57CHAPTER VIEYES 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.
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“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, and59the 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.”
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“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 they61claim 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 never62will 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,63almost 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, Mackenzie64thought. “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.”
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“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.
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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.
67CHAPTER VIITHE EASIEST LESSON
“Why do they always begin the conjugations onlove?”
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.
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“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 conjugateto likeinstead 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,69she 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,70most 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 the71money, but he’ll buy me out when I’ve got enough to stake me.”
“Your father was over this morning.”
“Yes, I know.”
“He thinksmyeducation’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, turning72to 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––ofamare, 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.
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“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.
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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.
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“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.
76CHAPTER VIIITHE 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.
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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.”
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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-campde 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,79knockin’ 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’s80got 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 Mexican81cigarette 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 his82mind 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. Now83their 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 of84pathetic, 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.”