85
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 Dad86Frazer 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.
87CHAPTER IXA 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 in88life 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.”
89
“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 his90boss 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 I91serve 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 passage92until 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 a93funny 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.
94
“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 stand95his 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.
96
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.
97CHAPTER XWILD 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.
98
“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 Hallleftit 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 withhim?”
“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 over99here 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.
100
“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.
101
“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?”
102
“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, which103rose 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 inches104below 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.
105
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.
106
“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 cold107anger 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.”
108
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.
109
“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 he110rolled 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.
111CHAPTER XIHECTOR 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.
112
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 must113be 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;114Joan 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 after115sunrise 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 the116beast 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.