Swan Carlson 15
III The Fight 27
IV Keeper of the Flock 34
V Tim Sullivan 49
VI Eyes in the Firelight 57
VII The Easiest Lesson 67
VIII The Sheep-Killer 76
IX A Two-Gun Man 87
X Wild Riders of the Range 97
XI Hector Hall Sets a Beacon 111
XII One Comes to Serve 127
XIII A Fight Almost Lost 136
XIV The Lonesomeness 149
XV Only One Jacob 160
XVI Reid Begins His Play 173
XVII Hertha Carlson 181
XVIII Swan Carlson's Day 195
XIX Not Cut out for a Sheepman 207
XX A Million Gallops Off 212
XXI Tim Sullivan Breaks a Contract 222
XXII Phantoms of Fever 233
XXIII Concerning Mary 239
XXIV More About Mary 252
XXV One Man's Joke 262
XXVI Payment on Account 270
XXVII A Summons in the Night 287
XXVIII Swan Carlson Laughs 296
XXIX Sheepman--And More 308
THE FLOCKMASTER OF POISON CREEK
CHAPTER I
THE SHEEP COUNTRY
So John Mackenzie had put his foot upon the road. This after he had
reasoned it out as a mathematical problem, considering it as a matter
of quantities alone. There was nothing in school-teaching at sixty
dollars a month when men who had to carry a rubber stamp to sign their
names to their checks were making fortunes all around him in sheep.
That was the way it looked to John Mackenzie the morning he set out
for Poison Creek to hunt up Tim Sullivan and strike him for a job.
Against the conventions of the country, he had struck out on foot.
That also had been reasoned out in a cool and calculative way. A
sheepherder had no use for a horse, in the first place. Secondly and
finally, the money a horse would represent would buy at least twelve
head of ewes. With questioning eyes upon him when he left Jasper, and
contemptuous eyes upon him when he met riders in his dusty journey,
John Mackenzie had pushed on, his pack on his back.
There was not a book in that pack. John Mackenzie, schoolmaster, had
been a bondslave of books in that country for four obscure, well-nigh
profitless years, and he was done with them for a while. The less a
sheepman knew about books, the more he was bound to know about sheep,
for sheep would be the object and aim of his existence. Mackenzie knew
plenty of sheepmen who never had looked into any kind of a book but a
bank-deposit book in their lives. That seemed to be education enough
to carry them very nicely along, even to boost them to the state
legislature, and lift one of them to the United States senate. So,
what was the use of worrying along on a mission of enlightenment at
sixty dollars a month?
Mackenzie had not come into the West in a missionary spirit at the
beginning. He had not believed the youth of that section to be in any
greater depths of ignorance than elsewhere in this more or less
favored land. But from his earliest years he had entertained romantic
notions, adventurous desires. With his normal-school certificate in
his breast pocket, tight trousers on his rather long legs, a short
vest scarcely meeting them at the waistband, he had traveled into the
West, seeking romance, alert for adventure.
When he arrived at Jasper, which was only the inter-mountain West, and
far from the golden coast of his most fervid dreams, he found that
adventure and romance apparently had packed up and gone elsewhere
years ahead of him. There was nothing nearer either of them in Jasper
than a tame gambling-joint in the back end of a saloon, where greasy,
morose sheepherders came to stake quarters on roulette and faro, where
railroaders squandered away their wages, leaving the grocerymen
unpaid. And there was no romance for John Mackenzie in any such
proceeding as that.
Simple, you will see he was; open-faced and guileless as the day.
Farm-bred, raw-boned, slow of speech, clear of eye, no vices, no
habits that pulled a man down, unless a fondness for his briar-root
pipe might be so classed. But in the way Mackenzie smoked the pipe it
was more in the nature of a sacrifice to his gods of romance than even
a mild dissipation.
In the four years of his school-teaching at Jasper Mackenzie slowly
grew out of his extreme rawness of appearance. His legs hardened from
long rambles over the hills, his face browned like an outdoor man's,
his rustic appearance, his clabber-days shyness, all slowly dissolved
away. But the school board was not cognizant of any physical or mental
strengthening in him. He was worth sixty dollars a month to that
slow-thinking body when he came to Jasper; he was worth no more than
sixty dollars when he threw up the job and left.
Romance and adventure had called him away to the road at last, but the
romance of sheep-riches, the adventure of following a flock over the
sage-gray hills. Maybe he would find it too late even to glimpse them
when he arrived in the heart of the sheeplands; perhaps times had
shifted since the heavy-jowled illiterates whom he had met in Jasper
began their careers with a few pounds of dried apples and uncommon
endurance for hardships in the open fields.
Simple, they thought him down in Jasper, in the mild simplicity of a
preacher or any man who would not fight. In their classification he
was a neutral force, an emasculated, mild, harmless creature who held
the child's view of life from much association with children. He often
had heard it said.
A man never could advance to notability in a community that rated him
as mildly simple; he would have a hard time of it even to become
notorious. Only one man there had taken an interest in him as man to
man, a flockmaster who had come into that country twenty years before,
a schoolteacher like himself.
This man had kicked up the golden dust before Mackenzie's eyes with
his tales of the romance of the range, the romance of sheep-riches,
the quick multiplication of a band run on the increase-sharing plan.
This man urged Mackenzie to join him, taking a band of sheep on
shares. But his range was in sight of Jasper; there was no romance on
his hills. So Mackenzie struck out for the headwaters of Poison Creek,
to find Tim Sullivan, notable man among the sheep-rich of his day.
It was a five-days' journey on foot, as he calculated it--nobody in
that country ever had walked it, as far as he could learn--to Tim
Sullivan's ranch on Poison Creek. Now, in the decline of the fifth day
he had come to Poison Creek, a loud, a rapid, and boisterous stream
which a man could cross in two jumps. It made a great amount of noise
in its going over the boulders in its bed, as a little water in a vast
arid land probably was justified by its importance in doing. It was
the first running water Mackenzie had met since leaving the Big Wind,
clear as if it came unpolluted by a hoof or a hand from its mountain
source.
But somewhere along its course Tim Sullivan grazed and watered forty
thousand sheep; and beyond him were others who grazed and watered many
times that number. Poison Creek might well enough merit its name from
the slaver of many flocks, the schoolmaster thought, although he knew
it came from pioneer days, and was as obscure as pioneer names usually
are obscure.
And some day he would be watering his thousands of sheep along its
rushing vein. That was John Mackenzie's intent and purpose as he
trudged the dusty miles of gray hills, with their furze of gray sage,
and their gray twilights which fell with a melancholy silence as
chilling as the breath of death. For John Mackenzie was going into
the sheeplands to become a master. He had determined it all by
mathematical rule.
There was the experience to be gained first, and it was cheaper to do
that at another man's expense than his own. He knew how the right kind
of a man could form a partnership with a flockmaster sometimes; he had
heard stories of such small beginnings leading to large ownership and
oily prosperity. Jasper had examples of its own; he was familiar with
them all.
Some of them began as herders on the basis of half the increase from a
stated number of sheep not more than ten years past. Now they looked
upon a sixty-dollars-a-month schoolteacher with the eyes of
superiority, as money always despises brains which it is obliged to
hire, probably because brains cannot devise any better method of
finding the necessary calories than that of letting themselves out by
the month.
Tim Sullivan needed herders; he had advertised for them in the Jasper
paper. Besides, Tim had the name of a man who could see the
possibilities in another. He had put more than one young fellow on the
way of success in the twenty years he had been running sheep on the
Poison Creek range. But failing to land a partnership deal with
Sullivan, Mackenzie was prepared to take a job running sheep by the
month. Or, should he find all avenues to experience at another man's
expense closed to him, he was ready to take the six hundred dollars
saved out of his years of book bondage and buy a little flock of his
own. Somewhere in that wide expanse of government-owned land he would
find water and grazing, and there his prosperity would increase.
Sheep had visited the creek lately at the point where Mackenzie first
encountered it, but there were no dusty flocks in sight billowing over
the hills. Tim Sullivan's house was not to be seen any more than
sheep, from the highest hill in the vicinity. It must be several miles
ahead of him still, Mackenzie concluded, remembering that Poison Creek
was long. Yet he hoped he might reach it by nightfall, for his feet
were growing weary of the untrodden way they had borne him for a
hundred and fifty miles, more or less.
He pushed on, now and again crossing the broad trail left by bands of
sheep counting two or three thousand, feeling the lonesomeness of the
unpeopled land softened by these domestic signs. Sunset, and no sight
of a house; nightfall, and not the gleam of a light to show him either
herder's camp or permanent domicile of man.
Mackenzie lingered beside the clamoring water in a little valley where
the uncropped grass was lush about his feet, considering making camp
there for the night. It was a pleasant place for a land so bleak, even
in summer, as that country of high table-lands and rolling gray hills.
As he started to unsling his pack he caught the dim note of somebody's
voice raised in song, and stood so, hand on the strap, listening.
The voice was faint, broken by the distance, yet cheering because it
was a voice. Mackenzie pressed up the hill, hoping to be able to
thread the voice back to its source from that eminence. As he neared
the top the voice came clearer; as he paused to listen, it seemed
quite close at hand. It was a woman singing, and this was the manner
of her song:
_Na-a-fer a-lo-o-one, na-a-fer a-lone,
He promise na-fer to leafe me,
Na-fer to leafe me a-lone!_
The valley whence came the song was quite dark below him, and darker
for the indefinite blotch of something that appeared to be trees. In
that grove the house that sheltered the melancholy singer must be
hidden, so completely shrouded that not even a gleam of light escaped
to lead him to the door. Mackenzie stood listening. There was no other
sound rising from that sequestered homestead than the woman's song,
and this was as doleful as any sound that ever issued from human
lips.
Over and over again the woman sang the three lines, a silence after
the last long, tremulous note which reached to the traveler's heart,
more eloquent in its expression of poignant loneliness than the
hopeless repetition of the song. He grinned dustily as he found
himself wishing, in all seriousness, that somebody would take a day
off and teach her the rest of the hymn.
Mackenzie's bones were weary of the road, hard as he tried to make
himself believe they were not, and that he was a tough man, ready to
take and give as it might come to him in the life of the sheeplands.
In his heart he longed for a bed that night, and a cup of hot coffee
to gladden his gizzard. Coffee he had not carried with him, much less
a coffeepot; his load would be heavy enough without them, he rightly
anticipated, before he reached Tim Sullivan's. Nothing more cheering
than water out of the holes by the way had passed his lips these five
days.
He could forgive the woman her song if she would supply some of the
comforts of those who luxuriated in houses for just this one night. He
went on, coming soon to barbed wire along the way, and presently to a
gap in it that let him in among the trees which concealed the house.
It was a small, low cabin, quite buried among the trees, no light
showing as Mackenzie drew near, although the voice of the woman still
rose in the plaintive monotony of her song.
Mackenzie put as much noise into his arrival as was possible by
walking heavily, knowing very well that a surprise by night is not a
good beginning for a claim of hospitality. The woman must have heard,
for her song ceased in the middle of a word. At the corner of the
house Mackenzie saw a dim light falling through an open door, into
which the shadow of the woman came.
A little way from the door Mackenzie halted, hat in hand, giving the
woman good evening. She stood within the threshold a few feet, the
light of the lantern hanging in an angle of the wall over her, bending
forward in the pose of one who listened. She was wiping a plate, which
she held before her breast in the manner of a shield, stiffly in both
hands. Her eyes were large and full of a frightened surprise, her pale
yellow hair was hanging in slovenly abandon down her cheeks and over
her ears.
She was a tall woman, thin of frame, worn and sad, but with a faded
comeliness of face, more intelligence apparent in it than is commonly
shown by Scandinavian women of the peasant class who share the labors
and the loads of their men on the isolated homesteads of the
Northwest. She stood so, leaning and staring, her mouth standing open
as if the song had been frightened out so quickly that it had no time
to shut the door.
"Good evening, madam," said Mackenzie again.
She came out of her paralysis of fright and surprise at the assuring
sound of his voice. He drew nearer, smiling to show his friendly
intention, the lantern light on the close, flat curls of his fair
hair, which lay damp on temples and forehead.
Tall after his kind was this traveler at her door, spare of flesh,
hollow of cheeks, great of nose, a seriousness in his eyes which
balanced well the marvelous tenderness of his smile. Not a handsome
man, but a man whose simple goodness shone in his features like a
friendly lamp. The woman in the door advanced a timid step; the color
deepened in her pale and melancholy face.
"I thought it was my man," she said, her voice soft and slow, a
labored effort in it to speak without the harsh dialect so apparent in
her song.
"I am a traveler, Mackenzie is my name, on my way to Tim Sullivan's
sheep ranch. My grub has run low; I'd like to get some supper if you
can let me have a bite."
"There is not much for a gentleman to eat," said she.
"Anything at all," Mackenzie returned, unslinging his pack, letting it
down wearily at his feet.
"My man would not like it. You have heard of Swan Carlson?"
"No; but I'll pay for it; he'll have no right to kick."
"You have come far if you have not heard of Swan Carlson. His name is
on the wind like a curse. Better you would go on, sir; my man would
kill you if he found you in this house."
She moved a step to reach and lay the plate on a table close at hand.
As she lifted her foot there was the sharp clink of metal, as of a
dragging chain. Mackenzie had heard it before when she stepped nearer
the door, and now he bent to look into the shadow that fell over the
floor from the flaring bottom of the lantern.
"Madam," said he, indignantly amazed by the barbarous thing he beheld,
"does that man keep you a prisoner here?"
"Like a dog," she said, nodding her untidy head, lifting her foot to
show him the chain.
It was a common trace-chain from plow harness; two of them, in fact,
welded together to give her length to go about her household work. She
had a freedom of not more than sixteen feet, one end of the chain
welded about her ankle, the other set in a staple driven into a log of
the wall. She had wrapped the links with cloths to save her flesh, but
for all of that protection she walked haltingly, as if the limb were
sore.
"I never heard of such inhuman treatment!" Mackenzie declared, hot to
the bone in his burning resentment of this barbarity. "How long has he
kept you tied up this way?"
"Three years now," said she, with a weary sigh.
"It's going to stop, right here. What did you let him treat you this
way for? Why didn't some of your neighbors take a hand in it?"
"Nobody comes," she sighed, shaking her head sadly. "The name of Swan
Carlson is a curse on the wind. Nobody passes; we are far from any
road that men travel; your face is the first I have seen since Swan
put the chain on me like a wolf."
"Where does he keep his tools?"
"Maybe in the barn--I do not know. Only there never is anything left
in my reach. Will you set me free, kind stranger?"
"If I can find anything to cut that chain. Let me have the lantern."
The woman hesitated, her eyes grown great with fright.
"My man, he is the one who choked two sheepherders with his hands. You
must have read in the paper----"
"Maybe it was before my time. Give me down the lantern."
Swan Carlson appeared to be a man who got along with very few tools.
Mackenzie could not find a cold-chisel among the few broken and rusted
odds and ends in the barn, although there was an anvil, such as every
rancher in that country had, fastened to a stump in the yard, a hammer
rusting beside it on the block. As Mackenzie stood considering what
could be done with the material at hand, the woman called to him from
the door, her voice vibrant with anxious excitement:
"My man will come soon," she said.
Mackenzie started back to the house, hammer in hand, thinking that he
might break the chain near her foot and give her liberty, at least. A
pile of logs lay in the dooryard, an ax hacked into the end of one.
With this tool added to the hammer, he hurried to the prisoner.
"I think we can make it now," he said.
The poor creature was panting as if the hand of her man hung over her
in threat of throttling out her life as he had smothered the
sheepherders in the tragedy that gave him his evil fame. Mackenzie
urged her to a chair, giving her the lantern to hold and, with the
edge of the ax set against a link of her chain, the poll on the floor,
he began hammering the soft metal against the bit.
Once she put her hand on his shoulder, her breath caught in a sharp
exclamation of alarm.
"I thought it was Swan's step!" she whispered. "Listen--do you hear?"
"There's nobody," he assured her, turning his head to listen, the
sweat on his lean cheek glistening in the light.
"It is my fear that he will come too soon. Strike fast, good young
man, strike fast!"
If Swan Carlson had been within half a mile he would have split the
wind to find out the cause of such a clanging in his shunned and
proscribed house, and that he did not appear before the chain was
severed was evidence that he was nowhere near at hand. When the cut
links fell to the floor Mrs. Carlson stood the lantern down with
gentle deliberation, as if preparing to enter the chamber of someone
in a desperate sickness to whom had come a blessed respite of sleep.
Then she stood, her lips apart, her breath suspended, lifting her
freed foot with a joyous relief in its lightness.
Mackenzie remained on his knees at her feet, looking up strangely into
her face. Suddenly she bent over him, clasped his forehead between her
hands, kissed his brow as if he were her son. A great hot tear
splashed down upon his cheek as she rose again, a sob in her throat
that ended in a little, moaning cry. She tossed her long arms like an
eagle set free from a cramping cage, her head thrown back, her
streaming hair far down her shoulders. There was an appealing grace in
her tall, spare body, a strange, awakening beauty in her haggard
face.
"God sent you," she said. "May He keep His hand over you wherever you
go."
Mackenzie got to his feet; she picked up the ax and leaned it against
the table close to her hand.
"I will give you eggs, you can cook them at a fire," she said, "and
bread I will give you, but butter I cannot give. That I have not
tasted since I came to this land, four years ago, a bride."
She moved about to get the food, walking with awkwardness on the foot
that had dragged the chain so long, laughing a little at her efforts
to regain a normal balance.
"Soon it will pass away, and I will walk like a lady, as I once knew
how."
"But I don't want to cook at a fire," Mackenzie protested; "I want you
to make me some coffee and fry me some eggs, and then we'll see about
things."
She came close to him, her great gray eyes seeming to draw him until
he gazed into her soul.
"No; you must go," she said. "It will be better when Swan comes that
nobody shall be here but me."
"But you! Why, you poor thing, he'll put that chain on you again,
knock you down, for all I know, and fasten you up like a beast. I'm
not going; I'll stay right here till he comes."
"No," shaking her head in sad earnestness, "better it will be for all
that I shall be here alone when he comes."
"Alone!" said he, impatiently; "what can you do alone?"
"When he comes," said she, drawing a great breath, shaking her hair
back from her face, her deep grave eyes holding him again in their
earnest appeal, "then I will stand by the door and kill him with the
ax!"
CHAPTER II
SWAN CARLSON
Mackenzie found it hard to bend the woman from this plan of summary
vengeance. She had suffered and brooded in her loneliness so long, the
cruel hand of Swan Carlson over her, that her thoughts had beaten a
path to this desire. This self-administration of justice seemed now
her life's sole aim. She approached it with glowing eyes and flushed
cheeks; she had lived for that hour.
Harshly she met Mackenzie's efforts at first to dissuade her from this
long-planned deed, yielding a little at length, not quite promising to
withhold her hand when the step of her savage husband should sound
outside the door.
"If you are here when he comes, then it will do for another night; if
you are gone, then I will not say."
That was the compromise she made with him at last, turning with no
more argument to prepare his supper, carrying the ax with her as she
went about the work. Often she stood in rigid concentration, listening
for the sound of Swan's coming, such animation in her eyes as a
bride's might show in a happier hour than hers. She sat opposite her
visitor as he made his supper on the simple food she gave him, and
told him the story of her adventure into that heartless land, the
ax-handle against her knee.
A minister's daughter, educated to fit herself for a minister's wife.
She had learned English in the schools of her native land, as the
custom is, and could speak it fairly when family reverses carried her
like a far-blown seed to America. She had no business training, for
what should a minister's wife know of business beyond the affairs of
the parish and the economy of her own home? She found, therefore,
nothing open to her hands in America save menial work in the
households of others.
Not being bred to it, nor the intention or thought of it as a future
contingency, she suffered in humbling herself to the services of
people who were at once her intellectual and social inferiors. The one
advantage in it was the improvement of her English speech, through
which she hoped for better things in time.
It was while she was still new to America, its customs and social
adjustments, and the shame of her menial situation burned in her soul
like a corrosive acid, that she saw the advertisement of Swan Carlson
in a Swedish newspaper. Swan Carlson was advertising for a wife.
Beneath a handsome picture of himself he stated his desires, frankly,
with evident honesty in all his representations. He told of his
holdings in sheep and land, of his money in the bank.
A dream of new consequence in this strange land came to Hertha
Jacobsen as she read the advertisement, as she studied the features of
Swan Carlson, his bold face looking at her from the page. She had seen
men, and the women of such men sharing their honors, who had risen
from peasants to governors and senators, to positions of wealth and
consequence in this strange land with all the romance of a tale out of
a book. Perhaps fate had urged her on to this unfriendly shore only
to feed her on the bitter herbs for her purification for a better
life.
The minister of her church investigated Swan Carlson and his claims,
finding him all that he professed to be. Hertha wrote to him; in time
Swan came to visit her, a tall, long-striding man, handsomer than his
picture in the paper, handsome as a Viking lord with his proud foot on
the neck of a fallen foe.
So she married him, and came away with him to the sheeplands, and
Swan's hand was as tender of her as a summer wind. It was shearing
time when they reached home; Swan was with her every day for a little
while, gathering his flocks from the range into the shearing sheds. He
was master of more than fifteen thousand sheep.
When the shearing was done, and Swan had gone with his wagons to ship
the clip, returning with his bankbook showing thousands in added
wealth, a change came into her life, so radiant with the blossoms of a
new happiness. Swan's big laugh was not so ready in his throat any
more; his great hand seemed forgetful of its caress. He told her that
the time of idling now was over; she must go with him in a sheep-wagon
to the range and care for her band of sheep, sharing the labors of his
life as she shared its rewards.
No; that was not to her liking. The wife of a rich man should not live
as a peasant woman, dew in her draggled skirts to her knees, the sun
browning her skin and bleaching her hair. It was not for his woman to
give him _no_, said Swan. Be ready at a certain hour in the morning;
they must make an early start, for the way was long.
But no; she refused to take the burden of a peasant woman on her back.
That was the first time Swan knocked her senseless. When she
recovered, the sheep-wagon was rocking her in its uneasy journey to
the distant range. Swan's cruelties multiplied with his impatience at
her slowness to master the shepherd's art. The dogs were sullen
creatures, unused to a woman's voice, unfriendly to a woman's
presence. Swan insisted that she lay aside her woman's attire and
dress as a man to gain the good-will of the dogs.
Again she defied his authority, all her refinement rising against the
degradation of her sex; again Swan laid her senseless with a blow.
When she woke her limbs were clad in overalls, a greasy jumper was
buttoned over her breast. But the dogs were wiser than their master;
no disguise of man's could cover her from the contempt of their shrewd
senses. They would not obey her shrilled commands.
Very well, said Swan; if she did not have it in her to win even the
respect of a dog, let her do a dog's work. So he took the collies
away, leaving her to range her band of sheep in terrible labor,
mind-wrenching loneliness, over the sage-gray hills. Wolves grew bold;
the lambs suffered. When Swan came again to number her flock, he
cursed her for her carelessness, giving her blows which were kinder
than his words.
With the first snow she abandoned her flock and fled. Disgraceful as
it was for a woman to leave her man, the frenzy of loneliness drove
her on. With his companionship she could have endured Swan's cruelty,
but alone her heart was dead. Three days she wandered. Swan found her
after she had fallen in the snow.
His great laugh woke her, and she was home in this house, the light of
day in her eyes. Swan was sitting beside her, merry in the thought of
how he had cheated her out of her intention to die like an old ewe
among the mountain drifts.
She was good for nothing, he said, but to sit at home like a cat. But
he would make sure that she sat at home, to be there at his coming,
and not running away from the bounty of a man who had taken a beggar
to his bosom. Then he brought the chain and the anvil, and welded the
red-hot iron upon her limb. He laughed when the smoke of her burning
flesh rose hissing; laughed when he mounted his horse and rode away,
leaving her in agony too great to let her die.
This summer now beginning was the fourth since that melancholy day. In
the time that had passed, Swan had come into the ways of trouble,
suffering a great drain upon his hoarded money, growing as a
consequence sullen and somber in his moods. No more he laughed; even
the distress of his chained wife, the sight of her wasting face and
body, the pleading of her tortured eyes, could not move his loud gales
of merriment again.
Swan had killed two of his sheepherders, as she had mentioned before.
It grew out of a dispute over wages, in which the men were right. That
was the winter following her attempt to run away, Swan being alone
with them upon the stormy range. He declared both of them set upon him
at once like wolves, and that he fought only to defend his life. He
strangled them, the throat of each grasped in his broad, thick hand,
and held them from him so, stiff arms against their desperate
struggles, until they sank down in the snow and died.
Only a little while ago the lawyers had got him off from the charge of
murder, after long delays. The case had been tried in another county,
for Swan Carlson's neighbors all believed him guilty of a horrible
crime; no man among them could have listened to his story under oath
with unprejudiced ear. The lawyers had brought Swan off, for at the
end it had been his living word against the mute accusations of two
dead men. There was nobody to speak for the herders; so the lawyers
had set him free. But it had cost him thousands of dollars, and Swan's
evil humor had deepened with the drain.
Crazy, he said of his wife; a poor mad thing bent on self-destruction
in wild and mournful ways. In that Swan was believed, at least. Nobody
came to inquire of her, none ever stopped to speak a word. The nearest
neighbor was twelve or fifteen miles distant, a morose man with sour
face, master of a sea of sheep.
All of this Swan himself had told her in the days when he laughed. He
told her also of the lawyers' drain upon his wealth, starving her days
together to make a pebble of saving to fill the ruthless breach.
"Tonight Swan will come," she said. "After what I have told you, are
you not afraid?"
"I suppose I ought to be," Mackenzie returned, leaving her to form her
own conclusion.
She searched his face with steady eyes, her hand on the ax-helve, in
earnest effort to read his heart.
"No, you are not afraid," she said. "But wait; when you hear him
speak, then you will be afraid."
"How do you know he is coming home tonight?"
She did not speak at once. Her eyes were fixed on the open door at
Mackenzie's side, her face was set in the tensity of her mental
concentration as she listened. Mackenzie bent all his faculties to
hear if any foot approached. There was no sound.
"The fishermen of my country can feel the chill of an iceberg through
the fog and the night," she said at last. "Swan Carlson is an iceberg
to my heart."
She listened again, bending forward, her lips open. Mackenzie fancied
he heard the swing of a galloping hoof-beat, and turned toward the
door.
"Have you a pistol?" she inquired.
"No."
"He is coming; in a little while he will be at the door. There is time
yet for you to leave."
"I want to have a word with your man; I'll wait."
Mrs. Carlson got up, keeping the ax in hand, moved her chair to the
other side of the door, where she stationed herself in such position
as Swan must see her first when he looked within. She disposed the ax
to conceal it entirely beneath her long apron, her hand under the
garment grasping the helve.
"For your own sake, not his, I ask you not to strike him," Mackenzie
pleaded, in all the earnestness he could command.
"I have given you the hour of my vengeance," she replied. "But if he
curses me, if he lifts his hand!"
Mackenzie was more than a little uneasy on the probable outcome of
his meeting with the tempestuous Swan. He got out his pipe and lit it,
considering the situation with fast-running thoughts. Still, a man
could not go on and leave that beaten, enslaved woman to the mercies
of her tyrant; Swan Carlson must be given to understand that he would
be held to answer to the law for his future behavior toward her.
"If I were you I'd put the ax behind the door and get his supper
ready," said he.
Mrs. Carlson got up at the suggestion, with such readiness that
surprised Mackenzie, put the ax back of the open door, stood a moment
winding up her fallen hair.
"Yes, he is my man," she said.
Swan was turning his horse into the barn; Mackenzie could hear him
talking to the animal, not unkindly. Mrs. Carlson put fresh fuel in
the stove, making a rattling of the lids which must have sounded
cheerful to the ears of a hungry man. As she began breaking eggs into
a bowl she took up her song again, with an unconscious air of
detachment from it, as one unwittingly follows the habit that has been
for years the accompaniment to a task.
As before, the refinement of accent was wanting in her words, but the
sweet melancholy of her voice thrilled her listener like the rich
notes of an ancient violin.
_Na-a-fer a-lo-o-one, na-a-fer a-lone,
He promise na-fer to leafe me,
Na-fer to leafe me a-lone!_
Mackenzie sat with his elbow on the table, his chair partly turned
toward the door, just within the threshold and a little to one side,
where the flockmaster would see him the moment he stepped into the
light. The traveler's pack lay on the floor at the door jamb; the
smoke from his pipe drifted out to tell of his presence in the honest
announcement of a man who had nothing to hide.
So Swan Carlson found him as he came home to his door.
Swan stopped, one foot in the door, the light on his face. Mrs.
Carlson did not turn from the stove to greet him by word or look, but
stood bending a little over the pan of sputtering eggs, which she
shook gently from side to side with a rhythmic, slow movement in
cadence with her song. Swan turned his eyes from one to the other, his
face clouding for a moment as for a burst of storm, clearing again at
once as Mackenzie rose and gave him good evening in cheerful and
unshaken voice.
Mrs. Carlson had spoken a true word when she described Swan as a
handsome man. Almost seven feet tall, Mackenzie took him to be, so
tall that he must stoop to enter the door; lithe and sinewy of limbs,
a lightness in them as of an athlete bred; broad in the shoulders,
long of arms. His face was stern, his red hair long about the ears,
his Viking mustache long-drooping at the corners of his mouth.
"I thought a man was here, or my woman had begun to smoke," said Swan,
coming in, flinging his hat down on the floor. "What do you want,
loafin' around here?"
Mackenzie explained his business in that country in direct words, and
his presence in the house in the same breath. Mollified, Swan grunted
that he understood and accepted the explanation, turning up his
sleeves, unfastening the collar of his flannel shirt, to wash. His
woman stood at the stove, her song dead on her lips, sliding the eggs
from the pan onto a platter in one piece. Swan gave her no heed, not
even a curious or questioning look, but as he crossed the room to the
wash bench he saw the broken chain lying free upon the floor.
A breath he paused over it, his eyes fastened on it in a glowering
stare. Mackenzie braced himself for the storm of wrath which seemed
bursting the doors of Swan Carlson's gloomy heart. But Swan did not
speak. He picked up the chain, examined the cut link, threw it down
with a clatter. At the sound of its fall Mackenzie saw Mrs. Carlson
start. She turned her head, terror in her eyes, her face blanched.
Swan bent over the basin, snorting water like a strangling horse.
There were eight eggs on the platter that Swan Carlson's woman put
before him when he sat down to his supper. One end of the great
trencher was heaped with brown bacon; a stack of bread stood at Swan's
left hand, a cup of coffee at his right. Before this provender the
flockmaster squared himself, the unwelcome guest across the table from
him, the smoke of his pipe drifting languidly out into the tranquil
summer night.
Swan had said no word since his first inquiry. Mackenzie had ventured
nothing more. Mrs. Carlson sat down in the chair that she had placed
near the door before Swan's arrival, only that she moved it a little
to bring her hand within reach of the hidden ax.
Swan had brushed his long, dark-red hair back from his broad, deep
forehead, bringing it down across the tips of his ears in a savage
fashion admirably suited to his grave, harsh, handsome face. He
devoured his food noisily, bending low over his plate.
"You want to learn the sheep business, huh?" said he, throwing up his
eyes in quick challenge, pausing a moment in his champing and clatter.
Mackenzie nodded, pipe raised toward his lips. "Well, you come to the
right country. You ever had any work around a ranch?"
"No."
"No, I didn't think you had; you look too soft. How much can you
lift?"
"What's that got to do with sheep?" Mackenzie inquired, frowning in
his habitual manner of showing displeasure with frivolous and trifling
things.
"I can shoulder a steel rail off of the railroad that weighs seven
hundred and fifty pounds," said Swan. "You couldn't lift one end."
"Maybe I couldn't," Mackenzie allowed, pretending to gaze out after
his drifting smoke, but watching the sheepman, as he mopped the last
of the eggs up with a piece of bread, with a furtive turning of his
eye. He was considering how to approach the matter which he had
remained there to take up with this great, boasting, savage man, and
how he could make him understand that it was any of society's business
whether he chained his wife or let her go free, fed her or starved
her, caressed her, or knocked her down.
Swan pushed back from the table, wringing the coffee from his
mustache.
"Did you cut that chain?" he asked.
"Yes, I cut it. You've got no right to keep your wife, or anybody
else, chained up. You could be put in jail for it; it's against the
law."
"A man's got a right to do what he pleases with his own woman; she's
his property, the same as a horse."
"Not exactly the same as a horse, either. But you could be put in jail
for beating your horse. I've waited here to tell you about this, in a
friendly way, and warn you to treat this woman right. Maybe you didn't
know you were breaking the law, but I'm telling you it's so."
Swan stood, his head within six inches of the ceiling. His wife must
have read an intention of violence in his face, although Mackenzie
could mark no change in his features, always as immobile as bronze.
She sprang to her feet, her bosom agitated, arms lifted, shoulders
raised, as if to shrink from the force of a blow. She made no effort
to reach the ax behind the door; the thought of it had gone,
apparently, out of her mind.
Swan stood within four feet of her, but he gave her no attention.
"When a man comes to my house and monkeys with my woman, him and me
we've got to have a fight," he said.
CHAPTER III
THE FIGHT
Mackenzie got up, keeping the table between them. He looked at the
door, calculating whether he could make a spring for the ax before
Carlson could grapple him. Carlson read in the glance an intention to
retreat, made a quick stride to the door, closed it sharply, locked
it, put the key in his pocket. He stood a moment looking Mackenzie
over, as if surprised by the length he unfolded when on his feet, but
with no change of anger or resentment in his stony face.
"You didn't need to lock the door, Carlson; I wasn't going to run
away--I didn't wait here to see you for that."
Mackenzie stood in careless, lounging pose, hand on the back of his
chair, pipe between his fingers, a rather humorous look in his eyes as
he measured Carlson up and down.
"Come out here in the middle and fight me if you ain't afraid!" Swan
challenged, derision in his voice.
"I'll fight you, all right, after I tell you what I waited here to
say. You're a coward, Swan Carlson, you're a sheepman with a sheep's
heart. I turned your woman loose, and you're going to let her stay
loose. Let that sink into your head."
Carlson was standing a few feet in front of Mackenzie, leaning
forward, his shoulders swelling and falling as if he flexed his
muscles for a spring. His arms he held swinging in front of him full
length, like a runner waiting for the start, in a posture at once
unpromising and uncouth. Behind him his wife shuddered against the
wall.
"Swan, Swan! O-o-oh, Swan, Swan!" she said, crying it softly as if she
chided him for a great hurt.
Swan turned partly toward her, striking backward with his open hand.
His great knuckles struck her across the eyes, a cruel, heavy blow
that would have felled a man. She staggered back a pace, then sank
limply forward on her knees, her hands outreaching on the floor, her
hair falling wildly, her posture that of a suppliant at a barbarian
conqueror's feet.
Mackenzie snatched the heavy platter from the table and brought
Carlson a smashing blow across the head. Carlson stood weaving on his
legs a moment as the fragments of the dish clattered around him,
swaying like a tree that waits the last blow of the ax to determine
which way it will fall. Mackenzie threw the fragment that remained in
his hand into Carlson's face, laying open a long gash in his cheek. As
the hot blood gushed down over his jaw Carlson steadied himself on his
swaying legs and laughed.
Mrs. Carlson lifted her face out of the shadows of the floor at the
sound. Mackenzie glanced at her, the red mark of Swan's harsh blow
across her brows, as he flew at Swan like a desert whirlwind, landing
heavily on his great neck before he could lift a guard. The blow
staggered Carlson over upon his wife, and together they collapsed
against the wall, where Carlson stood a breath, his hand thrown out to
save him from a fall. Then he shook his haughty, handsome, barbarian
head, and laughed again, a loud laugh, deep and strong.
There was no note of merriment in that sound, no inflection of
satisfaction or joy. It came out of his wide-extended jaws with a
roar, no facial softening with it, no blending of the features in the
transformation of a smile. Mrs. Carlson struggled to her knees at the
sound of it, lifting her moaning cry again at the sight of his gushing
blood. Swan charged his adversary with bent head, the floor trembling
under his heavy feet, his great hands lifted to seize and crush.
Mackenzie backed away, upsetting the table between them, barring for a
moment Swan's mad onrush. In the anger-blind movements of the man he
could read his intention, which was not to strike foot to foot, knee
to knee, but to grapple and smother, as he had smothered the
sheepherders in the snow. Across the overturned table Mackenzie landed
another blow, sprang around the barrier out of the pocket of corner
into which Carlson was bent on forcing him, hoping by nimble foot work
to play on the flockmaster for a knockout.
Swan threw a chair as Mackenzie circled out of his reach with nimble
feet, knocking down the stovepipe, dislodging a shower of tinware from
the shelves behind. Carlson had him by the shoulder now, but a deft
turn, a sharp blow, and Mackenzie was free, racing over the cluttered
floor in wild uproar, bending, side-stepping, in a strained and
terrific race. Carlson picked up the table, swung it overhead until it
struck the ceiling, threw it with all his mighty strength to crush the
man who had evaded him with such clever speed. A leg caught Mackenzie
a glancing blow on the head, dazing him momentarily, giving Carlson
the opening he desired.
In the next breath Mackenzie was down, Carlson's hand at his throat.
Mackenzie could see Swan's face as he bent over him, the lantern light
on it fairly. There was no light of exultation in it as his great hand
closed slowly upon Mackenzie's throat, no change from its stony
harshness save for the dark gash and the flood of blood that ran down
his jaw and neck.
Mackenzie writhed and struggled, groping on the floor for something to
strike Carlson with and break his garroting grip. The blood was
singing in his ears, the breath was cut from his lungs; his eyes
flashed a thousand scintillating sparks and grew dark. His hand struck
something in the debris on the floor, the handle of a table knife it
seemed, and with the contact a desperate accession of life heaved in
him like a final wave. He struck, and struck at Swan Carlson's arm,
and struck again at his wrist as he felt the tightening band of his
fingers relax, heard him curse and growl. A quick turn and he was
free, with a glimpse as he rolled over at Swan Carlson pulling a table
fork out of his hairy wrist.
Mackenzie felt blood in his mouth; his ears were muffled as if he were
under water, but he came to his feet with a leg of the broken table in
his hand. Swan threw the fork at him as he rose from his knees; it
struck the lantern, breaking the globe, cutting off more than half the
dim light in which the undetermined battle had begun.
Over against the door Mrs. Carlson stood with the ax in her hands,
holding it uplifted, partly drawn back, as if she had checked it in an
intended blow. Swan tore a broad plank from the table top, split it
over his knee to make it better fit his hand, and came on to the
attack, bending in his slouching, bearish attitude of defiant
strength. Mackenzie gave way before him, watching his moment to strike
the decisive blow.
This maneuver brought Mackenzie near the door, where the wild-eyed
woman stood, an ally and a reserve, ready to help him in the moment of
his extremity. He believed she had been on the point of striking Swan
the moment his fingers closed in their convulsive pang of death over
the handle of the fork.
Swan followed, warily now, conscious of this man's unexpected strength
and agility, and of his resources in a moment of desperation, making
feints with his board as a batter does before the ball is thrown.
Mackenzie passed Mrs. Carlson, backing away from Swan, sparring for
time to recover his wind and faculties after his swift excursion to
the borderland of death. He parried a swift blow, giving one in return
that caught Swan on the elbow and knocked the plank out of his hand.
Mackenzie sprang forward to follow up his advantage with a decisive
stroke, when, to his amazement, Mrs. Carlson threw herself between
them, the ax uplifted in her husband's defense.
"No, no!" she screamed; "he is my man!"
Swan Carlson laughed again, and patted her shoulder, stooping to
recover his board. But he flung it down again, taking the ax in its
place, pushing his woman, not without some tenderness in his hand,
back into the corner, throwing himself in front of her, his wild
laugh ringing in the murky room, stifling from the smoke of lantern
and stove.
Mackenzie felt his hope break like a rope of straw at this unexpected
turn of the woman. With those two mad creatures--for mad he believed
the isolation and cruelty suffered by the one, the trouble and terror
of the law by the other, had driven them--leagued against him it
seemed that he must put down all hope of ever looking again upon the
day.
If there was any chance for him at all, it lay in darkness. With this
thought Mackenzie made a quick dash past Carlson, smashing the lantern
with a blow.
There was one window in the room, a small, single-sash opening near
the stove. Even this was not apparent for a little while following the
plunge into the dark; Mackenzie stood still, waiting for his eyes to
adjust themselves to the gloom. No sound but Carlson's breathing came
from the other side of the kitchen. The square of window appeared
dimly now, a little to Mackenzie's left. He moved cautiously away from
it, yet not without noise for all his care. Swan let drive with his
board at the sound of movement. His aim was good; it struck
Mackenzie's shoulder, but fortunately with its flat surface, doing no
hurt.
Mackenzie threw himself down heavily, getting cautiously to his feet
again instantly, hoping to draw Carlson over in the belief that he had
put him out of the fight. But Carlson was not so rash. He struck a
match, holding it up, peering under it, blinking in the sudden light.
Mackenzie was not more than eight feet away. He closed the distance in
a bound, swung the heavy oak table leg, and stretched Carlson on the
floor. Mrs. Carlson began wailing and moaning, bending over her fallen
tyrant, as Mackenzie could gather from her voice.
"You've killed him," she said; "you've killed my man!"
"No, but I will kill him if you don't open the door!"
Mackenzie stood by Carlson as he spoke, feeling his body with his
foot. He bent over Carlson, exploring for his heart, fearing that he
had killed him, indeed. His first efforts to locate a pulse were not
assuring, but a feeble throbbing at last announced that the great
ruffian's admirable machinery was stunned, not broken.
"Open the door; he'll be all right in a little while," Mackenzie
said.
Mrs. Carlson was moaning in a sorrow as genuine as if the fallen man
had been the kindest husband that fate could have sent her, and not
the heartless beast that he was. She found the key and threw the door
open, letting in a cool, sweet breath of the night. Under it Carlson
would soon revive, Mackenzie believed. He had no desire to linger and
witness the restoration.
Mackenzie had a bruised and heavy feeling about him as he shouldered
his pack and hurried from that inhospitable door. He knew that Swan
Carlson was not dead, and would not die from that blow. Why the
feeling persisted as he struck off up the creek through the dew-wet
grass he could not tell, but it was strong upon him that Swan Carlson
would come into his way again, to make trouble for him on a future
day.
CHAPTER IV
KEEPER OF THE FLOCK
John Mackenzie, late schoolmaster of Jasper, marched on through the
cool of the night, regretting that he had meddled in the domestic
arrangements of Swan Carlson, the Swede. The outcome of his attempted
kindness to the oppressed woman had not been felicitous. Indeed, he
was troubled greatly by the fear that he had killed Swan Carlson, and
that grave consequences might rise out of this first adventure that
ever fell in his way.
Perhaps adventure was not such a thing to be sought as he had
imagined, he reflected; hand to his swollen throat. There was an ache
in his crushed windpipe, a dryness in his mouth, a taste of blood on
his tongue. That had been a close go for him, there on the floor under
Swan Carlson's great knee; a few seconds longer, and his first
adventure would have been his last.
Yet there was a vast satisfaction in knowing what was in him. Here he
had stood foot to foot with the strong man of the sheeplands, the
strangler, the fierce, half-insane terror of peaceful men, and had
come off the victor. He had fought this man in his own house, where a
man will fight valiantly, even though a coward on the road, and had
left him senseless on the floor. It was something for a schoolteacher,
counted a mild and childlike man.
It had been many a year since Mackenzie had mixed in a fight, and the
best that had gone before was nothing more than a harmless spat
compared to this. The marvel of it was how he had developed this
quality of defense in inactivity. There must have been some
psychological undercurrent carrying strength and skill to him through
all the years of his romantic imaginings; the spirits of old heroes of
that land must have lent him their counsel and might in that desperate
battle with the Norse flockmaster.
Adventure was not dead out of the land, it seemed, although this was a
rather sordid and ignoble brand. It had descended to base levels among
base men who lived with sheep and thought only of sheep-riches.
Violence among such men as Swan Carlson was merely violence, with none
of the picturesque embellishments of the olden days when men slung
pistols with a challenge and a hail, in those swift battles where
skill was all, bestial strength nothing.
Mackenzie hoped to find Tim Sullivan different from the general run of
sheep-rich men. There must be some of the spice of romance in a man
who had the wide reputation of Tim Sullivan, and who was the hero of
so many tales of success.
It was Mackenzie's hope that this encounter with the wild sheepman
might turn out to his profit with Tim Sullivan. He always had believed
that he should win fortune fighting if it ever fell to his portion at
all. This brush with Swan Carlson confirmed his old belief. If there
was any good luck for him in the sheep country, it would come to him
through a fight,
Mackenzie considered these things as he marched on away from Swan
Carlson's homestead, thinking the safe plan would be to put several
miles between himself and that place before lying down to rest. At
dawn Swan would be out after him with a gun, more than likely.
Mackenzie had nothing of the sort in his slender equipment. Imagine a
man going into the sheep country carrying a gun! The gun days of the
West were done; he had seen only one cowboy wearing one in his four
years at Jasper.
Past midnight Mackenzie came to a little valley where somebody had
been cutting hay. The late-risen moon discovered the little mounds of
hay thick around him, the aroma of the curing herbage was blowing to
him an invitation to stop and sleep. Let Swan Carlson come when he
might, that was the place prepared for the traveler's repose.
Romance or no romance, riches or poverty, he was through with a
woman's work, he told himself. Once there had been ideals ahead of him
in educational work, but the contempt of men had dispelled them. If he
could not find his beginning in the sheep country, he would turn
elsewhere. A man who had it in him to fight giants wasn't cut out for
teaching school.
Mackenzie sat with his back to a haycock thinking in this vein. The
sound of running water was near; he went to the creek and bathed his
throat, easing its burning with a deep swig. Back again to the hay,
still building new victories, and nobler ones, on the foundation of
this triumph over Swan Carlson, the red giant who choked men to death
in the snow.
Morning discovered no habitation in reach of the eye. That little
field of mown hay stood alone among the gray hills, unfenced,
unfended, secure in its isolation, a little patch of something in the
wilderness that looked like home. Mackenzie must have put many miles
behind him since leaving Carlson's door. Looking back, he could follow
the course of the creek where it snaked through the hills, dark green
of willow and cottonwood fresh among the hemming slopes of sage, but
no trace of Carlson's trees could he see.
Mackenzie had no flour to mix a wad of dough, and but a heel of a
bacon side to furnish a breakfast. It was so unpromising in his
present hungry state that he determined to tramp on a few miles in the
hope of lifting Tim Sullivan's ranch-house on the prominent hilltop
where, he had been told, it stood.
Two or three miles beyond the hay-field Mackenzie came suddenly upon a
sheep-camp. The wagon stood on a green hillside, a pleasant valley
below it where the grass was abundant and sweet. The camp evidently
had been stationed in that place but a little while, for a large band
of sheep grazed just below it, no bedding-ground being worn bare in
the unusual verdure. Altogether, it was the greenest and most
promising place Mackenzie had met in his journey, gladdening at once
to the imagination and the eye.
The shepherd sat on the hillside, his dogs beside him, a little smoke
ascending straight in the calm, early sunshine from his dying fire.
The collies scented the stranger while he stood on the hilltop,
several hundred yards above the camp, rising to question his presence
bristling backs. The shepherd rose to inquire into the alarm,
springing up with amazing agility, such sudden and wild concern in his
manner as provoked the traveler's smile.
Mackenzie saw that he was a boy of fifteen or thereabout, dressed in
overalls much too large for him, the bottoms turned up almost to his
knees. Hot as the morning was beginning, the lad had on a duck coat
with sheepskin collar, but in the excitement of beholding a visitor
approaching his camp so early in the day, he took off his hat,
standing so a moment. Then he cut out a streak for the wagon, a few
rods distant, throwing back a half-frightened look as he disappeared
around its side.
This was a very commodious wagon, familiar to Mackenzie from having
seen many like it drawn up for repairs at the blacksmith shops in
Jasper. Its heavy canvas top was stretched tightly over bows, made to
withstand wind and rough weather, a stovepipe projecting through it,
fended about with a broad tin, and a canvas door, with a little window
in it, a commodious step letting down to the ground. Its tongue was
cut short, to admit coupling it close behind the camp-mover's wagon,
and it was a snug and comfortable home on wheels.
The dogs came slowly to meet Mackenzie as he approached, backs still
bristling, countenances unpromising. The boy had disappeared into the
wagon; Mackenzie wondered if he had gone to fetch his gun.
But no. Instead of a gun, came a girl, neither timidity nor fear in
her bearing, and close behind her came the boy, hat still in his hand,
his long, straight hair down about his ears. Mackenzie had stopped a
hundred yards or so distant, not confident of a friendly reception
from the dogs. The girl waved her hand in invitation for him to come
on, and stood waiting at the wagon end.
She was as neatly dressed as the lad beside her was uncouth in his
man-size overalls, her short corduroy skirt belted about with a broad
leather clasped with a gleaming silver buckle, the tops of her tall
laced boots lost beneath its hem. Her gray flannel waist was laced at
the bosom like a cowboy's shirt, adorned at the collar with a flaming
scarlet necktie done in a bow as broad as a band. Her brown sombrero
was tilted, perhaps unintentionally, a little to one side of her
rather pert and independently carried head.
At a word from her the dogs left the way unopposed, and as greetings
passed between the sheepgirl and the stranger the wise creatures stood
beside her, eyeing the visitor over with suspicious mien. Mackenzie
told his name and his business, making inquiry in the same breath for
Tim Sullivan's ranch.
"Do you know Mr. Sullivan?" she asked. And as she lifted her eyes
Mackenzie saw that they were as blue as asters on an October morning,
and that her hair was a warm reddish-brown, and that her face was
refreshingly pure in its outline, strong and haughty and brown, and
subtly sweet as the elusive perfume of a wild rose of the hills.
"No, I don't know Mr. Sullivan; I've never even seen him. I've heard a
lot about him down at Jasper--I was the schoolteacher there."
"Oh, you're up here on your vacation?" said she, a light of quick
interest in her eyes, an unmistakable friendliness in her voice. It
was as if he had presented a letter from somebody well and favorably
known.
"No, I've come up here to see about learning the sheep business."
"Sheep business?" said she, looking at him with surprised eyes. "Sheep
business?" this time with a shading of disgust. "Well, if I had sense
enough to teach school I'd never want to see another sheep!"
Mackenzie smiled at her impetuous outburst in which she revealed in a
word the discontent of her heart.
"Of course you know Mr. Sullivan?"
"He's my father," she returned. "This is my brother Charley; there are
eight more of us at home."
Charley grinned, his shyness still over him, but his alarm quieted,
and gave Mackenzie his hand.
"The ranch is about thirteen or fifteen miles on up the creek from
here," she said, "You haven't had your breakfast, have you?"
"No; I just about finished my grub yesterday."
"I didn't see any grease around your gills," said the girl, in quite a
matter-of-fact way, no flippancy in her manner. "Charley, stir up the
fire, will you? I can't offer you much, Mr. Mackenzie, but you're
welcome to what there is. How about a can of beans?"
"You've hit me right where I live, Miss Sullivan."
The collies came warily up, stiff-legged, with backs still ruffled,
and sniffed Mackenzie over. They seemed to find him harmless, turning
from him presently to go and lie beside Charley, their faces toward
the flock, alert ears lifted, white breasts gleaming in the sun like
the linen of fastidious gentlemen.
"Do you want me to get any water, Joan?" Charley inquired.
Joan answered from inside the wagon that no water was needed, there
was coffee enough in the pot. She handed the smoke-blackened vessel
out to Mackenzie as she spoke, telling him to go and put it on the
fire.
Joan turned the beans into the pan after cooking the bacon, and sent
Charley to the wagon for a loaf of bread.
"We don't have to bake bread in this camp, that's one blessing," she
said. "Mother keeps us supplied. Some of these sheepherders never
taste anything but their cold-water biscuits for years at a time."
"It must get kind of tiresome," Mackenzie reflected, thinking of his
own efforts at bread-making on the road.
"It's too heavy to carry around in the craw," said Joan.
Charley watched Mackenzie curiously as he ate, whispering once to his
sister, who flushed, turned her eyes a moment on her visitor, and then
seemed to rebuke the lad for passing confidences in such impolite way.
Mackenzie guessed that his discolored neck and bruised face had been
the subject of the boy's conjectures, but he did not feel pride enough
in his late encounter to speak of it even in explanation. Charley
opened the way to it at last when Joan took the breakfast things back
to the wagon.
"Have you been in a fight?" the boy inquired.
"Not much of a one," Mackenzie told him, rather wishing that the
particulars might be reserved.
"Your neck's black like somebody'd been chokin' you, and your face is
bunged up some, too. Who done it?"
"Do you know Swan Carlson?" Mackenzie inquired, turning slowly to the
boy.
"Swan Carlson?" Charley's face grew pale at the name; his eyes started
in round amazement. "You couldn't never 'a' got away from Swan; he
choked two fellers to death, one in each hand. No man in this country
could whip one side of Swan."
"Well, I got away from him, anyhow," said Mackenzie, in a manner that
even the boy understood to be the end of the discussion.
But Charley was not going to have it so. He jumped up and ran to meet
Joan as she came from the wagon.
"Mr. Mackenzie had a fight with Swan Carlson--that's what's the matter
with his neck!" he said. There was unbounded admiration in the boy's
voice, and exultation as if the distinction were his own. Here before
his eyes was a man who had come to grips with Swan Carlson, and had
escaped from his strangling hands to eat his breakfast with as much
unconcern as if he had no more than been kicked by a mule.
Joan came on a little quicker, excitement reflected in her lively
eyes. Mackenzie was filling his pipe, which had gone through the
fight in his pocket in miraculous safety--for which he was duly
grateful--ashamed of his bruises, now that the talk of them had
brought them to Joan's notice again.
"I hope you killed him," she said, coming near, looking down on
Mackenzie with full commendation; "he keeps his crazy wife chained up
like a dog!"
"I don't think he's dead, but I'd like to know for sure," Mackenzie
returned, his eyes bent thoughtfully on the ground.
"Nobody will ever say a word to you if you did kill him," Joan
assured. "They'd all know he started it--he fusses with everybody."
She sat on the ground near him, Charley posting himself a little in
front, where he could admire and wonder over the might of a man who
could break Swan Carlson's hold upon his throat and leave his house
alive. Before them the long valley widened as it reached away, the
sheep a dusty brown splotch in it, spread at their grazing, the sound
of the lambs' wailing rising clear in the pastoral silence.
"I stopped at Carlson's house after dark last night," Mackenzie
explained, seeing that such explanation must be made, "and turned his
wife loose. Carlson resented it when he came home. He said I'd have to
fight him. But you're wrong when you believe what Carlson says about
that woman; she isn't crazy, and never was."
That seemed to be all the story, from the way he hastened it, and
turned away from the vital point of interest. Joan touched his arm as
he sat smoking, his speculative gaze on the sheep, his brows drawn as
if in troubled thought.
"What did you do when he said you had to fight him?" she inquired, her
breath coming fast, her cheeks glowing.
Mackenzie laughed shortly. "Why, I tried to get away," he said.
"Why didn't you, before he got his hands on you?" Charley wanted to
know.
"Charley!" said Joan.
"Carlson locked the door before I could get out." Mackenzie nodded to
the boy, very gravely, as one man to another. Charley laughed.
"You didn't tear up no boards off the floor tryin' to git away!" said
he.
Joan smiled; that seemed to express her opinion of it, also. She
admired the schoolmaster's modest reluctance when he gave them a bare
outline of what followed, shuddering when he laughed over Mrs.
Carlson's defense of her husband with the ax.
"Gee!" said Charley, "I hope dad'll give you a job."
"But how did you get out of there?" Joan asked.
"I took an unfair advantage of Swan and hit him with a table leg."
"Gee! dad's _got_ to give you a job," said Charley; "I'll make him."
"I'll hold you to that, Charley," Mackenzie laughed.
In the boy's eyes Mackenzie was already a hero, greater than any man
that had come into the sheeplands in his day. Sheep people are not
fighting folks. They never have been since the world's beginning; they
never will be to the world's end. There is something in the peaceful
business of attending sheep, some appeal in their meekness and
passivity, that seems to tincture and curb the savage spirit that
dwells in the breast of man. Swan Carlson was one of the notorious
exceptions in that country. Even the cattlemen were afraid of him.
Joan advised against Mackenzie's expressed intention of returning to
Carlson's house to find out how badly he was hurt. It would be a
blessing to the country, she said, if it should turn out that Carlson
was killed. But Mackenzie had an uneasy feeling that it would be a
blessing he could not share. He was troubled over the thing, now that
the excitement of the fight had cooled out of him, thinking of the
blow he had given Carlson with that heavy piece of oak.
Perhaps the fellow was not dead, but hurt so badly that he would die
without surgical aid. It was the part of duty and humanity to go back
and see. He resolved to do this, keeping the resolution to himself.
Joan told him much of the sheep business, and much about the art of
running a big band over that sparse range, in which this green valley
lay like an oasis, a gladdening sight seldom to be met with among
those sulky hills. She said she hoped her father would find a place
for him, for the summer, at least.
"But I wouldn't like to see you shut yourself up in this country like
the rest of us are," she said, gazing off over the hills with wistful
eyes. "A man that knows enough to teach school oughtn't fool away his
time on sheep."
She was working toward her own emancipation, she told him, running
that band of two thousand sheep on shares for her father, just the
same as an ordinary herdsman. In three years she hoped her increase,
and share of the clip, would be worth ten thousand dollars, and then
she would sell out and go away.
"What would you want to leave a good business like this for?" he
asked, rather astonished at her cool calculation upon what she
believed to be freedom. "There's nothing out in what people call the
world that you could turn your hand to that would make you a third of
the money."
"I want to go away and get some education," she said.
"But you are educated, Miss Sullivan."
She turned a slow, reproachful look upon him, a shadow of sadness over
her wholesome young face.
"I'm nearly nineteen; I don't know as much as a girl of twelve," she
said.
"I've never met any of those precocious twelve-year-olds," he told
her, shaking his head gravely. "You know a great deal more than you're
conscious of, I think, Miss Sullivan. We don't get the best of it out
of books."
"I'm a prisoner here," she said, stretching her arms as if she
displayed her bonds, "as much of a prisoner in my way as Swan
Carlson's wife was in hers. You cut her chain; nobody ever has come to
cut mine."
"Your knight will come riding over the hill some evening. One comes
into every woman's life, sooner or later, I think."
"Mostly in imagination," said Joan. And her way of saying it, so wise
and superior, as if she spoke of some toy which she had outgrown,
brought a smile again to her visitor's grave face.
Charley was not interested in his sister's bondage, or in the coming
of a champion to set her free. He went off to send the dogs after an
adventurous bunch of sheep that was straying from the main flock. Joan
sighed as she looked after him, putting a strand of hair away behind
her ear. Presently she brightened, turning to Mackenzie with
quickening eyes.
"I'll make a bargain with you, Mr. Mackenzie, if you're in earnest
about learning the sheep business," she said.
"All right; let's hear it."
"Dad's coming over here today to finish cutting hay. I'll make a deal
with him for you to get a band of sheep to run on shares if you'll
agree to teach me enough to get into college--if I've got brains
enough to learn."
"The doubt would be on the side of the teacher, not the pupil, Miss
Sullivan. Maybe your father wouldn't like the arrangement, anyway."
"He'll like it, all right. What do you say?"
"I don't think it would be very much to my advantage to take charge of
a band of sheep under conditions that might look as if I needed
somebody to plug for me. Your father might think of me as an
incompetent and good-for-nothing person."
"You're afraid I haven't got it in me to learn--you don't want to
waste time on me!" Joan spoke with a sad bitterness, as one who saw
another illusion fading before her eyes.
"Not that," he hastened to assure her, putting out his hand as if to
add the comfort of his touch to the salve of his words. "I'm only
afraid your father wouldn't have anything to do with me if you were to
approach him with any such proposal. From what I've heard of him he's
a man who likes a fellow to do his own talking."
"I don't think he'd refuse me."
"It's hard for a stranger to do that. Your father----"
* * * * *
"You'll not do it, you mean?"
"I think I'd rather get a job from your father on my own face than on
any kind of an arrangement or condition, Miss Sullivan. But I pass you
my word that you'll be welcome to anything and all I'm able to teach
you if I become a pupil in the sheep business on this range. Provided,
of course, that I'm in reaching distance."
"Will you?" Joan asked, hope clearing the shadows from her face
again.
"But we might be too far apart for lessons very often," he suggested.
"Not more than ten or twelve miles. I could ride that every day."
"It's a bargain then, if I get on," said he.
"It's a bargain," nodded Joan, giving him her hand to bind it, with
great earnestness in her eyes.
CHAPTER V
TIM SULLIVAN
"Yes, they call us flockmasters in the reports of the Wool Growers'
Association, and in the papers and magazines, but we're nothing but
sheepmen, and that's all you can make out of us."
Tim Sullivan spoke without humor when he made this correction in the
name of his calling, sitting with his back to a haycock, eating his
dinner in the sun. Mackenzie accepted the correction with a nod of
understanding, sparing his words.
"So you want to be a flockmaster?" said Tim. "Well, there's worse
callin's a man, especially a young man, could take up. What put it in
your head to tramp off up here to see me? Couldn't some of them
sheepmen down at Jasper use you?"
"I wanted to get into the heart of the sheep country for one thing,
and several of my friends recommended you as the best sheepman on the
range, for another. I want to learn under a master, if I learn at
all."
"Right," Tim nodded, "right and sound. Do you think you've got the
stuff in you to make a sheepman out of?"
"It will have to be a pretty hard school if I can't stick it
through."
"Summers are all right," said Tim, reflectively, nodding away at the
distant hills, "and falls are all right, but you take it winter and
early spring, and it tries the mettle in a man. Blizzards and
starvation, and losses through pile-ups and stampedes, wolves and what
not, make a man think sometimes he'll never go through it any more.
Then spring comes, with the cold wind, and slush up to your ankles,
and you out day and night lookin' after the ewes and lambs. Lambin'
time is the hard time, and it's the time when a man makes it or loses,
accordin' to what's in him to face hardship and work."
"I've heard about it; I know what I'm asking to go up against, Mr.
Sullivan."
"You want to buy in, or take a band on shares?"
"I'd rather take a band on shares. If I put what little money I've got
into it I'll go it alone."
"That's right; it's safer to let the other man take the risk. It ain't
fair to us sheepmen, but we have to do it to get men. Well, when we
hit on a good man, it pays better than hirin' poor ones at fifty
dollars a month and found. I've had old snoozers workin' for me that
the coyotes eat the boots off of while they was asleep. You look kind
of slim and light to tackle a job on the range."
Mackenzie made no defense of his weight, advancing no further argument
in behalf of his petition for a job. Sullivan measured him over with
his appraising eyes, saying nothing about the bruises he bore,
although Mackenzie knew he was burning with curiosity to go into the
matter of how and when he received them.
Sullivan was a man of calm benignity of face, a placid certainty of
his power and place in the world; a rugged man, broad-handed, slow.
His pleasure was in the distinction of his wealth, and not in any use
that he made of it for his own comfort or the advancement of those
under his hand. Even so, he was of a type superior to the general run
of flockmasters such as Mackenzie had met.
"I'll give you a job helpin' me on this hay for a few days, and kind
of try you out," Tim agreed at last. "I don't want to discourage you
at the start, but I don't believe you got the mettle in you to make a
flockmaster, if you want to call it that, out of."
"All right; I'll help you on the hay. Before I start in though, I'd
like to borrow a saddle-horse from you to take a ride down the creek
to Swan Carlson's place. I wouldn't be long."
"Carlson's place? Do you know Swan Carlson?"
Mackenzie told in few words how much he knew of Carlson, and his
reason for desiring to visit him. Tim's wonder was too large to
contain at hearing this news. He got up, his eyes staring in plain
incredulity, his mouth open a bit between surprise and censure, it
seemed. But he said nothing for a little while; only stood and looked
Mackenzie over again, with more careful scrutiny than before.
"I'll go down with you," he announced, turning abruptly away to get
the horses.
It was evident to Mackenzie that Sullivan was bewildered between doubt
and suspicion as they rode toward Carlson's ranch, which the sheepman
said was about seven miles away. But he betrayed nothing of his
thoughts in words, riding in silence mainly, looking at the ground
like a man who had troubles on his mind.
The silence of abandonment was over Carlson's house as they rode up. A
few chickens retreated from the yard to the cover of the barn in the
haste of panic, their going being the only sound of life about the
place. The door through which Mackenzie had left was shut; he
approached it without hesitation--Tim Sullivan lingering back as if in
doubt of their reception--and knocked. No answer. Mackenzie tried the
door, finding it unlocked; pushed it open, entered.
Sullivan stood outside, one mighty hand on the jamb, his body to one
side under protection of the house, his head put cautiously and
curiously round to see, leaving a fairway for Swan Carlson should he
rise from a dark corner, shake himself like an old grizzly, and
charge.
"Is he there?" Tim asked, his voice a strained whisper.
Mackenzie did not reply. He stood in the middle of the room where his
combat with Swan had taken place, among the debris of broken dishes,
wrecked table, fallen stovepipe and tinware, looking about him with
grim interest. There was nobody in the other room, but the blood from
Swan's hurt trailed across the floor as if he had been helped to the
bed. Tim took his courage in both hands and came just inside the
door.
"Man! Look at the blood!" he said.
"There's nobody here," Mackenzie told him, turning to go.
"She's took him to the doctor," said Tim.
"Where is that?"
"There's a kind of a one over on the Sweetwater, sixty miles from
here, but there's no good one this side of Jasper."
"He'll die on the way," Mackenzie said conclusively.
"No such luck," said Tim. "Look! There's the chain he tied that woman
of his up with."
"We'd better go back and get at that hay," Mackenzie said. "There's
nothing I can do for Carlson."
"There's the table leg you hit him with!" Tim picked it up, plucking
off the red hairs which clung to it, looking at Mackenzie with
startled eyes. Mackenzie mounted his horse.
"You'd better shut the door," he called back as he rode away.
Tim caught up with him half a mile on the way back to the hay-field.
The sheepman seemed to have outrun his words. A long time he rode
beside Mackenzie in silence, turning a furtive eye upon him across his
long nose now and then. At last it burst from him:
"You done it!" he said, with the astonished pleasure of a man assured
against his doubts.
Mackenzie checked his horse, looking at Tim in perplexed inquiry.
"What are you talking about?" he asked.
"You laid him out--Swan Carlson--you done it! Man!"
"Oh, you're still talking about that," Mackenzie said, a bit vexed.
"It would be worth thousands to the rest of us sheepmen on this range
if he never comes back."
"Why didn't some of you handle him long ago? A man of your build ought
to be able to put a dent in Carlson."
"I'll fight any man that stands on two feet," said Tim, with such
sincerity that it could not have been taken for a boast, "you can ask
about me far and near, but I draw the line at the devil. I've stood up
with four men against me, with meat cleavers and butcher knives in
their hands, when I used to work as a sheep butcher back in the
packin' house in Chicago, and I've come through with my life. But them
was friends of mine," he sighed; "a man knew how they lived. Swan
Carlson's got a wolf's blood in his veins. He ain't a human man."
"And this man is worth three hundred thousand dollars!" thought
Mackenzie. And he knew, also, that the greatest treasure that the
flockmaster could count was one not so greatly appreciated as a
thousand sheep--that brave, ambitious little rebel, Joan.
"Maybe you've got the makin' of a sheepman in you," Tim said,
thoughtfully, as they came in sight of the hay. "I've got an old man I
could put you under till the dogs got used to you and you learnt their
ways and found out something among the thousand things a man's got to
know if he intends to make a success of runnin' sheep. Old Dad Frazer
could put you onto the tricks of the trade quicker than any man I
know. Maybe you _have_ got the makin' of a sheepman in you. I'll have
to think it over."
Tim took the four days they were at the hay to think about it. At the
end of that time, with the hay in stack and the mowing-machine loaded
into the wagon for the rough journey to the ranch, Tim unburdened his
mind.
"I've decided to try you out, John," he announced, but shaking his
head as he spoke, as if he doubted the wisdom of the venture. "I'll
leave you here with Dad Frazer--he's over on Horsethief, about six
miles across from Joan's range--and let him break you in. You
understand, you don't go in on shares till you're able to handle at
least two thousand head."
"I agree on that."
"And then there's another little point." Tim shifted his feet, jerked
up his trousers, rubbed his chin in a truly Irish way. "That girl of
mine, Joan, she's got it in her head she wants to be a lady, and go to
college and put on agonies. No use in it, as I tell her. No girl
that's got money needs any of the education stuff. I got on without
it, and I made my money without it. Joan she wants you to give her
some lessons. She made me promise I wouldn't take you on unless you'd
agree to that as part of our conditions and contract."
Mackenzie had no need to put on a face of thinking it over seriously;
he was entirely sincere in the silence he held while he revolved it in
his mind. He doubted whether more learning would bring to Joan the
contentment which she lacked in her present state. It might only open
the door to a greater longing, or it might disillusion her when her
feet had left these wild, free hills, and set a pang in her heart like
a flame for the things which knowledge closes the door against the
return for evermore.
"I'll tell you how to handle her to be rid of her soon," said Tim,
winking craftily, seeing how the wind stood. "Discourage her, tell her
she ain't got the mind for books and Latin and mathematics. All the
mathematics she needs is enough to count her sheep and figure her
clip. Tell her to put books out of her head and stick to the range,
marry some good sheepman if one turns up to her taste, or pass them
all up if she likes. But tell her to stick to sheep, whatever she
does. She can be the sheep queen of this country in fifteen years;
she's as handy with 'em now as I am, and I tell you, John, that's
something that's hard for me to say, even of my own girl. But she is;
she's as good a sheepman right now as I am or ever will be. But you
don't need to tell her that."
"I don't believe she'll take it, but it's the soundest advice I could
give her," Mackenzie said.
"Work up to it gradual, lad; it can't be done in a day. Make the
lessons hard, pile the Latin on heavy. Lord, I remember it, back in
the old country, old Father MacGuire layin' it on the lads under his
thumb. Devil a word of it sticks to me now, not even the word for
sheep. I tried to remember some of it when they sent me up to the
legislature in Cheyenne; I wanted to knock 'em over. But it had all
leaked out. Discourage her, man; discourage her."
"Yes, that might be the greatest kindness I could do her in the end,"
Mackenzie said.
"I'll drop you off over there; you can stay in camp tonight with
Charley and Joan. Tomorrow I'll come back and take you out to Dad
Frazer's camp, and you can begin your schoolin' for the makin' of a
master. But begin early to discourage her, John; begin at her early,
lad."
CHAPTER VI
EYES IN THE FIRELIGHT
"They call it the lonesomeness here," said Joan, her voice weary as
with the weight of the day. "People shoot themselves when they get it
bad--green sheepherders and farmers that come in here to try to plow
up the range."
"Crazy guys," said Charley, contemptuously, chin in his hands where he
stretched full length on his belly beside the embers of the supper
fire.
"Homesick," said Mackenzie, understandingly. "I've heard it's one of
the worst of all diseases. It defeats armies sometimes, so you can't
blame a lone sheepherder if he loses his mind on account of it."
"Huh!" said Charley, no sympathy in him for such weakness at all.
"I guess not," Joan admitted, thoughtfully. "I was brought up here,
it's home to me. Maybe I'd get the lonesomeness if I was to go away."
"You sure would, kid," said Charley, with comfortable finality.
"But I want to go, just the same," Joan declared, a certain defiance
in her tone, as if in defense of a question often disputed between
herself and Charley.
"You think you do," said Charley, "but you'd hit the high places
comin' back home. Ain't that right, Mr. Mackenzie?"
"I think there's something to it," Mackenzie allowed.
"Maybe I would," Joan yielded, "but as soon as my share in the sheep
figures up enough you'll see me hittin' the breeze for Chicago. I want
to see the picture galleries and libraries."
"I'd like to go through the mail-order house we get our things from up
there," Charley said. "The catalogue says it covers seventeen acres!"
Mackenzie was camping with them for the night on his way to Dad
Frazer's range, according to Tim Sullivan's plan. Long since they had
finished supper; the sheep were quiet below them on the hillside. The
silence of the sheeplands, almost oppressive in its weight, lay around
them so complete and unbroken that Mackenzie fancied he could hear the
stars snap as they sparkled. He smiled to himself at the fancy, face
turned up to the deep serenity of the heavens. Charley blew the
embers, stirring them with a brush of sage.
"The lonesomeness," said Mackenzie, with a curious dwelling on the
word; "I never heard it used in that specific sense before."
"Well, it sure gets a greenhorn," said Joan.
Charley held the sage-branch to the embers, blowing them until a
little blaze jumped up into the startled dark. The sudden light
revealed Joan's face where she sat across from Mackenzie, and it was
so pensively sad that it smote his heart like a pain to see.
Her eyes stood wide open as she had stretched them to roam into the
night after her dreams of freedom beyond the land she knew, and so she
held them a moment, undazzled by the light of the leaping blaze. They
gleamed like glad waters in a morning sun, and the schoolmaster's
heart was quickened by them, and the pain for her longing soothed out
of it. The well of her youth was revealed before him, the fountain of
her soul.
"I'm goin' to roll in," Charley announced, his branch consumed in the
eager breath of the little blaze. "Don't slam your shoes down like you
was drivin' nails when you come in, Joan."
"It wouldn't bother you much," Joan told him, calmly indifferent to
his great desire for unbroken repose.
Charley rolled on his back, where he lay a little while in luxurious
inaction, sleep coming over him heavily. Joan shook him, sending him
stumbling off to the wagon and his bunk.
"You could drive a wagon over him and never wake him once he hits the
hay," she said.
"What kind of a man is Dad Frazer?" Mackenzie asked, his mind running
on his business adventure that was to begin on the morrow.
"Oh, he's a regular old flat-foot," said Joan. "He'll talk your leg
off before you've been around him a week, blowin' about what he used
to do down in Oklahoma."
"Well, a man couldn't get the lonesomeness around him, anyhow."
"You'll get it, all right, just like I told you; no green hand with
all his senses ever escaped it. Maybe you'll have it light, though,"
she added, hopefully, as if to hold him up for the ordeal.
"I hope so. But with you coming over to take lessons, and Dad Frazer
talking morning, noon, and night, I'll forget Egypt and its fleshpots,
maybe."
"Egypt? I thought you came from Jasper?"
"It's only a saying, used in relation to the place you look back to
with regret when you're hungry."
"I'm so ignorant I ought to be shot!" said Joan.
And Mackenzie sat silently fronting her, the dead fire between, a long
time, thinking of the sparkle of her yearning eyes, smiling in his
grim way to himself when there was no chance of being seen as he felt
again the flash of them strike deep into his heart. Wise eyes, eyes
which held a store of wholesome knowledge gleaned from the years in
those silent places where her soul had grown without a shadow to
smirch its purity.
"There's a difference between wisdom and learning," he said at last,
in low and thoughtful voice. "What's it like over where Dad Frazer
grazes his sheep?"
"Close to the range Swan Carlson and the Hall boys use, and you want
to keep away from there."
"Of course; I wouldn't want to trespass on anybody's territory. Are
they all disagreeable people over that way?"
"There's nobody there but the Halls and Carlson. You know Swan."
"He might improve on close acquaintance," Mackenzie speculated.
"I don't think he's as bad as the Halls, wild and crazy as he is.
Hector Hall, especially. But you may get on with them, all right--I
don't want to throw any scare into you before you meet them."
"Are they out looking for trouble?"
"I don't know as they are, but they're there to make it if anybody
lets a sheep get an inch over the line they claim as theirs. Oh,
well, pass 'em up till you have to meet them--maybe they'll treat you
white, anyway."
Again a silence stood between them, Mackenzie considering many things,
not the least of them being this remarkable girl's life among the
sheep and the rough characters of the range, no wonder in him over her
impatience to be away from it. It seemed to him that Tim Sullivan
might well spare her the money for schooling, as well as fend her
against the dangers and hardships of the range by keeping her at home
these summer days.
"It looks to me like a hard life for a girl," he said; "no diversions,
none of the things that youth generally values and craves. Don't you
ever have any dances or anything--camp meetings or picnics?"
"They have dances over at Four Corners sometimes--Hector Hall wanted
me to go to one with him about a year ago. He had his nerve to ask me,
the little old sheep-thief!"
"Well, I should think so."
"He's been doubly sore at us ever since I turned him down. I looked
for him to come over and shoot up my camp some night for a long time,
but I guess he isn't that bad."
"So much to his credit."
"But I wish sometimes I'd gone with him. Maybe it would have
straightened things out. You know, when you stay here on the range,
Mr. Mackenzie, you're on a level with everybody else, no matter what
you think of yourself. You can't get out of the place they make for
you in their estimation of you. Hector Hall never will believe I'm
too good to go to a dance with him. He'll be sore about it all his
life."
"A man naturally would have regrets, Miss Sullivan. Maybe that's as
far as it goes with Hector Hall, maybe he's only sore at heart for the
honor denied."
"That don't sound like real talk," said Joan.
Mackenzie grinned at the rebuke, and the candor and frankness in which
it was administered, thinking that Joan would have a frigid time of it
out in the world if she applied such outspoken rules to its flatteries
and mild humbugs.
"Let's be natural then," he suggested, considering as he spoke that
candor was Joan's best defense in her position on the range. Here she
sat out under the stars with him, miles from the nearest habitation,
miles from her father's house, her small protector asleep in the
wagon, and thought no more of it than a chaperoned daughter of the
city in an illuminated drawing-room. A girl had to put men in their
places and keep them there under such circumstances, and nobody knew
better how to do it than Joan.
"I'll try your patience and good humor when you start out to teach
me," she told him, "for I'll want to run before I learn to walk."
"We'll see how it goes in a few days; I've sent for the books."
"I'll make a good many wild breaks," she said, "and tumble around a
lot, I know, but there won't be anybody to laugh at me--but you." She
paused as if considering the figure she would make at the tasks she
awaited with such impatience, then added under her breath, almost in
a whisper, as if it was not meant for him to hear: "But you'll never
laugh at me for being hungry to learn."
Mackenzie attempted neither comment nor reply to this, feeling that it
was Joan's heart speaking to herself alone. He looked away over the
sleeping sheeplands, vast as the sea, and as mysterious under the
starlight, thinking that it would require more than hard lessons and
unusual tasks to discourage this girl. She stood at the fountain-edge,
leaning with dry lips to drink, her wistful eyes strong to probe the
mysteries which lay locked in books yet strange to her, but wiser in
her years than many a man who had skimmed a college course. There was
a vast difference between knowledge and learning, indeed; it never had
been so apparent to him as in the presence of that outspoken girl of
the sheep range that summer night.
What would the world do with Joan Sullivan if she ever broke her
fetters and went to it? How would it accept her faith and frankness,
her high scorn for the deceits upon which it fed? Not kindly, he knew.
There would be disillusionment ahead for her, and bitter awakening
from long-wrapping dreams. If he could teach her to be content in the
wide freedom of that place he would accomplish the greatest service
that he could bring her in the days of her untroubled youth.
Discourage her, said Tim Sullivan. Mackenzie felt that this was not
his job.
"Maybe Charley's right about it," she said, her voice low, and soft
with that inherited gentleness which must have come from Tim
Sullivan's mother, Mackenzie thought. "He's a wise kid, maybe I would
want to come back faster than I went away. But I get so tired of it
sometimes I walk up and down out here by the wagon half the night, and
wear myself out making plans that I may never be able to put
through."
"It's just as well," he told her, nodding again in his solemn, weighty
fashion; "everybody that amounts to anything has this fever of unrest.
Back home we used to stack the wheat to let it sweat and harden.
You're going through that. It takes the grossness out of us."
"Have you gone through it?"
"Years of it; over the worst of it now, I hope."
"And you came here. Was that the kind of an ambition you had? Was that
all your dreams brought you?"
"But I've seen more here than I ever projected in my schemes, Miss
Joan. I've seen the serenity of the stars in this vastness; I've felt
the wind of freedom on my face." And to himself: "And I have seen the
firelight leap in a maiden's eyes, and I have looked deep into the
inspiring fountain of her soul." But there was not the boldness in
him, nor the desire to risk her rebuke again, to bring it to his
lips.
"Do you think you'll like it after you get over the lonesomeness?"
"Yes, if I take the lonesomeness."
"You'll take it, all right. But if you ever do work up to be a
sheepman, and of course you will if you stick to the range long
enough, you'll never be able to leave again. Sheep tie a person down
like a houseful of children."
"Maybe I'd never want to go. I've had my turn at it out there; I've
been snubbed and discounted, all but despised, because I had a little
learning and no money to go with it. I can hide my little learning
here, and nobody seems to care about the money. Yes, I think I'll stay
on the range."
Joan turned her face away, and he knew the yearning was in her eyes as
they strained into the starlit horizon after the things she had never
known.
"I don't see what could ever happen that would make me want to stay
here," she said at last. She got up with the sudden nimbleness of a
deer, so quickly that Mackenzie though she must be either startled or
offended, but saw in a moment it was only her natural way of moving in
the untrammeled freedom of her lithe, strong limbs.
"You'll find a soft place on the side of the hill somewhere to sleep,"
she said, turning toward the wagon. "I'm going to pile in. Good
night."
Mackenzie sat again by the ashes of the little fire after giving her
good night. He felt that he had suffered in her estimation because of
his lowly ambition to follow her father, and the hundred other obscure
heroes of the sheep country, and become a flockmaster, sequestered and
safe among the sage-gray hills.
Joan expected more of a man who was able to teach school; expected
lofty aims, far-reaching ambitions. But that was because Joan did not
know the world that lifted the lure of its flare beyond the rim of her
horizon. She must taste it to understand, and come back with a bruised
heart to the shelter of her native hills.
And this lonesomeness of which she had been telling him, this dread
sickness that fell upon a man in those solitudes, and drained away his
courage and hope--must he experience it, like a disease of adolescence
from which few escape? He did not believe it. Joan had said she was
immune to it, having been born in its atmosphere, knowing nothing but
solitude and silence, in which there was no strange nor fearful
thing.
But she fretted under a discontent that made her miserable, even
though it did not strain her reason like the lonesomeness. Something
was wanting to fill her life. He cast about him, wondering what it
could be, wishing that he might supply it and take away the shadow out
of her eyes.
It was his last thought as he fell asleep in a little swale below the
wagon where the grass was tall and soft--that he might find what was
lacking to make Joan content with the peace and plenty of the
sheeplands, and supply that want.
CHAPTER VII
THE EASIEST LESSON
"Why do they always begin the conjugations on _love_?"
There was no perplexity in Joan's eyes as she asked the question;
rather, a dreamy and far-away look, the open book face-downward on the
ground beside her.
"Because it's a good example of the first termination, I suppose,"
Mackenzie replied, his eyes measuring off the leagues with her own, as
if they together sought the door that opened out of that gray land
into romance that quiet summer afternoon.
"It was that way in the Spanish grammar," said Joan, shaking her head,
unconvinced by the reason he advanced. "There are plenty of words in
the first termination that are just as short. Why? You're the teacher;
you ought to know."
She said it banteringly, as if she dared him to give the reason. His
eyes came back from their distant groping, meeting hers with gentle
boldness. So for a little while he looked silently into her appealing
eyes, then turned away.
"Maybe, Joan, because it is the easiest lesson to learn and the
hardest to forget," he said.
Joan bent her gaze upon the ground, a flush tinting her brown face,
plucking at the grass with aimless fingers.
"Anyway, we've passed it," said she.
"No, it recurs all through the book; it's something that can't be left
out of it, any more than it can be left out of life. Well, it doesn't
need to trouble you and me."
"No; we could use some other word," said Joan, turning her face away.
"But mean the same, Joan. I had an old maid English teacher when I was
a boy who made us conjugate _to like_ instead of the more intimate and
tender word. Poor old soul! I hope it saved her feelings and eased her
regrets."
"Maybe she'd had a romance," said Joan.
"I hope so; there's at least one romance coming to every woman in this
world. If she misses it she's being cheated."
Mackenzie took up the Latin grammar, marking off her next lesson, and
piling it on with unsparing hand, too. Yet not in accord with Tim
Sullivan's advice; solely because his pupil was one of extraordinary
capacity. There was no such thing as discouraging Joan; she absorbed
learning and retained it, as the sandstone absorbs oil under the
pressure of the earth, holding it without wasting a drop until the day
it gladdens man in his exploration.
So with Joan. She was storing learning in the undefiled reservoir of
her mind, to be found like unexpected jewels by some hand in after
time. As she followed the sheep she carried her books; at night, long
after Charley had gone to sleep, she sat with them by the lantern
light in the sheep-wagon. Unspoiled by the diversions and distractions
which divide the mind of the city student, she acquired and held a
month's tasks in a week. The thirsty traveler in the desert places had
come to the oasis of her dreams.
Daily Joan rode to the sheep-camp where Mackenzie was learning the
business of running sheep under Dad Frazer. There were no holidays in
the term Joan had set for herself, no unbending, no relaxation from
her books. Perhaps she did not expect her teacher to remain there in
the sheeplands, shut away from the life that he had breathed so long
and put aside for what seemed to her an unaccountable whim.
"You'll be reading Caesar by winter," Mackenzie told her as she
prepared to ride back to her camp. "You'll have to take it slower
then; we can't have lessons every day."
"Why not?" She was standing beside her horse, hat in hand, her rich
hair lifting in the wind from her wise, placid brow. Her books she had
strapped to the saddle-horn; there was a yellow slicker at the
cantle.
"You'll be at home, I'll be out here with the sheep. I expect about
once a week will be as often as we can make it then."
"I'll be out here on the range," she said, shaking her determined
head, "a sheepman's got to stick with his flock through all kinds of
weather. If I run home for the winter I'll have to hire a herder, and
that would eat my profits up; I'd never get away from here."
"Maybe by the time you've got enough money to carry out your plans,
Joan, you'll not want to leave."
"You've got to have education to be able to enjoy money. Some of the
sheepmen in this country--yes, most of them--would be better men if
they were poor. Wealth is nothing to them but a dim consciousness of a
new power. It makes them arrogant and unbearable. Did you ever see
Matt Hall?"
"I still have that pleasure in reserve. But I think you'll find it's
refinement, rather than learning, that a person needs to enjoy wealth.
That comes more from within than without."
"The curtain's down between me and everything I want," Joan said, a
wistful note of loneliness in her low, soft voice. "I'm going to ride
away some day and push it aside, and see what it's been keeping from
me all the years of my longing. Then, maybe, when I'm satisfied I'll
come back and make money. I've got sense enough to see it's here to be
made if a person's got the sheep to start with and the range to run
them on."
"Yes, you'll have to go," said he, in what seemed sad thoughtfulness,
"to learn it all; I can't teach you the things your heart desires most
to know. Well, there are bitter waters and sweet waters, Joan; we've
got to drink them both."
"It's the same way here," she said, "only we've got sense enough to
know the alkali holes before we drink out of them."
"But people are not that wise the world over, Joan."
Joan stood in silent thought, her far-reaching gaze on the dim curtain
of haze which hung between her and the world of men's activities,
strivings, and lamentations.
"If I had the money I'd go as soon--as soon as I knew a little more,"
she said. "But I've got to stick; I made that bargain with dad--he'd
never give me the money, but he'll buy me out when I've got enough to
stake me."
"Your father was over this morning."
"Yes, I know."
"He thinks _my_ education's advanced far enough to trust me with a
band of sheep. I'm going to have charge of the flock I've been running
here with Dad Frazer."
"I heard about it."
"And you don't congratulate me on becoming a paid sheepherder, my
first step on the way to flockmaster!"
"I don't know that you're to be congratulated," she returned, facing
him seriously. "All there is to success here is brute strength and
endurance against storms and winter weather--it don't take any brains.
Out there where you've been and I'm going, there must be something
bigger and better for a man, it seems to me. But maybe men get tired
of it--I don't know."
"You'll understand it better when you go there, Joan."
"Yes, I'll understand a lot of things that are locked up to me now.
Well, I don't want to go as much all the time now as I did--only in
spells sometimes. If you stay here and teach me, maybe I'll get over
it for good."
Joan laughed nervously, half of it forced, her face averted.
"If I could teach you enough to keep you here, Joan, I'd think it was
the biggest thing I'd ever done."
"I don't want to know any more if it means giving up," she said.
"It looks like giving up to you, Joan, but I've only started," he
corrected her, in gentle spirit.
"I oughtn't talk that way to you," she said, turning to him
contritely, her earnest eyes lifted to his, "it's none of my business
what you do. If you hadn't come here I'd never have heard of--of
_amare_, maybe."
Joan bent her head, a flush over her brown cheeks, a smile of mischief
at the corners of her mouth. Mackenzie laughed, but strained and
unnaturally, his own tough face burning with a hot tide of mounting
blood.
"Somebody else would have taught you--you'd have conjugated it in
another language, maybe," he said.
"Yes, you say it's the easiest lesson to learn," she nodded, soberly
now. "Have you taught it to many--many--girls?"
"According to the book, Joan," he returned; "only that way."
Joan drew a deep breath, and looked away over the hills, and smiled.
But she said no more, after the way of one who has relieved the mind
on a doubted point.
"I expect I'll be getting a taste of the lonesomeness here of nights
pretty soon," Mackenzie said, feeling himself in an awkward, yet not
unpleasant situation with this frank girl's rather impertinent
question still burning in his heart. "Dad's going to leave me to take
charge of another flock."
"I'll try to keep you so busy you'll not have it very bad," she said.
"Yes, and you'll pump your fount of knowledge dry in a hurry if you
don't slow down a little," he returned. "At the pace you've set you'll
have to import a professor to take you along, unless one strays in
from somewhere."
"I don't take up with strays," said Joan, rather loftily.
"I think Dad's getting restless," Mackenzie said, hastening to cover
his mistake.
"He goes away every so often," Joan explained, "to see his Mexican
wife down around El Paso somewhere."
"Oh, that explains it. He didn't mention her to me."
"He will, all right. He'll cut out to see her in a little while, more
than likely, but he'll come drifting back with the shearers in the
spring like he always does. It seems to me like everybody comes back
to the sheep country that's ever lived in it a while. I wonder if I'd
want to come back, too?"
It was a speculation upon which Mackenzie did not feel called to make
comment. Time alone would prove to Joan where her heart lay anchored,
as it proves to all who go wandering in its own bitter way at last.
"I don't seem to want to go away as long as I'm learning something,"
Joan confessed, a little ashamed of the admission, it appeared, from
her manner of refusing to lift her head.
Mackenzie felt a great uplifting in his heart, as a song cheers it
when it comes gladly at the close of a day of perplexity and doubt and
toil. He reached out his hand as if to touch her and tell her how this
dawning of his hope made him glad, but withdrew it, dropping it at his
side as she looked up, a lively color in her cheeks.
"As long as you'll stay and teach me, there isn't any particular use
for me to leave, is there?" she inquired.
"If staying here would keep you, Joan, I'd never leave," he told her,
his voice so grave and earnest that it trembled a little on the low
notes.
Joan drew her breath again with that long inspiration which was like a
satisfied sigh.
"Well, I must go," she said.
But she did not move, and Mackenzie, drawing nearer, put out his hand
in his way of silent appeal again.
"Not that I don't want you to know what there is out there," he said,
"but because I'd save you the disappointment, the disillusionment, and
the heartache that too often go with the knowledge of the world. You'd
be better for it if you never knew, living here undefiled like a
spring that comes out of the rocks into the sun."
"Well, I must go," said Joan, sighing with repletion again, but taking
no step toward her waiting horse.
Although it was a moment which seemed full of things to be said,
neither had words for it, but stood silently while the day went out in
glory around them. Dad Frazer was bringing his murmuring flock home to
the bedding-ground on the hillside below the wagon; the wind was low
as a lover's breath, lifting Joan's russet hair from her pure, placid
brow.
And she must go at last, with a word of parting from the saddle, and
her hand held out to him in a new tenderness as if going home were a
thing to be remembered. And as Mackenzie took it there rose in his
memory the lines:
_Touch hands and part with laughter,
Touch lips and part with tears._
Joan rode away against the sun, which was red upon the hill, and stood
for a little moment sharply against the fiery sky to wave him a
farewell.
"So easily learned, Joan; so hard to forget," said Mackenzie, speaking
as if he sent his voice after her, a whisper on the wind, although she
was half a mile away. A moment more, and the hill stood empty between
them. Mackenzie turned to prepare supper for the coming of Dad Frazer,
who would complain against books and the nonsense contained in them if
the food was not on the board when he came up the hill.
CHAPTER VIII
THE SHEEP-KILLER
It was dusk when Dad Frazer drove the slow-drifting flock home to its
sleeping place, which tomorrow night very likely would be on some
hillside no softer, many miles away. Only a few days together the camp
remained in one place, no longer than it took the sheep to crop the
herbage within easy reach. Then came the camp-mover and hauled the
wagon to fresh pastures in that illimitable, gray-green land.
Dad Frazer was a man of sixty or sixty-five, who had been an army
teamster in the days of frontier posts. He was slender and sinewy,
with beautiful, glimmering, silvery hair which he wore in long curls
and kept as carefully combed as any dandy that ever pranced at the
court of a king. It was his one vanity, his dusty, greasy raiment
being his last thought.
Dad's somber face was brown and weathered, marked with deep lines,
covered over with an ashy, short growth of beard which he clipped once
in two weeks with sheep-shears when he didn't lose count of the days.
Frazer always wore an ancient military hat with a leather thong at the
back of his head drawn tight across his flowing hair. The brim of this
hat turned up in the back as if he had slept in it many years, which
was indeed the case, and down in the front so low over his brows that
it gave him a sullen and clouded cast, which the redundancy of his
spirits and words at once denied.
For Dad Frazer was a loquacious sheepherder, an exception among the
morose and silent men who follow that isolated calling upon the lonely
range. He talked to the dogs when there was nobody by, to the sheep as
he scattered them for an even chance between weak and strong over the
grazing lands, and to himself when no other object presented. He swore
with force and piquancy, and original embellishments for old-time
oaths which was like a sharp sauce to an unsavory dish.
Frazer was peculiar in another way. He liked a soft bed to pound the
ground on after his long days after the sheep, and to that end kept a
roll of sheepskins under the wagon. More than that, he always washed
before eating, even if he had to divide the last water in the keg.
Now as he was employed with his ablutions, after a running fire of
talk from the time he came within hearing to the moment the water
smothered his voice over the basin, Mackenzie saw him turn an eye in
his direction every little while between the soaping and the washing
of his bearded face. The old fellow seemed bursting with restraint of
something that he had not told or asked about. Mackenzie could read
him like a thermometer.
"What's the matter, Dad--rattlesnakes?" he asked.
"Rattlesnakes nothin'!" returned the old man.
"I thought another one had been crawling up your leg."
"Nearer boey constructors! Anybody been here but Joan?"
"No."
Dad came over to the tail of the wagon, where Mackenzie had supper
spread on a board, a box at each end, for that was a sheep-camp _de
luxe_. He stood a little while looking about in the gloom, his head
tipped as if he listened, presently taking his place, unaccountably
silent, and uncomfortably so, as Mackenzie could very well see.
"You didn't lose a dog, did you, Dad?"
"Dog nothin'! Do I look like a man that'd lose a dog?"
"Well, Dad," Mackenzie said, in his slow, thoughtful way, "I don't
exactly know how a man that would lose a dog looks, but I don't
believe you do."
"Swan Carlson's back on the range!" said Dad, delivering it before he
was ready, perhaps, and before he had fully prepared the way, but
unable to hold it a second longer.
"Swan Carlson?"
"Back on the range."
"So they fixed him up in the hospital at Cheyenne?"
"I reckon they must 'a'. He's back runnin' his sheep, and that woman
of his'n she's with him. Swan run one of his herders off the first
rattle out of the box, said he'd been stealin' sheep while he was
gone. That's one of his old tricks to keep from payin' a man."
"It sounds like him, all right. Have you seen him?"
"No. Matt Hall come by this evenin', and told me."
"I'm glad Swan got all right again, anyhow, even if he's no better to
his wife than he was before. I was kind of worried about him."
"Yes, and I'll bet he's meaner than he ever was, knockin' that woman
around like a sack of sawdust the way he always did. I reckon he gets
more fun out of her that way than he does keepin' her tied."
"He can hang her for all I'll ever interfere between them again,
Dad."
"That's right. It don't pay to shove in between a man and his wife in
their fusses and disturbances. I know a colonel in the army that's got
seventeen stitches in his bay winder right now from buttin' in between
a captain and his woman. The lady she slid a razor over his vest.
They'll do it every time; it's woman nature."
"You talk like a man of experience, Dad. Well, I don't know much about
'em."
"Yes, I've been marryin' 'em off and on for forty years."
"Who is Matt Hall, and where's his ranch, Dad? I've been hearing about
him and his brother, Hector, ever since I came up here."
"Them Hall boys used to be cattlemen up on the Sweetwater, but they
was run out of there on account of suspicion of rustlin', I hear. They
come down to this country about four years ago and started up sheep,
usin' on Cottonwood about nine or twelve miles southeast from here.
Them fellers don't hitch up with nobody on this range but Swan
Carlson, and I reckon Swan only respects 'em because they're the only
men in this country that packs guns regular any more."
"Swan don't pack a gun as a regular thing?"
"I ain't never seen him with one on. Hector Hall he's always got a
couple of 'em on him, and Matt mostly has one in sight. You can gamble
on it he's got an automatic in his pocket when he don't strap it on
him in the open."
"I don't see what use a man's got for a gun up here among sheep and
sheepmen. They must be expecting somebody to call on them from the old
neighborhood."
"Yes, I figger that's about the size of it. I don't know what Matt was
doin' over around here this evenin'; I know I didn't send for him."
"Joan spoke of him this afternoon. From what she said, I thought he
must be something of a specimen. What kind of a looking duck is he?"
"Matt's a mixture of a goriller and a goose egg. He's a long-armed,
short-legged, gimlet-eyed feller with a head like a egg upside down.
You could split a board on that feller's head and never muss a hair. I
never saw a man that had a chin like Matt Hall. They say a big chin's
the sign of strength, and if that works out Matt must have a mind like
a brigadier general. His face is all chin; chin's an affliction on
Matt Hall; it's a disease. Wait till you see him; that's all I can
say."
"I'll know him when I do."
"Hector ain't so bad, but he's got a look in his eyes like a man
that'd grab you by the nose and cut your throat, and grin while he was
doin' it."
Mackenzie made no comment on these new and picturesque characters
introduced by Dad into the drama that was forming for enactment in
that place. He filled his pipe and smoked a little while. Then:
"How many sheep do they run?" he asked.
"Nine or ten thousand, I guess."
Silence again. Dad was smoking a little Mexican cigarette with
corn-husk wrapper, a peppery tobacco filling that smarted the eyes
when it burned, of which he must have carried thousands when he left
the border in the spring.
"Tim was over today," said Mackenzie.
"What did he want?"
"About this business between him and me. Is it usual, Dad, for a man
to work a year at forty dollars a month and found before he goes in as
a partner on the increase of the flock he runs?"
"What makes you ask me that, John?"
"Only because there wasn't anything said about it when I agreed with
Tim to go to work here with you and learn the rudiments of handling a
band of sheep. He sprung that on me today, when I thought I was about
to begin my career as a capitalist. Instead of that, I've got a year
ahead of me at ten dollars a month less than the ordinary herder gets.
I just wanted to know."
"Sheepmen are like sand under the feet when it comes to dealin' with
'em; I never knew one that was in the same place twice. You've got a
lot of tricks to learn in this trade, and I guess this is one of them.
I don't believe Tim ever intends to let you in on shares; that ain't
his style. Never did take anybody in on shares but Joan, that I know
of. It looks to me like Tim's workin' you for all he can git out of
you. You'll herd for Tim a year at forty dollars, and teach Joan a
thousand dollars' worth while you're doin' it. You're a mighty
obligin' feller, it looks like to me."
Mackenzie sat thinking it over. He rolled it in his mind quite a
while, considering its most unlikely side, considering it as a
question of comparative values, trying to convince himself that, if
nothing more came of it than a year's employment, he would be even
better off than teaching school. If Tim was indeed planning to profit
doubly by him during that year, Joan could have no knowledge of his
scheme, he was sure.
On Joan's account he would remain, he told himself, at last, feeling
easier and less simple for the decision. Joan needed him, she counted
on him. Going would be a sad disappointment, a bitter discouragement,
to her. All on Joan's account, of course, he would remain; Joan, with
her russet hair, the purity of October skies in her eyes. Why, of
course. Duty made it plain to him; solely on account of Joan.
"I'd rather be a foot-loose shearer, herdin' in between like I do,
than the richest sheepman on the range," said Dad. "They're tied down
to one little spot; they work out a hole in their piece of the earth
like a worm. It ain't no life. I can have more fun on forty dollars
than Tim Sullivan can out of forty thousand."
Dad got out his greasy duck coat with sheepskin collar, such as
cattlemen and sheepmen, and all kinds of outdoor men in that country
wore, for the night was cool and damp with dew. Together they sat
smoking, no more discussion between them, the dogs out of sight down
the hill near the sheep.
Not a sound came out of the sheep, bedded on the hillside in
contentment, secure in their trust of men and dogs. All day as they
grazed there rose a murmur out of them, as of discontent, complaint,
or pain. Now their quavering, pathetic voices were as still as the
wind. There was not a shuffle of hoof, not a sigh.
Mackenzie thought of Joan, and the influence this solitary life, these
night silences, had borne in shading her character with the melancholy
which was so plainly apparent in her longing to be away. She yearned
for the sound of life, for the warmth of youth's eager fire beyond the
dusty gray loneliness of this sequestered place. Still, this was what
men and women in the crowded places thought of and longed toward as
freedom. Loose-footed here upon the hills, one might pass as free as
the wind, indeed, but there was something like the pain of prison
isolation in these night silences which bore down upon a man and made
him old.
A sudden commotion among the sheep, terrified bleating, quick
scurrying of feet, shook Mackenzie out of his reflections. The dogs
charged down the hill and stood baying the disturber of the flock with
savage alarm, in which there was a note of fear. Dad stood a moment
listening, then reached into the wagon for the rifle.
"Don't go down there!" he warned Mackenzie, who was running toward the
center of disturbance. "That's a grizzly--don't you hear them dogs?"
Mackenzie stopped. The advance stampede of the terrified flock rushed
past him, dim in the deeper darkness near the ground. Below on the
hillside where the sheep bedded he could see nothing. Dad came up with
the gun.
The sheep were making no outcry now, and scarcely any sound of
movement. After their first startled break they had bunched, and were
standing in their way of pathetic, paralyzing fear, waiting what
might befall. Dad fired several quick shots toward the spot where the
dogs were charging and retreating, voices thick in their throats from
their bristling terror of the thing that had come to lay tribute upon
the flock.
"Don't go down there!" Dad cautioned again. "Git the lantern and light
it--maybe when he sees it he'll run. It's a grizzly. I didn't think
there was one in forty miles."
Mackenzie took hold of the gun.
"Give it to me--hand me another clip."
Dad yielded it, warning Mackenzie again against any rash movement. But
his words were unheeded if not unheard. Mackenzie was running down the
hillside toward the dogs. Encouraged by his coming, they dashed
forward, Mackenzie halting to peer into the darkness ahead. There was
a sound of trampling, a crunching as of the rending of bones. He
fired; ran a little nearer, fired again.
The dogs were pushing ahead now in pursuit of whatever it was that
fled. A moment, and Mackenzie heard the quick break of a galloping
horse; fired his remaining shots after it, and called Dad to fetch the
light.
When the horse started, the dogs returned to the flock, too wise to
waste energy in a vain pursuit. At a word from Mackenzie they began
collecting the shuddering sheep. Dad Frazer came bobbing down the hill
with the lantern, breathing loud in his excitement.
"Lord!" said he, when he saw the havoc his light revealed; "a regular
old murderin' stock-killer. And I didn't think there was any grizzly
in forty miles."
Mackenzie took the lantern, sweeping its light over the mangled bodies
of several sheep, torn limb from limb, scattered about as if they had
been the center of an explosion.
"A murderin' old stock-killer!" said Dad, panting, out of breath.
Mackenzie held up the light, looking the old man in the face.
"A grizzly don't hop a horse and lope off, and I never met one yet
that wore boots," said he. He swung the light near the ground again,
pointing to the trampled footprints among the mangled carcasses.
"It was a man!" said Dad, in terrified amazement. "Tore 'em apart like
they was rabbits!" He looked up, his weathered face white, his eyes
staring. "It takes--it takes--Lord! Do you know how much muscle it
takes to tear a sheep up that a-way?"
Mackenzie did not reply. He stood, turning a bloody heap of wool and
torn flesh with his foot, stunned by this unexampled excess of human
ferocity.
Dad recovered from his amazement presently, bent and studied the
trampled ground.
"I ain't so sure," he said. "Them looks like man's tracks, but a
grizzly's got a foot like a nigger, and one of them big fellers makes
a noise like a lopin' horse when he tears off through the bresh. I
tell you, John, no human man that ever lived could take a live sheep
and tear it up that a-way!"
"All right, then; it was a bear," Mackenzie said, not disposed to
argue the matter, for argument would not change what he knew to be a
fact, nor yet convince Dad Frazer against his reason and experience.
But Mackenzie knew that they were the footprints of a man, and that
the noise of the creature running away from camp was the noise of a
galloping horse.
CHAPTER IX
A TWO-GUN MAN
"You know, John, if a man's goin' to be a sheepman, John, he's got to
keep awake day and night. He ain't goin' to set gabbin' and let a
grizzly come right up under his nose and kill his sheep. It's the
difference between the man that wouldn't do it and the man that would
that makes the difference between a master and a man. That's the
difference that stands against Dad Frazer. He'd never work up to
partnership in a band of sheep if he lived seven hundred years."
So Tim Sullivan, a few days after the raid on John Mackenzie's flock.
He had come over on hearing of it from Dad Frazer, who had gone to
take charge of another band. Tim was out of humor over the loss, small
as it was out of the thousands he numbered in his flocks. He concealed
his feelings as well as he could under a friendly face, but his words
were hard, the accusation and rebuke in them sharp.
Mackenzie flared up at the raking-over Tim gave him, and turned his
face away to hold down a hot reply. Only after a struggle he composed
himself to speak.
"I suppose it was because you saw the same difference in me that you
welched on your agreement to put me in a partner on the increase of
this flock as soon as Dad taught me how to work the sheep and handle
the dogs," he said. "That's an easy way for a man to slide out from
under his obligations; it would apply anywhere in life as well as in
the sheep business. I tell you now I don't think it was square."
"Now, lad, I don't want you to look at it that way, not at all, not at
all, lad." Tim was as gentle as oil in his front now, afraid that he
was in the way of losing a good herder whom he had tricked into
working at a bargain price. "I don't think you understand the lay of
it, if you've got the impression I intended to take you in at the
jump-off, John. It's never done; it's never heard of. A man's got to
prove himself, like David of old. There's a lot of Goliaths here on
the range he's got to meet and show he's able to handle before any man
would trust him full shares on the increase of two thousand sheep."
"You didn't talk that way at first," Mackenzie charged, rather
sulkily.
"I took to you when I heard how you laid Swan out in that fight you
had with him, John. That was a recommendation. But it wasn't enough,
for it was nothing but a chance lucky blow you got in on him that give
you the decision. If you'd 'a' missed him, where would you 'a' been
at?"
"That's got nothing to do with your making a compact and breaking it.
You've got no right to come here beefing around about the loss of a
few sheep with a breach of contract on your side of the fence. You've
put it up to me now like you should have done in the beginning. All
right; I'll prove myself, like David. But remember there was another
fellow by the name of Jacob that went in on a livestock deal with a
slippery man, and stick to your agreement this time."
"I don't want you to feel that I'm takin' advantage of you, John; I
don't want you to feel that way."
"I don't just feel it; I know it. I'll pay you for the seven sheep the
grizzly killed, and take it out of his hide when I catch him."
This offer mollified Tim, melting him down to smiles. He shook hands
with Mackenzie, all the heartiness on his side, refusing the offer
with voluble protestations that he neither expected nor required it.
"You've got the makin' of a sheepman in you, John; I always thought
you had. But----"
* * * * *
"You want to be shown. All right; I'm game, even at forty dollars and
found."
Tim beamed at this declaration, but the fires of his satisfaction he
was crafty enough to hide from even Mackenzie's penetrating eyes.
Perhaps the glow was due to a thought that this schoolmaster, who owed
his notoriety in the sheeplands to a lucky blow, would fail, leaving
him far ahead on the deal. He tightened his girths and set his foot in
the stirrup, ready to mount and ride home; paused so, hand on the
saddle-horn, with a queer, half-puzzled, half-suspicious look in his
sheep-wise eyes.
"Wasn't there something else that feller Jacob was workin' for besides
the interest in the stock?" he asked.
"Seems to me like there was," Mackenzie returned, carelessly. "The
main thing I remember in the transaction was the stone he set up
between the old man and himself on the range. 'The Lord watch between
thee and me,' you know, it had on it. That's a mighty good motto yet
for a sheepherder to front around where his boss can read it. A man's
got to have somebody to keep an eye on a sheepman when his back's
turned, even today."
Tim laughed, swung into the saddle, where he sat roving his eyes over
the range, and back to the little band of sheep that seemed only a
handful of dust in the unbounded pastures where they fed. The
hillsides were green in that favored section, greener than anywhere
Mackenzie had been in the sheeplands, the grass already long for the
lack of mouths to feed. Tim's face glowed at the sight.
"This is the best grazin' this range has ever produced in my day," he
said, "too much of it here for that little band you're runnin'. I'll
send Dad over with three thousand more this week. You can camp
together--it'll save me a wagon, and he'll be company. How's Joan
gettin on with the learnin'?"
"She's eating it up."
"I was afraid it'd be that way," said Tim, gloomily; "you can't
discourage that girl."
"She's too sincere and capable to be discouraged. I laid down my hand
long ago."
"And it's a pity to ruin a good sheepwoman with learnin'," Tim said,
shaking his head with the sadness of it.
Tim rode away, leaving Mackenzie to his reflections as he watched his
boss' broad back grow smaller from hill to hill. The sheepherder
smiled as he recalled Tim's puzzled inquiry on the other consideration
of Jacob's contract with the slippery Laban.
_What is this thou hast done unto me? Did not I serve with thee for
Rachel? Wherefore then hast thou beguiled me?_
"Tim would do it, too," Mackenzie said, nodding his grave head; "he'd
work off the wrong girl on a man as sure as he had two."
It was queer, the way Tim had thought, at the last minute, of the
"something else" Jacob had worked for; queer, the way he had turned,
his foot up in the stirrup, that puzzled, suspicious expression in his
mild, shrewd face. Even if he should remember on the way home, or get
out his Bible on his arrival and look the story up, there would be
nothing of a parallel between the case of Jacob and that of John
Mackenzie to worry his sheepman's head. For though Jacob served his
seven years for Rachel, which "seemed to him but a few days, for the
love he had to her," he, John Mackenzie, was not serving Tim Sullivan
for Joan.
"Nothing to that!" said he, but smiling, a dream in his eyes, over the
thought of what might have been a parallel case with Jacob's, here in
the sheeplands of the western world.
Tim was scarcely out of sight when a man came riding over the hills
from the opposite direction. Mackenzie sighted him afar off, watching
him as each hill lifted him to a plainer view. He was a stranger, and
a man unsparing of his horse, pushing it uphill and down with
unaltered speed. He rode as if the object of his journey lay a long
distance ahead, and his time for reaching it was short.
Mackenzie wondered if the fellow had stolen the horse, having it more
than half in mind to challenge his passage until he could give an
account of his haste, when he saw that the rider had no intention of
going by without speech. As he mounted the crest of the hill above the
flock, he swung straight for the spot where Mackenzie stood.
The stranger drew up with a short grunt of greeting, turning his gaze
over the range as if in search of strayed stock. He was a short, spare
man, a frowning cast in his eyes, a face darkly handsome, but
unsympathetic as a cougar's. He looked down at Mackenzie presently, as
if he had put aside the recognition of his presence as a secondary
matter, a cold insolence in his challenging, sneering eyes.
"What are you doing over here east of Horsethief?" he inquired,
bending his black brows in a frown, his small mustache twitching in
catlike threat of a snarl.
"I'm grazing that little band of sheep you see down yonder," Mackenzie
returned, evenly, running his eyes over the fellow's gear.
This was rather remarkable for a land out of which strife and
contention, murder and sudden death were believed to have passed long
ago. The man wore two revolvers, slung about his slender frame on a
broad belt looped around for cartridges. These loops were empty, but
the weight of the weapons themselves sagged the belt far down on the
wearer's hips. His leather cuffs were garnitured with silver stars in
the Mexican style; he wore a red stone in his black necktie, which was
tied with care, the flowing ends of it tucked into the bosom of his
dark-gray flannel shirt.
"If you're tryin' to be funny, cut it out; I'm not a funny man," he
said. "I asked you what you're doing over here east of Horsethief
Cañon?"
"I don't know that it's any of your business where I run my sheep,"
Mackenzie told him, resentful of the man's insolence.
"Tim Sullivan knows this is our winter grazing land, and this grass is
in reserve. If he didn't tell you it was because he wanted to run you
into trouble, I guess. You'll have to get them sheep out of here, and
do it right now."
The stranger left it to Mackenzie's imagination to fix his identity,
not bending to reveal his name. Hector Hall, Mackenzie knew him to be,
on account of his pistols, on account of the cold meanness of his eyes
which Dad Frazer had described as holding such a throat-cutting look.
But armed as he was, severe and flash-tempered as he seemed, Mackenzie
was not in any sort of a flurry to give ground before him. He looked
up at him coolly, felt in his pocket for his pipe, filled it with
deliberation, and smoked.
"Have you got a lease on this land?" he asked.
"I carry my papers right here," Hall replied, touching his belt.
Mackenzie looked about the range as if considering which way to go.
Then, turning again to Hall:
"I don't know any bounds but the horizon when I'm grazing on
government land that's as much mine as the next man's. I don't like to
refuse a neighbor a request, but my sheep are going to stay right
here."
Hall leaned over a little, putting out his hand in a warning gesture,
drawing his dark brows in a scowl.
"Your head's swelled, young feller," he said, "on account of that
lucky thump you landed on Swan Carlson. You've got about as much
chance with that man as you have with a grizzly bear, and you've got
less chance with me. You've got till this time tomorrow to be six
miles west of here with that band of sheep."
Hall rode off with that word, leaving a pretty good impression that he
meant it, and that it was final. Mackenzie hadn't a doubt that he
would come back to see how well the mandate had been obeyed next day.
If there was anything to Hall's claim on that territory, by agreement
or right of priority which sheepmen were supposed to respect between
themselves, Tim Sullivan knew it, Mackenzie reflected. For a month
past Tim had been sending him eastward every time the wagon was moved,
a scheme to widen the distance between him and Joan and make it an
obstacle in her road, he believed at the time. Now it began to show
another purpose. Perhaps this was the winter pasture claimed by the
Hall brothers, and Tim had sent him in where he was afraid to come
himself.
It seemed a foolish thing to squabble over a piece of grazing land
where all the world lay out of doors, but Hector Hall's way of coming
up to it was unpleasant. It was decidedly offensive, bullying,
oppressive. If he should give way before it he'd just as well leave
the range, Mackenzie knew; his force would be spent there, his day
closed before it had fairly begun. If he designed seriously to remain
there and become a flockmaster, and that he intended to do, with all
the sincerity in him, he'd have to meet Hall's bluff with a stronger
one, and stand his ground, whether right or wrong. If wrong, a
gentleman's adjustment could be made, his honor saved.
So deciding, he settled that matter, and put it out of his head until
its hour. There was something more pleasant to cogitate--the parallel
of Jacob and Laban, Tim Sullivan and himself. It was strange how the
craft of Laban had come down to Tim Sullivan across that mighty flight
of time. It would serve Tim the right turn, in truth, if something
should come of it between him and Joan. He smiled in anticipatory
pleasure at Tim's discomfiture and surprise.
But that was not in store for him, he sighed. Joan would shake her
wings out in a little while, and fly away, leaving him there, a dusty
sheepman, among the husks of his dream. Still, a man might dream on a
sunny afternoon. There was no interdiction against it; Hector Hall,
with his big guns, could not ride in and order a man off that domain.
A shepherd had the ancient privilege of dreams; he might drink himself
drunk on them, insane on them in the end, as so many of them were said
to do in that land of lonesomeness, where there was scarcely an echo
to give a man back his own faint voice in mockery of his solitude.
Evening, with the sheep homing to the bedding-ground, brought
reflections of a different hue. Since the raid on his flock Mackenzie
had given up his bunk in the wagon for a bed under a bush on the
hillside nearer the sheep. Night after night he lay with the rifle at
his hand, waiting the return of the grisly monster who had spent his
fury on the innocent simpletons in his care.
Whether it was Swan Carlson, with the strength of his great arms,
driven to madness by the blow he had received, or whether it was
another whom the vast solitudes of that country had unhinged,
Mackenzie did not know. But that it was man, he had no doubt.
Dad Frazer had gone away unconvinced, unshaken in his belief that it
was a grizzly. Tim Sullivan had come over with the same opinion, no
word of doubt in his mouth. But Mackenzie knew that when he should
meet that wild night-prowler he would face a thing more savage than a
bear, a thing as terrible to grapple with as the saber-tooth whose
bones lay deep under the hills of that vast pasture-land.
CHAPTER X
WILD RIDERS OF THE RANGE
Joan missed her lessons for three days running, a lapse so unusual as
to cause Mackenzie the liveliest concern. He feared that the mad
creature who spent his fury tearing sheep limb from limb might have
visited her camp, and that she had fallen into his bloody hands.
A matter of eight or nine miles lay between their camps; Mackenzie had
no horse to cover it. More than once he was on the point of leaving
the sheep to shift for themselves and striking out on foot; many times
he walked a mile or more in that direction, to mount the highest hill
he could discover, and stand long, sweeping the blue distance with
troubled eyes. Yet in the end he could not go. Whatever was wrong, he
could not set right at that late hour, he reasoned; to leave the sheep
would be to throw open the gates of their defense to dangers always
ready to descend upon them. The sheep were in his care; Joan was not.
That was what Tim Sullivan would say, in his hard way of holding a man
to his bargain and his task.
Joan came late in the afternoon, rising the nearest hilltop with a
suddenness quite startling, waving a cheerful greeting as if to assure
him from a distance that all was well. She stood looking at him in
amazement when she flipped to the ground like a bird, her face growing
white, her eyes big.
"Well, what in the world! Where did you get those guns?" she said.
"A fellow left them here the other day."
"A fellow?" coming nearer, looking sharply at the belt. "That's Hector
Hall's belt--I've seen him wearing it! There his initials are, worked
out in silver tacks! Where did you get it?"
"Mr. Hall left it here. What kept you, Joan? I've been worried about
you."
"Hector Hall _left_ it here? With both of his guns?"
"Yes, he left the guns with it. What was the matter, Joan?"
Joan looked him up and down, her face a study between admiration and
fear.
"Left his guns! Well, what did you do with _him_?"
"I suppose he went home, Joan. Did anything happen over your way to
keep you?"
"Charley was sick," she said, shortly, abstractedly, drowned in her
wonder of the thing he told with his native reluctance when questioned
on his own exploits. "Did you have a fight with Hector?"
"Is he all right now?"
"Charley's all right; he ate too many wild gooseberries. Did you have
a fight with Hector Hall, Mr. Mackenzie?"
She came near him as she questioned him, her great, soft eyes pleading
in fear, and laid her hand on his shoulder as if to hold him against
any further evasion. He smiled a little, in his stingy way of doing
it, taking her hand to allay her tumult of distress.
"Not much of a fight, Joan. Mr. Hall came over here to drive me off
of this range, and I had to take his guns away from him to keep him
from hurting me. That's all there was to it."
"All there was to it!" said Joan. "Why, he's one of the meanest men
that ever lived! He'll never rest till he kills you. I wish you'd let
him have the range."
"Is it his?"
"No, it belongs to us; we've got a lease on it from the government,
and pay rent for it every year. Swan Carlson and the Hall boys have
bluffed us out of it for the past three summers and run their sheep
over here in the winter-time. I always wanted to fight for it, but dad
let them have it for the sake of peace. I guess it was the best way,
after all."
"As long as I was right, my last worry is gone, Joan. You're not on
the contested territory, are you?"
"No; they lay claim as far as Horsethief Cañon, but they'd just as
well claim all our lease--they've got just as much right to it."
"That ends the matter, then--as far as I'm concerned."
"I wonder what kind of an excuse Hector made when he went home without
his guns!" she speculated, looking off over the hills in the direction
of the Hall brothers' ranch.
"Maybe he's not accountable to anybody, and doesn't have to explain."
"I guess that's right," Joan said, still wandering in her gaze.
Below them the flock was spread, the dogs on its flanks. Mackenzie
pointed to the sun.
"We'll have to get to work; you'll be starting back in an hour."
But there was no work in Joan that day, nothing but troubled
speculation on what form Hector Hall's revenge would take, and when
the stealthy blow of his resentment would fall. Try as he would,
Mackenzie could not fasten her mind upon the books. She would begin
with a brave resolution, only to wander away, the book closed
presently upon her thumb, her eyes searching the hazy hills where
trouble lay out of sight. At last she gave it up, with a little
catching sob, tears in her honest eyes.
"They'll kill you--I know they will!" she said.
"I don't think they will," he returned, abstractedly, "but even if
they do, Rachel, there's nobody to grieve."
"Rachel? My name isn't Rachel," said Joan, a little hurt. For it was
not in flippancy or banter that he had called her out of her name; his
eyes were not within a hundred leagues of that place, his heart away
with them, it seemed, when he spoke.
He turned to her, a color of embarrassment in his brown face.
"I was thinking of another story, Joan."
"Of another girl," she said, perhaps a trifle resentfully. At least
Mackenzie thought he read a resentful note in the quick rejoinder, a
resentful flash of color in her cheek.
"Yes, but a mighty old girl, Joan," he confessed, smiling with a
feeling of lightness around his heart.
"Somebody you used to know?" face turned away, voice light in a
careless, artificial note.
"She was a sheepman's daughter," he said.
"Did you know her down at Jasper?"
"No, I never knew her at all, Rach--Joan. That was a long, long time
ago."
Joan brightened at this news. She ceased denying him her face, even
smiled a little, seeming to forget Hector Hall and his pending
vengeance.
"Well, what about her?" she asked.
He told her which Rachel he had in mind, but Joan only shook her head
and looked troubled.
"I never read the Bible; we haven't even got one."
He told her the story, beginning with Jacob's setting out, and his
coming to the well with the great stone at its mouth which the maidens
could not roll away.
"So Jacob rolled the stone away and watered Rachel's sheep," he said,
pausing with that much of it, looking off down the draw between the
hills in a mind-wandering way. Joan touched his arm, impatient with
such disjointed narrative.
"What did he do then?"
"Why, he kissed her."
"I think he was kind of fresh," said Joan. But she laughed a little,
blushing rosily, a bright light in her eyes. "Tell me the rest of it,
John."
Mackenzie went on with the ancient pastoral tale of love. Joan was
indignant when she heard how Laban gave Jacob the weak-eyed girl for a
wife in place of his beloved Rachel, for whom he had worked the seven
years.
"Jake must have been a bright one!" said she. "How could the old man
put one over on him like that?"
"You'll have to read the story," said Mackenzie. "It's sundown; don't
you think you'd better be going back to camp, Joan?"
But Joan was in no haste to leave. She walked with him as he worked
the sheep to their bedding-ground, her bridle-rein over her arm. She
could get back to camp before dark, she said; Charley would not be
worried.
Joan could not have said as much for herself. Her eyes were pools of
trouble, her face was anxious and strained. She went silently beside
Mackenzie while the dogs worked the sheep along with more than human
patience, almost human intelligence. Frequently she looked into his
face with a plea dumbly eloquent, but did not again put her fear for
him into words. Only when she stood beside her horse near the
sheep-wagon, ready to mount and leave him to his solitary supper, she
spoke of Hector Hall's revolvers, which Mackenzie had unstrapped and
put aside.
"What are you going to do with them, John?"
She had fallen into the use of that familiar address only that day,
moved by the tenderness of the old tale he had told her, perhaps;
drawn nearer to him by the discovery of a gentle sentiment in him
which she had not known before. He heard it with a warm uplifting of
the heart, all without reason, he knew, for it was the range way to be
familiar on a shorter acquaintance than theirs.
"I'm going to give them back to him," he said. "I've been carrying
them around ever since he left them in the hope he'd get ashamed of
himself and come for them."
Joan started at the sound of galloping hoofs, which rose suddenly out
of complete silence as the riders mounted the crest behind them.
"I guess he's coming for them now," she said.
There were two riders coming down the slope toward them at a pace
altogether reckless. Mackenzie saw at a glance that neither of them
was Hector Hall, but one a woman, her loose garments flapping as she
rode.
"It's Swan Carlson and his wife!" he said, unable to cover his
amazement at the sight.
"What do you suppose they're doing over here?" Joan drew a little
nearer as she spoke, her horse shifting to keep by her side.
"No telling. Look how that woman rides!"
There was enough in her wild bearing to excite admiration and wonder,
even in one who had not seen her under conditions which promised
little of such development. She came on at Swan's side, leaning
forward a little, as light and sure in the saddle as any cowboy on the
range. They bore down toward the sheep-wagon as if they had no
intention of halting, jerking their horses up in Indian fashion a few
feet from where Mackenzie and Joan stood. The animals slid on stiff
legs, hoofs plowing the soft ground, raising a cloud of dust which
dimmed the riders momentarily.
Neither of the abrupt visitors spoke. They sat silently staring, not a
rod between them and the two on foot, the woman as unfriendly of face
as the man. And Swan Carlson had not improved in this feature since
Mackenzie parted from him in violence a few weeks before. His red hair
was shorter now, his drooping mustache longer, the points of it
reaching two inches below his chin. He was gaunt of cheek, hollow of
eyes, like a man who had gone hungry or suffered a sorrow that ate
away his heart.
His wife had improved somewhat in outward appearance. Her face had
filled, the pathetic uncertainty had gone from her eyes. She was not
uncomely as she sat astride her good bay horse, her divided skirt of
corduroy wide on its flanks, a man's gray shirt laced over her bosom,
the collar open, showing the fairness of her neck. Her abundant hair
was braided, and wound closely about her head like a cap. Freedom had
made a strange alteration in her. It seemed, indeed, as if Swan
Carlson had breathed into her the breath of his own wild soul, making
her over according to the desire of his heart.
Mackenzie stepped out in invitation for Swan to state the occasion of
his boisterous visit, and stood waiting in silence while the two
strange creatures continued to stare. Swan lifted his hand in a manner
of salutation, no change either of friendship or animosity in his
lean, strong face.
"You got a woman, huh? Well, how'll you trade?"
Swan glanced from his wife to Joan as he spoke. If there was any
recollection in him of the hard usage he had received at Mackenzie's
hands, it did not seem to be bitter.
"Ride on," said Mackenzie.
Mrs. Carlson urged her horse with sudden start close to where Joan
stood, leaned far over her saddle and peered into the girl's face.
Joan, affronted by the savage impertinence, met her eyes defiantly,
not giving an inch before the unexpected charge.
In that pose of defiant challenge Swan Carlson's woman peered into the
face of the girl whose freshness and beauty had drawn the wild banter
from her man's bold lips. Then, a sudden sweep of passion in her face,
she lifted her rawhide quirt and struck Joan a bitter blow across the
shoulder and neck. Mackenzie sprang between them, but Mrs. Carlson,
her defiance passed in that one blow, did not follow it up. Swan
opened wide his great mouth and pealed out his roaring laughter, not a
line of mirth softening in his face, not a gleam of it in his eyes. It
was a sound without a note to express human warmth, or human
satisfaction.
Joan flamed up like a match in oil. She dropped her bridle-reins,
springing back a quick step, turning her eyes about for some weapon by
which she might retaliate. Hector Hall's pistols hung on the end-gate
of the sheep-wagon not more than twenty feet away. It seemed that Joan
covered the distance in a bound, snatched one of the guns and fired.
Her own horse stood between her and the wild range woman, which
perhaps accounted for her miss. Mackenzie was holding her wrist before
she could shoot again.
Swan let out another roar of heartless laughter, and together with his
woman galloped down the hill. Ahead of them the sheep were assembled,
packed close in their huddling way of seeking comfort and courage in
numbers, just beginning to compose themselves for the night. Straight
into the flock Swan Carlson and his woman rode, trampling such as
could not rise and leap aside, crushing such lambs as were not nimble
enough or wise enough to run.
"I'll kill her, I'll kill her!" said Joan.
She panted, half crying, struggling to free her arm that she might
fire again.
"All right, let 'em have it!" Mackenzie said, seeing the havoc among
the sheep.
Swan and his woman rode like a whirlwind through the flock, the dogs
after them with sharp cries, the frightened bleating of the lambs, the
beating of two thousand hoofs, adding to the confusion of what had
been a peaceful pastoral scene but a few minutes before. Joan cut
loose at the disturbers of this peace, emptying the revolver quickly,
but without effect.
Half way through the herd Swan leaned down and caught a lamb by the
leg, swung it around his head as lightly as a man would wave his hat,
and rode on with it in savage triumph. Mackenzie snatched the rifle
from the wagon. His shot came so close to Swan that he dropped the
lamb. The woman fell behind Swan, interposing herself as a shield, and
in this formation they rode on, sweeping down the narrow thread of
green valley, galloping wildly away into the sanctuary of the hills.
Mackenzie stood, gun half lifted, and watched them go without another
shot, afraid to risk it lest he hit the woman. He turned to Joan, who
stood by, white with anger, the empty revolver in her hand.
"Are you hurt, Joan?" he asked, in foolish weakness, knowing very well
that she was.
"No, she didn't hurt me--but I'll kill her for it!" said Joan.
She was trembling; her face was bloodless in the cold anger that
shook her. There was a red welt on her neck, purple-marked on its
ridge where the rawhide had almost cut her tender skin.
"Swan Carlson has pulled his woman down to his savage level at last,"
Mackenzie said.
"She's worse than he is; she's a range wolf!"
"I believe she is. But it always happens that way when a person gets
to going."
"With those two and the Hall boys you'll not have a ghost of a chance
to hold this range, John. You'd better let me help you begin working
the sheep over toward my camp tonight."
"No, I'm going to stay here."
"Swan and that woman just rode through here to get the lay of
your camp. More than likely they'll come over and burn you out
tonight--pour coal oil on the wagon and set it afire."
"Let 'em; I'll not be in it."
"They'll worry you night and day, kill your sheep, maybe kill you, if
you don't come away. It isn't worth it; dad was right about it. For
the sake of peace, let them have it, John."
Mackenzie stood in silence, looking the way Swan and his woman had
gone, the gun held as if ready to lift and fire at the showing of a
hat-crown over the next hill. He seemed to be considering the
situation. Joan studied his face with eager hopefulness, bending
forward a bit to see better in the failing light.
"They've got to be shown that a master has come to the sheep country,"
he said, in low voice, as if to himself. "I'll stay and prove it to
all of them at once."
Joan knew there was no use to argue or appeal. She dropped the matter
there, and Mackenzie put the gun away.
"I'm sorry I haven't anything to put on it," he said, looking at the
red welt on her neck.
"I'm sorry I missed her," said Joan.
"It isn't so much the sting of a blow, I know," he comforted, "as the
hurt of the insult. Never mind it, Joan; she's a vicious, wild woman,
jealous because Swam took notice of you."
"It was a great compliment!"
"I wish I had some balm for it that would cure it in a second, and
take away the memory of the way it was done," said he, very softly.
"I'll kill her," flared Joan.
"I don't like to hear you say that, Joan," he chided, and reached and
laid his hand consolingly upon the burning mark.
Joan caught her breath as if he had touched her skin with ice. He
withdrew his hand quickly, blaming himself for the rudeness of his
rough hand.
"You didn't hurt me, John," she said, her eyes downcast, the color of
warm blood playing over her face.
"I might have," he blamed himself, in such seriousness as if it were
the gravest matter he had risked, and not the mere touching of a
blood-red welt upon a simple maiden's neck.
"I'll be over early in the morning to see if you're all right," she
told him as she turned again to her horse.
"If you can come, even to show yourself on the hill," said he.
"Show myself? Why, a person would think you were worrying about me."
"I am, Joan. I wish you would give up herding sheep, let the share and
the prospect and all of it go, and have your father put a herder in to
run that band for you."
"They'll not hurt me; as mean as they are they'll not fight a woman.
Anyway, I'm not over the deadline."
"There's something prowling this range that doesn't respect lines,
Joan."
"You mean the grizzly?"
"Yes, the grizzly that rides a horse."
"Dad Frazer thinks you were mistaken on that, John."
"I know. Dad Frazer thinks I'm a better schoolteacher than I'll ever
be a sheepman, I guess. But I've met bears enough that I don't have to
imagine them. Keep your gun close by you tonight, and every night."
"I will," she promised, moved by the earnestness of his appeal.
Dusk was thickening into darkness over the sheeplands; the dogs were
driving the straggling sheep back to the bedding-ground, where many of
them already lay in contentment, quickly over the flurry of Swan
Carlson's passing. Joan stood at her stirrup, her face lifted to the
heavens, and it was white as an evening primrose under the shadow of
her hat. She lingered as if there remained something to say or be
said, something to give or to take, before leaving her friend and
teacher alone to face the dangers of the night. Perhaps she thought of
Rachel, and the kiss her kinsman gave her when he rolled the stone
from the well's mouth, and lifted up his voice and wept.
Mackenzie stood a little apart, thinking his own swift-running
thoughts, quickening under the leap of his own eager blood. But no
matter for Jacob's precedent, Mackenzie had no excuse of even distant
relationship to offer for such familiarity. The desire was urging, but
the justification was not at hand. So Joan rode away unkissed, and
perhaps wondering why.
CHAPTER XI
HECTOR HALL SETS A BEACON
Mackenzie sat a long time on his hill that night, his ear turned
to the wind, smoking his pipe and thinking the situation over
while listening for the first sound of commotion among the sheep.
He had pledged himself to Tim and Joan that he would not quit
the sheep country without proving that he had in him the mettle
of a flockmaster. Hector Hall had been given to understand the
same thing. In fact, Mackenzie thought, it looked as if he had
been running with his eyes shut, making boastful pledges.
He might have to hedge on some of them, or put them through at a cost
far beyond the profit. It came that way to a boaster of his intentions
sometimes, especially so when a man spoke too quickly and assumed too
much. Here he was standing face to a fight that did not appear to
promise much more glory in the winning than in the running away.
There had been peace in that part of the sheep country a long time;
Mackenzie had come to Jasper, even, long after the feuds between the
flockmasters and cattlemen had worn themselves out save for an
outbreak of little consequence in the far places now and then. But the
peace of this place had been a coward's peace, paid for in money and
humiliation. A thing like that was not to be expected of Tim Sullivan,
although from a business reasoning he doubtless was right about it.
It was Mackenzie's work now to clean up the camp of the Hall brothers,
along with Swan Carlson, and put an end to their bullying and edging
over on Tim Sullivan's range, or take up his pack and trudge out of
the sheep country as he had come. By staying there and fighting for
Tim Sullivan's interests he might arrive in time at a dusty
consequence, his fame, measured in thousands of sheep, reaching even
to Jasper and Cheyenne, and perhaps to the stock-yards commission
offices in Omaha and Chicago.
"John Mackenzie, worth twenty thousand, or fifty thousand sheep."
That would be the way they would know him; that would be the measure
of his fame. By what sacrifice, through what adventure, how much
striving and hard living he might come to the fame of twenty thousand
sheep, no man would know or care. There in the dusty silences of that
gray-green land he would bury the man and the soul that reached upward
in him with pleasant ambitions, to become a creature over sheep. Just
a step higher than the sheep themselves, wind-buffeted, cold-cursed,
seared and blistered and hardened like a callous through which the
urging call of a man's duty among men could pierce no more.
But it had its compensations, on the other hand. There must be a vast
satisfaction in looking back over the small triumphs won against
tremendous forces, the successful contest with wild winter storm,
ravaging disease, night-prowling beasts. Nature was the big force
arrayed against a flockmaster, and it was unkind and menacing seven
months out of the year. That must be the secret of a flockmaster's
satisfaction with himself and his lot, Mackenzie thought; he could
count himself a fit companion for the old gods, if he knew anything
about them, after his victory over every wild force that could be bent
against him among those unsheltered hills.
The Hall brothers were a small pest to be stamped out and forgotten in
the prosperity of multiplying flocks. As for Swan Carlson, poor
savage, there might be some way of reaching him without further
violence between them. Wild and unfeeling as he seemed, there must be
a sense of justice in him, reading him by his stern, immobile face.
As he sat and weighed the argument for and against the sheep business,
the calling of flockmaster began to take on the color of romantic
attraction which had not been apparent to him before. In his way,
every flockmaster was a hero, inflexible against the unreckoned forces
which rose continually to discourage him. This was true, as he long
had realized, of a man who plants in the soil, risking the large part
of his capital of labor year by year. But the sheepman's risks were
greater, his courage immensely superior, to that of the tiller of the
soil. One storm might take his flock down to the last head, leaving
him nothing to start on again but his courage and his hope.
It appeared to Mackenzie to be the calling of a proper man. A
flockmaster need not be a slave to the range, as most of them were. He
might sit in his office, as a few of them did, and do the thing like a
gentleman. There were possibilities of dignity in it heretofore
overlooked; Joan would think better of it if she could see it done
that way. Surely, it was a business that called for a fight to build
and a fight to hold, but it was the calling of a proper man.
Mackenzie was immensely cheered by his reasoning the sheep business
into the romantic and heroic class. Here were allurements of which he
had not dreamed, to be equaled only by the calling of the sea, and not
by any other pursuit on land at all. A man who appreciated the subtle
shadings of life could draw a great deal of enjoyment and self-pride
out of the business of flockmaster. It was one of the most ancient
pursuits of man. Abraham was a flockmaster; maybe Adam.
But for all of the new comfort he had found in the calling he had
adopted, Mackenzie was plagued by a restless, broken sleep when he
composed himself among the hillside shrubs above the sheep. A vague
sense of something impending held him from rest. It was present over
his senses like a veil of drifting smoke through his shallow sleep.
Twice he moved his bed, with the caution of some haunted beast; many
times he started in his sleep, clutching like a falling man, to sit up
alert and instantly awake.
There was something in the very tension of the night-silence that
warned him to be on the watch. It was not until long after midnight
that he relaxed his straining, uneasy vigil, and stretched himself to
unvexed sleep. He could steal an hour or two from the sheep in the
early morning, he told himself, as he felt the sweet restfulness of
slumber sweeping over him; the helpless creatures would remain on the
bedding-ground long after sunrise if he did not wake, waiting for him
to come and set them about the great business of their lives. They
hadn't sense enough to range out and feed themselves without the
direction of man's guiding hand.
Mackenzie had dipped but a little way into his refreshing rest when
the alarmed barking of his dogs woke him with such sudden wrench that
it ached. He sat up, senses drenched in sleep for a struggling moment,
groping for his rifle. The dogs went charging up the slope toward the
wagon, the canvas top of which he could see indistinctly on the
hillside through the dark.
As Mackenzie came to his feet, fully awake and on edge, the dogs
mouthed their cries as if they closed in on the disturber of the night
at close quarters. Mackenzie heard blows, a yelp from a disabled dog,
and retreat toward him of those that remained unhurt. He fired a shot,
aiming high, running toward the wagon.
Again the dogs charged, two of them, only, out of the three, and again
there was the sound of thick, rapid blows. One dog came back to its
master, pressing against his legs for courage. Mackenzie shouted,
hoping to draw the intruder into revealing himself, not wanting the
blood of even a rascal such as the night-prowler on his hands through
a chance shot into the dark. There was no answer, no sound from the
deep blackness that pressed like troubled waters close to the ground.
The dog clung near to Mackenzie's side, his growling deep in his
throat. Mackenzie could feel the beast tremble as it pressed against
him, and bent to caress it and give it confidence. At his reassuring
touch the beast bounded forward to the charge again, only to come
yelping back, and continue on down the hill toward the flock.
Mackenzie fired again, dodging quickly behind a clump of bushes after
the flash of his gun. As he crouched there, peering and straining
ahead into the dark, strong hands laid hold of him, and tore his rifle
away from him and flung him to the ground. One came running from the
wagon, low words passed between the man who held Mackenzie pinned to
the ground, knees astride him, his hands doubled back against his chin
in a grip that was like fetters. This one who arrived in haste groped
around until he found Mackenzie's rifle.
"Let him up," he said.
Mackenzie stood, his captor twisting his arms behind him with such
silent ease that it was ominous of what might be expected should the
sheepherder set up a struggle to break free.
"Bud, I've come over after my guns," said Hector Hall, speaking close
to Mackenzie's ear.
"They're up at the wagon," Mackenzie told him, with rather an injured
air. "You didn't need to make all this trouble about it; I was keeping
them for you."
"Go on up and get 'em," Hall commanded, prodding Mackenzie in the ribs
with the barrel of his own gun.
The one who held Mackenzie said nothing, but walked behind him, rather
shoved him ahead, hands twisted in painful rigidity behind his back,
pushing him along as if his weight amounted to no more than a child's.
At the wagon Hall fell in beside Mackenzie, the barrel of a gun again
at his side.
"Let him go," he said. And to Mackenzie: "Don't try to throw any
tricks on me, bud, but waltz around and get me them guns."
"They're hanging on the end of the coupling-pole; get them yourself,"
Mackenzie returned, resentful of this treatment, humiliated to such
depths by this disgrace that had overtaken him that he cared little
for the moment whether he should live or die.
Hall spoke a low, mumbled, unintelligible word to the one who stood
behind Mackenzie, and another gun pressed coldly against the back of
the apprentice sheepman's neck. Hall went to the end of the wagon,
found his pistols, struck a match to inspect them. In the light of the
expiring match at his feet Mackenzie could see the ex-cattleman
buckling on the guns.
"Bud, you've been actin' kind of rash around here," Hall said, in
insolent satisfaction with the turn of events. "You had your lucky day
with me, like you had with Swan Carlson, but I gave you a sneak's
chance to leave the country while the goin' was good. If you ever
leave it now the wind'll blow you out. Back him up to that wagon
wheel!"
Mackenzie was at the end of his tractable yielding to commands, seeing
dimly what lay before him. He lashed out in fury at the man who
pressed the weapon to his neck, twisting round in a sweep of passion
that made the night seem to burst in a rain of fire, careless of what
immediate danger he ran. The fellow fired as Mackenzie swung round,
the flash of the flame hot on his neck.
"Don't shoot him, you fool!" Hector Hall interposed, his voice a growl
between his teeth.
Mackenzie's quick blows seemed to fall impotently on the body of the
man who now grappled with him, face to face, Hector Hall throwing
himself into the tangle from the rear. Mackenzie, seeing his assault
shaping for a speedy end in his own defeat, now attempted to break
away and seek shelter in the dark among the bushes. He wrenched free
for a moment, ducked, ran, only to come down in a few yards with
Hector Hall on his back like a catamount.
Fighting every inch of the way, Mackenzie was dragged back to the
wagon, where his captors backed him against one of the hind wheels and
bound him, his arms outstretched across the spokes in the manner of a
man crucified.
They had used Mackenzie illy in that fight to get him back to the
wagon; his face was bleeding, a blow in the mouth had puffed his lips.
His hat was gone, his shirt torn open on his bosom, but a wild rage
throbbed in him which lifted him above the thought of consequences as
he strained at the ropes which held his arms.
They left his feet free, as if to mock him with half liberty in the
ordeal they had set for him to face. One mounted the front wagon wheel
near Mackenzie, and the light of slow-coming dawn on the sky beyond
him showed his hand uplifted as if he sprinkled something over the
wagon sheet. The smell of kerosene spread through the still air; a
match crackled on the wagon tire. A flash, a sudden springing of
flame, a roar, and the canvas was enveloped in fire.
Mackenzie leaned against his bonds, straining away from the sudden
heat, the fast-running fire eating the canvas from the bows, the bunk
within, and all the furnishings and supplies, on fire. There seemed to
be no wind, a merciful circumstance, for a whip of the high-striving
flames would have wrapped him, stifling out his life in a moment.
Hall and the other man, who had striven with Mackenzie in such
powerful silence, had drawn away from the fire beyond his sight to
enjoy the thing they had done. Mackenzie, turning his fearful gaze
over his shoulder, calculated his life in seconds. The fire was at his
back, his hair was crinkling in the heat of it, a little moving breath
of wind to fill the sudden vacuum drew a tongue of blaze with sharp
threat against his cheek.
In a moment the oil-drenched canvas would be gone, the flaming
contents of the wagon, the woodwork of box and running gears left to
burn more slowly, and his flesh and bones must mingle ashes with the
ashes, to be blown on the wind, as Hector Hall had so grimly
prophesied. What a pitiful, poor, useless ending of all his
calculations and plans!
A shot at the top of the hill behind the wagon, a rush of galloping
hoofs; another shot, and another. Below him Hall and his comrade rode
away, floundering in haste through the sleeping flock, the one poor
dog left out of Mackenzie's three tearing after them, venting his
impotent defiance in sharp yelps of the chase.
Joan. Mackenzie knew it was Joan before she came riding into the
firelight, throwing herself from the horse before it stopped. Through
the pain of his despair--above the rebellious resentment of the thing
that fate had played upon him this bitter gray morning; above the
anguish of his hopeless moment, the poignant striving of his tortured
soul to meet the end with resolution and calm defiance worthy a
man--he had expected Joan.
Why, based on what reason, he could not have told, then nor in the
years that came afterward. But always the thought of Joan coming to
him like the wings of light out of the east.
And so Joan had come, as he strained on his bound arms to draw his
face a few inches farther from the fire, as he stifled in the smoke
and heavy gases of the burning oil; Joan had come, and her hand was
cool on his forehead, her voice was tender in his ear, and she was
leading him into the blessed free air, the east widening in a bar of
light like a waking eye.
Joan was panting, the knife that had cut his bonds still open in her
hand. They stood face to face, a little space between them, her great
eyes pouring their terrified sympathy into his soul. Neither spoke, a
daze over them, a numbness on their tongues, the dull shock of death's
close passing bewildering and deep.
Mackenzie breathed deeply, his brain clearing out of its racing whirl,
and became conscious of Joan's hand grasping his. Behind them the
ammunition in the burning wagon began to explode, and Joan, shuddering
as with cold, covered her white face with her hands and sobbed aloud.
Mackenzie touched her shoulder.
"Joan! O Joan, Joan!" he said.
Joan, shivering, her shoulders lifted as if to fend against a winter
blast, only cried the harder into her hands. He stood with hand
touching her shoulder lightly, the quiver of her body shaking him to
the heart. But no matter how inviting the opening, a man could not
speak what rose in his heart to say, standing as he stood, a debtor in
such measure. To say what he would have said to Joan, he must stand
clear and towering in manliness, no taint of humiliation on his soul.
Mackenzie groaned in spirit, and his words were a groan, as he said
again:
"Joan! O Joan, Joan!"
"I knew they'd come tonight--I couldn't sleep."
"Thank God for your wakefulness!" said he.
She was passing out of the reefs of terror, calming as a wind falls at
sunset. Mackenzie pressed her arm, drawing her away a little.
"That ammunition--we'd better----"
"Yes," said Joan, and went with him a little farther down the slope.
Mackenzie put his hand to his face where the flames had licked it, and
to the back of his head where his scorched hair broke crisply under
his palm. Joan looked at him, the aging stamp of waking and worry in
her face, exclaiming pityingly when she saw his hurts.
"It served me right; I stumbled into their hands like a blind kitten!"
he said, not sparing himself of scorn.
"It's a cattleman's trick; many an older hand than you has gone that
way," she said.
"But if I'd have waked and watched like you, Joan, they wouldn't have
got me. I started to watch, but I didn't keep it up like you. When I
should have been awake, I was sleeping like a sluggard."
"The cowards!" said Joan.
"I let one of them sneak up behind me, after they'd clubbed two of the
dogs to death, and grab me and get my gun! Great God! I deserve to be
burned!"
"Hush!" she chided, fearfully. "Hush!"
"One of them was Hector Hall--he came after his guns. If I'd been a
man, the shadow of a man, I'd made him swallow them the day I
took--the time he left them here."
"Matt was with him," said Joan. "You couldn't do anything; no man
could do anything, against Matt Hall."
"They handled me like a baby," said he, bitterly, "and I, and I,
wanting to be a sheepman! No wonder they think I'm a soft and simple
fool up here, that goes on the reputation of a lucky blow!"
"There's a man on a horse," said Joan. "He's coming this way."
The rider broke down the hillside as she spoke, riding near the
wreckage of the burning wagon, where he halted a moment, the strong
light of the fire on his face: Swan Carlson, hatless, his hair
streaming, his great mustache pendant beside his stony mouth. He came
on toward them at once. Joan laid her hand on her revolver.
"You got a fire here," said Swan, stopping near them, leaning
curiously toward them as if he peered at them through smoke.
"Yes," Mackenzie returned.
"I seen it from over there," said Swan. "I come over to see if you
needed any help."
"Thank you, not now. It's gone; nothing can be done."
"I smelt coal oil," said Swan, throwing back his head, sniffing the
air like a buck. "Who done it?"
"Some of your neighbors," said Mackenzie.
"I knowed they would," Swan nodded. "Them fellers don't fight like me
and you, they don't stand up like a man. When I seen you take that
feller by the leg that day and upset him off of his horse and grab his
guns off of him, I knowed he'd burn you out."
Joan, forgetting her fear and dislike of Swan Carlson in her interest
of what he revealed, drew a little nearer to him.
"Were you around here that day, Swan?" she asked.
"Yes, I saw him upset that feller, little bird," Swan said, leaning
again from his saddle, his long neck stretched to peer into her face.
"He's a good man, but he ain't as good a man as me."
Swan was barefooted, just as he had leaped from his bunk in the
sheep-wagon to ride to the fire. There was a wild, high pride in his
cold, handsome face as he sat up in the saddle as if to show Joan his
mighty bulk, and he stretched out his long arms like an eagle on its
crag flexing its pinions in the morning sun.
"Did he--did Hector Hall sling a gun on Mr. Mackenzie that time?" she
asked, pressing forward eagerly.
"Never mind, Joan--let that go," said Mackenzie, putting his arm
before her to stay her, speaking hastily, as if to warn her back from
a danger.
"He didn't have time to sling a gun on him," said Swan, great
satisfaction in his voice as he recalled the scene. "Your man he's
like a cat when he jumps for a feller, but he ain't got the muscle in
his back like me."
"There's nobody in this country like you, Swan," said Joan, pleased
with him, friendly toward him, for his praise of the one he boldly
called her man.
"No, I can roll 'em all," Swan said, as gravely as if he would be hung
on the testimony. "You ought to have me for your man; then you'd have
somebody no feller on this range would burn out."
"You've got a wife, Swan," Joan said, with gentle reproof, but putting
the proposal from her as if she considered it a jest.
"I'm tired of that one," Swan confessed, frankly. Then to Mackenzie:
"I'll fight you for her." He swung half way out of the saddle, as if
to come to the ground and start the contest on the moment, hung there,
looking Mackenzie in the face, the light of morning revealing the
marks of his recent battle. "Not now, you've had a fight already,"
said Swan, settling back into the saddle. "But when you brace up, then
I'll fight you for her. What?"
"Any time," Mackenzie told him, speaking easily, as if humoring the
whim of some irresponsible person.
With a sudden start of his horse Swan rode close to Joan, Mackenzie
throwing himself between them, catching the bridle, hurling the animal
back. Swan did not take notice of the interference, only leaned far
over, stretching his long neck, his great mustaches like the tusks of
an old walrus, and strained a long look into Joan's face. Then he
whirled his horse and galloped away, not turning a glance behind.
Joan watched him go, saying nothing for a little while. Then:
"I think he's joking," she said.
"I suppose he is," Mackenzie agreed, although he had many doubts.
They turned to look at the wagon again, the popping of ammunition
having ceased. The woodwork was all on fire; soon it would be reduced
to bolts and tires. Joan's spirits seemed to have risen with the
broadening of day, in spite of Swan Carlson's visit and his bold jest,
if jest he meant it to be. She laughed as she looked at the sheep,
huddled below them in attitude of helpless fright.
"Poor little fools!" she said. "Well, I must go back to Charley. Don't
tell dad I was over here, please, John. He wouldn't like it if he knew
I'd butted in this way--he's scared to death of the Halls."
"I don't see how I'm to keep him from knowing it," Mackenzie said,
"and I don't see why he shouldn't know. He'd have been out a cheap
herder if it hadn't been for you."
"No, you mustn't tell him, you mustn't let anybody know I was here,
John," she said, lifting her eyes to his in an appeal far stronger
than words. "It wouldn't do for dad--for anybody--to know I was here.
You don't need to say anything about them tying--doing--_that_."
Joan shuddered again in that chilling, horrified way, turning from him
to hide what he believed he had read in her words and face before.
It was not because she feared to have her father know she had come
riding to his rescue in the last hours of her troubled night; not
because she feared his censure or his anger, or wanted to conceal her
deed for reasons of modesty from anyone. Only to spare him the
humiliation of having his failure known, Mackenzie understood. That
was her purpose, and her sole purpose, in seeking his pledge to
secrecy.
It would hurt him to have it go abroad that he had allowed them to
sneak into his camp, seize him, disarm him, bind him, and set the fire
that was to make ashes of him for the winds to blow away. It would do
for him with Tim Sullivan entirely if that should become known, with
the additional humiliation of being saved from this shameful death by
a woman. No matter how immeasurable his own gratitude, no matter how
wide his own pride in her for what she had done, the sheep country
never would be able to see it with his eyes. It would be another
smirch for him, and such a deep one as to obscure him and his chances
there forever.
Joan knew it. In her generosity, her interest for his future, she
wanted her part in it to remain unknown.
"You must promise me, John," she said. "I'll never come to take
another lesson unless you promise me."
"I promise you, God bless you, Joan!" said he.
CHAPTER XII
ONE COMES TO SERVE
An hour after midday there came riding over the hills Tim Sullivan and
a stranger. They stopped at the ruins of the sheep-wagon, where Tim
dismounted and nosed around, then came on down the draw, where
Mackenzie was ranging the sheep.
Tim was greatly exercised over the loss of the wagon. He pitched into
Mackenzie about it as soon as he came within speaking distance.
"How did you do it--kick over the lantern?" he inquired, his face
cloudy with ill-held wrath.
Mackenzie explained, gruffly and in few words, how the wagon was
fired, sparing his own perilous adventure and the part that Joan had
borne in it. This slowed Tim down, and set him craning his neck over
the country to see if any further threat of violence impended on the
horizon.
"Them Hall boys ought to be men enough not to do me a trick like that
after the way I've give in to them on this side of the range," he
said. Then to Mackenzie, sharply: "It wouldn't 'a' happened if you
hadn't took Hector's guns away from him that time. A sheepman's got no
right to be fightin' around on the range. If he wants to brawl and
scrap, let him do it when he goes to town, the way the cowboys used
to."
"Maybe you're right; I'm beginning to think you are," Mackenzie
returned.
"Right? Of course I'm right. A sheepman's got to set his head to
business, and watchin' the corners to prevent losses like this that
eats up the profit, and not go around with his sleeves rolled up and
his jaw slewed, lookin' for a fight. And if he starts one he's got to
have the backbone and the gizzard to hold up his end of it, and not
let 'em put a thing like this over on him. Why wasn't you in the wagon
last night watchin' it?"
"Because I've been expecting them to burn it."
"Sure you've been expectin' 'em to burn you out, and you hid in the
brush with your tail between your legs like a kicked pup and let 'em
set my new wagon afire. How did you git your face bunged up that
way?"
"I fell down," Mackenzie said, with a sarcasm meant only for himself,
feeling that he had described his handling of the past situation in a
word.
"Runnin' off, I reckon. Well, I tell you, John, it won't do, that kind
of business won't do. Them Hall boys are mighty rough fellers, too
rough for a boy like you that's been runnin' with school children all
his life. You got some kind of a lucky hitch on Hector when you
stripped that belt and guns off of him--I don't know how you done it;
it's a miracle he didn't nail you down with lead--but that kind of
luck won't play into a man's hands one time in a thousand. You never
ought 'a' started anything with them fellers unless you had the weight
in your hind-quarters to keep it goin'."
"You're right," said Mackenzie, swallowing the rebuke like a bitter
pill.
"Right? You make me tired standin' there and takin' it like a sick
cat! If you was half the man I took you to be when you struck this
range you'd resent a callin' down like I'm givin' you. But you don't
resent it, you take it, like you sneaked and let them fellers burn
that wagon and them supplies of mine. If you was expectin' 'em to turn
that kind of a trick you ought 'a' been right there in that wagon,
watchin' it--there's where you had a right to be."
"I suppose there's where I'd been if I had your nerve, Sullivan,"
Mackenzie said, his slow anger taking place of the humiliation that
had bent him down all morning like a shameful load. "Everybody on this
range knows you're a fighting man--you've fought the wind gettin' away
from this side of the range every time you saw smoke, you've got a
reputation for standing out for your rights like a man with a gizzard
in him as big as a sack of bran! Sure, I know all about the way you've
backed out of here and let Carlson and the Halls bluff you out of the
land you pay rent on, right along. If I had your nerve----"
* * * * *
Tim's face flamed as if he had risen from turning batter-cakes over a
fire. He made a smoothing, adjusting, pacificating gesture with his
hands, looking with something between deep concern and shame over his
shoulder at the man who accompanied him, and who sat off a few feet in
his saddle, a grin over his face.
"Now, John, I don't mean for you to take it that I'm throwin' any slur
over your courage for the way things has turned out--I don't want you
to take it that way at all, lad," said Tim.
"I'm not a fighting man"--Mackenzie was getting hotter as he went
on--"everybody in here knows that by now, I guess. You guessed wrong,
Sullivan, when you took me for one and put me over here to hold this
range for you that this crowd's been backing you off of a little
farther each spring. You're the brave spirit that's needed here--if
somebody could tie you and hold you to face the men that have robbed
you of the best range you've got. I put down my hand; I get out of the
way for you when it comes to the grit to put up a fight."
"Oh, don't take it to heart what I've been sayin', lad. A man's hot
under the collar when he sees a dirty trick like that turned on him,
but it passes off like sweat, John. Let it go, boy, let it pass."
"You sent me in here expecting me to fight, and when I don't always
come out on top you rib me like the devil's own for it. You expected
me to fight to hold this grass, but you didn't expect me to lose
anything at all. Well, I'll hold the range for you, Sullivan; you
don't need to lose any sleep over that. But if I'm willing to risk my
skin to do it, by thunder, you ought to be game enough to stand the
loss of a wagon without a holler that can be heard to Four Corners!"
"You're doin' fine holdin' my range that I pay solid money to Uncle
Sam for, you're doin' elegant fine, lad. I was hasty, my tongue got
out from under the bit, boy. Let it pass; don't you go holdin' it
against an old feller like me that's got the worry of forty-odd
thousand sheep on his mind day and night."
"It's easy enough to say, but it don't let you out. You've got no call
to come here and wade into me without knowing anything about the
circumstances."
"Right you are, John, sound and right. I was hasty, I was too hot.
You've done fine here, you're the first man that's ever stood up to
them fellers and held 'em off my grass. You've done things up like a
man, John. I give it to you--like a man."
"Thanks," said Mackenzie, in dry scorn.
"I ain't got no kick to make over the loss of my wagon--it's been many
a day since I had one burnt up on me that way. Pass it up, pass up
anything I've said about it, John. That's the lad."
So John passed it up, and unbent to meet the young man who rode with
Tim, whom the sheepman presented as Earl Reid, from Omaha, son of
Malcolm Reid, an old range partner and friend. The young man had come
out to learn the sheep business; Tim had brought him over for
Mackenzie to break in. Dad Frazer was coming along with three thousand
sheep, due to arrive in about a week. When he got there, the
apprentice would split his time between them.
Mackenzie received the apprentice as cordially as he could, but it was
not as ardent a welcome as the young man may have expected, owing to
the gloom of resentment into which Sullivan's outbreak had thrown this
unlucky herder on the frontier of the range.
Reid was rather a sophisticated looking youth of twenty-two or
twenty-three, city broke, city marked. There was a poolroom pallor
about this thin face, a poolroom stoop to his thin shoulders, that
Mackenzie did not like. But he was frank and ingenuous in his
manner, with a ready smile that redeemed his homely face, and a pair
of blue eyes that seemed young in their innocence compared to the
world-knowledge that his face betrayed.
"Take the horses down there to the crick and water 'em," Tim directed
his new herder, "and then you'll ride back with me as far as Joan's
camp and fetch over some grub to hold you two fellers till the wagon
comes. Joan, she'll know what to give you, and I guess you can find
your way back here?"
"Surest thing you know," said Earl, with easy confidence, riding off
to water the horses.
"That kid's no stranger to the range," Mackenzie said, more to himself
than to Tim, as he watched him ride off.
"No, he used to be around with the cowboys on Malcolm's ranch when he
was in the cattle business. He can handle a horse as good as you or
me. Malcolm was the man that set me up in the sheep business; I
started in with him like you're startin' with me, more than thirty
years ago. He was the first sheepman on this range, and he had to
fight to hold his own, I'm here to say!"
"You'd better send the kid over into peaceful territory," Mackenzie
suggested, crabbedly.
"No, the old man wants him to get a taste of what he went through to
make his start--he was tickled to the toes when he heard the way them
Hall boys are rarin' up and you standin' 'em off of this range of
mine. 'Send him over there with that man,' he says; 'that's the kind
of a man I want him to break in under.' The old feller was tickled
clean to his toes."
"Is he over at the ranch?"
"No, he went back home last night. Come down to start the kid right,
and talk it over with me. It was all a surprise to me, I didn't know a
thing about it, but I couldn't turn Malcolm down." Tim winked, looked
cunning, nodded in a knowing way. "Kid's been cuttin' up throwin' away
too much money; gettin' into scrapes like a boy in town will, you
know. Wild oats and a big crop of 'em. The old man's staked him out
with me for three years, and he ain't to draw one cent of pay, or have
one cent to spend, in that time. If he breaks over, it's all off
between them two. And the kid's sole heir to nearly half a million."
Mackenzie turned to look again at the boy, who was coming back with
the horses.
"Do you think he'll stick?" he asked.
"Yes, he promised the old man he would, and if he's anything like
Malcolm, he'll eat fire before he'll break his word. Malcolm and me we
come to terms in ten words. The kid's to work three years for me
without pay; then I'll marry him to my Joan."
Mackenzie felt his blood come up hot, and sink down again, cold; felt
his heart kick in one resentful surge, then fall away to weakness as
if its cords had been cut. Tim laughed, looking down the draw toward
the sheep.
"It's something like that Jacob and Laban deal you spoke about the
other day," said he. "Curious how things come around that way, ain't
it? There I went ridin' off, rakin' up my brains to remember that
story, and laughed when it come to me all of a sudden. Jacob skinned
them willow sticks, and skinned the old man, too. But I don't guess
Earl would turn a trick like that on me, even if he could."
"How about Joan? Does she agree to the terms?" Mackenzie could not
forbear the question, even though his throat was dry, his lips cold,
his voice husky at the first word.
"She'll jump at it," Tim declared, warmly. "She wants to go away from
here and see the world, and this will be her chance. I don't object to
her leavin', either, as long as it don't cost me anything. You go
ahead and stuff her, John; stuff her as full of learnin' as she'll
hold. It'll be cheaper for me than sendin' her off to school and
fittin' her up to be a rich man's wife, and you can do her just as
much good--more, from what she tells me. You go right ahead and stuff
her, John."
"Huh!" said John.
"Earl, he'll look after your sheep while you're teachin' Joan her
books. Stuff her, but don't founder her, John. If any man can fit her
up to prance in high society, I'd bet my last dollar you can. You're a
kind of a gentleman yourself, John."
"Thanks," said John, grinning a dry grin.
"Yes," reminiscently, with great satisfaction, "Malcolm made the
proposition to me, hit me with it so sudden it nearly took my breath.
'Marry him to your Joan when you make a man of him,' he says. I said
maybe he wouldn't want to hitch up with a sheepman's daughter that was
brought up on the range. 'If he don't he can go to work and make his
own way--I'll not leave him a dam' cent!' says Malcolm. We shook hands
on it; he said he'd put it in his will. And that's cinched so it can't
slip."
When Tim mounted to leave he looked round the range again with a
drawing of trouble in his face, as if he searched the peaceful
landscape for the shadow of wings.
"I ain't got another sheep-wagon to give you right now, John; I guess
you'll have to make out with a tent till winter," he said.
"I'd rather have it," Mackenzie replied.
Tim leaned over, hand to one side of his mouth, speaking in low voice,
yet not whispering:
"And remember what I said about that matter, John. Stuff, but don't
founder."
"Stuff," said John, but with an inflection that gave the word a
different meaning, quite.
CHAPTER XIII
A FIGHT ALMOST LOST
Dad Frazer was not overly friendly toward the young man from Omaha who
had come out to learn the sheep business under the threat of penalties
and the promise of high rewards. He growled around about him
continually when he and Mackenzie met, which was not very often, owing
to their being several miles apart. Tim had stationed Dad and his big
band of sheep between Mackenzie and Joan, leaving the schoolmaster to
hold the frontier. No matter for old man Reid's keenness to have his
son suffer some of the dangers which he had faced in his day, Tim
seemed to be holding the youth back out of harm's way, taking no risks
on losing a good thing for the family.
Reid had been on the range about two weeks, but Mackenzie had not seen
a great deal of him, owing to Tim's plan of keeping him out of the
disputed territory, especially at night. That the young man did not
care much for the company or instruction of Dad Frazer was plain.
Twice he had asked Mackenzie to use his influence with Tim to bring
about a change from the old man's camp to his. In Mackenzie's silence
and severity the young man found something that he could not
penetrate, a story that he could not read. Perhaps it was with a view
to finding out what school Mackenzie had been seasoned in that Reid
bent himself to win his friendship.
Dad Frazer came over the hills to Mackenzie's range that afternoon, to
stretch his legs, he said, although Mackenzie knew it was to stretch
his tongue, caring nothing for the miles that lay between. He had left
Reid in charge of his flock, the young man being favored by Tim to the
extent of allowing him a horse, the same as he did Joan.
"I'm glad he takes to you," said Dad. "I don't like him; he's got a
graveyard in his eyes."
"I don't think he ever pulled a gun on anybody in his life, Dad,"
Mackenzie returned, in mild amazement.
"I don't mean that kind of a graveyard; I mean a graveyard where he
buried the boy in him long before his time. He's too sharp for his
years; he's seen too much of the kind of life a young feller's better
off for to hear about from a distance and never touch. I tell you,
John, he ain't no good."
"He's an agreeable kind of a chap, anyhow; he's got a line of talk
like a saddle salesman."
"Yes, and I never did have no use for a talkin' man. Nothin' to 'em;
they don't stand the gaff."
In spite of his friendly defense of young Reid, Mackenzie felt that
Dad had read him aright. There was something of subtle knowledge, an
e
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