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“Tim was telling me.”
“A guy could do worse.”
With this comforting reflection Reid stretched himself on his blanket and went to sleep. Mackenzie was not slow in following his example, for it had been a hard day with the sheep, with much leg work on account of the new dogs showing a wolfish shyness of their new master most exasperating at times. Mackenzie’s last thought was that Reid would take a great deal of labor off his legs by using the horse in attending the sheep.
A scream woke Mackenzie. He heaved up out of his sleep with confusion clouding his senses for the moment, the thought that he was on water, and the cry was that of one who drowned, persistent above his struggling reason. It was a choking cry, the utterance of a desperate soul who sees life fleeing while he lifts his voice in the last appeal. And between him and his companion Mackenzie saw the bulk of a giant-shouldered man, who bent with arm outstretched toward him, whose hand came in contact with his throat as he rose upright with the stare of confusion in his eyes.
Mackenzie broke through this film of his numbing sleep, reaching for the rifle that he had laid near his hand. It was gone, and across the two yards intervening he saw young Reid writhing in the grip of the monster who was strangling out his life.
Mackenzie wrenched free from the great hand that closed about his throat, tearing the mighty arm away with the strength of both his own. A moment, and he was involved in the most desperate struggle that he had ever faced in his life.
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This interference gave Reid a new gulp of life. The three combatants were on their feet now, not a word spoken, not a sound but the dull impact of blows and the hard breathings of the two who fought this monster of the sheeplands for their lives. Swan Carlson, Mackenzie believed him to be, indulging his insane desire for strangling out the lives of men. He had approached so stealthily, with such wild cunning, that the dogs had given no alarm, and had taken the gun to insure against miscarriage or interruption in his horrible menu of death.
A brief tangle of locked arms, swaying bodies, ribs all but crushed in the embrace of those bestial arms, and Mackenzie was conscious that he was fighting the battle alone. In the wild swirl of it he could not see whether Reid had fallen or torn free. A little while, now in the pressure of those hairy, bare arms, now free for one gasping breath, fighting as man never fought in the sheeplands before that hour, and Mackenzie felt himself snatched up bodily and thrown down from uplifted arms with a force that must have ended all for him then but for the interposition of a sage-clump that broke the fall.
Instantly the silent monster was upon him. Mackenzie met him hand to hand, fighting the best fight that was in him, chilled with the belief that it was his last. But he could not come up from his knees, and in this position his assailant bent over him, one hand on his forehead, the other at the back of his neck, a knee against his breast.
Mackenzie tore at the great, stiff arms with his last desperate might, perhaps staying a little the pressure147that in a moment more must snap his spine. As the assassin tightened this terrible grip Mackenzie’s face was lifted toward the sky. Overhead was the moon, clear-edged, bright, in the dusk of the immensities beyond; behind the monster, who paused that breath as in design to fill his victim’s last moment with a hope that he soon would mock, Mackenzie saw young Reid.
The youth was close upon the midnight strangler, stooping low. As the terrible pressure on forehead and neck cracked his spine like a breaking icicle, Mackenzie believed he shouted, putting into his voice all that he felt of desperate need of help. And he saw young Reid strike, and felt the breaking wrench of the cruel hands relax, and fell down upon the ground like a dead man and knew no more.
Reid was there with the lantern, putting water on Mackenzie’s head when he again broke through the mists and followed the thread of his soul back to his body. Reid was encouraging him to be steady, and to take it easy, assuring him that he never saw a man put up such a fight as the schoolmaster had all but lost.
Mackenzie sat up presently, with throbbing head, a feeling of bulging in his eyeballs, his neck stiff from the wrenching it had received. The great body of the man whom he had fought lay stretched in the moonlight, face to the ground. The camp butcher knife was sticking in his back. Mackenzie got to his feet, a dizziness over him, but a sense of his obligation as clear as it ever was in any man.
“I owe you one for that; I’ll not forget it in a hurry,” he said, giving Reid his hand.
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“No, we’re even on it,” Reid returned. “He’d ’a’ broke my neck in another second if you hadn’t made that tackle. Who is he, do you know?”
“Turn him over,” Mackenzie said.
Reid withdrew the knife, sticking it into the ground with as little concern as if he had taken it from a butcher’s block, and heaved the fellow over on his back. The moonlight revealed his dusty features clearly, but Mackenzie brought the lantern to make it doubly sure.
“He’s not the man I thought he was,” said he. “I think this fellow’s name is Matt Hall. He’s the sheep-killer you’ve heard about. Look––he’s all over blood––there’s wool on his shirt.”
“Matt Hall, huh?” said Reid. He wiped the butcher knife on the dead sheep-killer’s shirt, making a little whistling, reflective sound through his teeth. “I’ll have to scour that knife before we cut bacon with it in the morning,” he said.
149CHAPTER XIVTHE LONESOMENESS
“He’s got the lonesomeness,” said Dad, “and I tell you, John, when that gits a hold of a man he ain’t responsible. It’s the same as shuttin’ a man up in jail to break him off of booze––say, he’ll claw the rocks out of the wall with his finger nails to git out where he can take a snort.”
“I never had the lonesomeness, so I don’t know, but there’s something the matter with the kid.”
“Yes, I see him tearin’ around the country ridin’ the head off of that horse, never lookin’ where he’s goin’ any more than a bat. He’s been clean over to Four Corners after the mail twice this week. A feller must want a letter purty bad when he’ll go to all that fuss for it.”
“I’m afraid it’s going to be hard for him; he hasn’t any more than bitten into his three years yet; he don’t really know how they taste.”
“It’ll break him; he’ll go all to pieces, I tell you John. When the lonesomeness takes a hold of a feller that way something pops in his head after a while; then he either puts a bullet through his heart or settles down and gits fat. That feller ain’t got it in him to put on loco fat.”
Dad had slicked himself up pretty well that day before cutting across the range for a chat with Mackenzie. His operations with the sheep-shears on his fuzzy whiskers had not been uniform, probably due to the lack of a mirror. Dad trusted to the feel of it when he had150no water by to look into and guide his hand, and this time he had cut close to the skin in several places, displaying his native color beneath the beard. But whatever he lacked in his chin-hedge he made up for in careful arrangement of his truly beautiful hair.
There was a sniff of perfume about him, a nosegay of wild flowers pinned in the pocket of his shirt. Mackenzie marveled over these refinements in the old man’s everyday appearance, but left it to his own time and way to tell what plans or expectations prompted them.
“Hector Hall showed up?”
“No.”
“Reid wouldn’t make any more than a snap and a swaller out of that feller, I guess. But it ain’t good for a man like him to start out killin’; it goes to his liver too quick and drives him mooney.”
“I don’t suppose it’s very healthy for any man, Dad.”
“You said it! I’ve went fifty miles around a range to skip a feller that was lookin’ for my skelp, and I’d go a thousand before I’d crowd a fight. I never was much on the fight, and runnin’ sheep took what little was in me out a long time ago.”
Dad got out his red box of corn-husk cigarettes, offering it silently to Mackenzie, who shook his head, knowing very well that Dad did it to observe conventions rather than out of a desire to have him help himself. The stock of Mexican smokes was running low; Dad had spoken of it only the day before, and his feet were itching for the road to the border, he said.
“Well, he’s got a name and a fame in this country he can travel on,” said Dad.
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Which was true enough. Mackenzie’s fight with Swan Carlson had taken second place, his reputation as a fighting man in the sheeplands had paled almost to nothing, after Reid’s swift-handed dealing with Matt Hall. The fame of his exploit ran through the country, fixing his place in it at once, for Matt Hall was known as a man who had the strength of seven in his long, gorilla arms.
Hector Hall, brother of the slain man, seemed to accept the tragedy with a sorrowful resignation in which no shadow of revenge appeared. He let it be known that Matt had been irresponsible at times, given to night-prowlings and outbreaks of violence of strange and fantastic forms. How much truth there was in this excuse for the dead man, Hector alone knew. But no matter for his passivity, Mackenzie did not trust him. He made a requisition on Tim Sullivan at once for revolvers for himself and Reid, which Tim delegated the young man to go to Four Corners and buy.
“Well, I come over to see if you’ll lend Reid to me three or four days while I make a trip to town,” said Dad. “I’ve got a little business over there to tend to I’ve been puttin’ off for more than a month.”
“Yes, if it’s all right with Tim you can have him. What’s up, getting married?”
“Kind of arrangin’, John, kind of arrangin’. There’s a widow-lady over at Four Corners I used to rush that needs a man to help her with her sheep. A man might as well marry a sheep ranch as work on one, I reckon.”
“It’s a shorter cut, anyhow. When do you want Reid?”
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“I was aimin’ to rack out this evenin’, John.”
“I’ll send him over this afternoon. I don’t know where he is, but he’ll be back for dinner.”
Dad went away well satisfied and full of cheer, Mackenzie marveling over his marital complexities as he watched him go. Together with Rabbit, and the Mexican woman down El Paso way whom John had mentioned, but of whom Dad never had spoken, and no telling how many more scattered around the country, Dad seemed to be laying the groundwork for a lively roundup one of his days. He said he’d been marrying women off and on for forty years. His easy plan seemed to be just to take one that pleased his capricious temper wherever he found her, without regard to former obligations.
Mackenzie grinned. He did not believe any man was so obscure as to be able to escape many wives. Dad seemed to be a dry-land sailor, with a wife in every town he ever had made in his life. Mackenzie understood about Mexican marriages. If they were priest marriages, they were counted good; if they were merely justice of the peace ones they were subject to wide and elastic infringement on both sides. Probably Indian marriages were similar. Surely Dad was old enough to know what he was about.
Reid came to camp at noontime, and prepared dinner in his quick and handy way. Mackenzie did not take up the question of his acting as relief for Dad while the old scout went off to push his arrangements for marrying a sheep ranch, seeing that Reid was depressed and down-spirited and in no pleasant mood.
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They were almost independent of the camp-mover, owing to their light equipment, which they could carry with them from day to day as the sheep ranged. Supplies were all they needed from the wagon, which came around to them twice a week. After dinner Reid began packing up for the daily move, moody and silent, cigarette dangling on his lip.
“It’s a one-hell of a life!” said he, looking up from the last knot in the rope about the bundle of tent.
“Have you soured on it already, Earl?”
Reid sat on the bundle of tent, a cloud on his face, hat drawn almost to the bridge of his nose, scowling out over the sheep range as if he would curse it to a greater barrenness.
“Three years of this, and what’ll I be? Hell! I can’t even find that other Hall.”
“Have you been out looking for him?”
“That big Swede over there was tellin’ me he’s put me down in his book for a killin’. I thought I’d give him a chance to get it over with if he meant it.”
“Has Carlson been over?”
“No, I rode over there the other evening. Say, is that the woman you found chained up when you struck this country?”
“She’s the one.”
Mackenzie looked at Reid curiously as he answered. There was something of quick eagerness in the young man’s inquiry, a sudden light of a new interest in his face, in sharp contrast with the black mood of a moment before.
“She looks like an Ibsen heroine,” said Reid. “Take154that woman out of this country and dress her right, and she’d be a queen.”
“You’d better keep away from there,” said Mackenzie, dryly.
“Oh, I guess I can take care of Swan if you could,” Reid returned, with a certain easy insolence, jerking his hip to hitch his gun around in suggestive movement.
Mackenzie dropped the matter without more words, seeing too plainly the humor of the youth. Maybe Dad had diagnosed his ailment aright, but to Mackenzie it appeared something more than plain lonesomeness. The notoriety attending the killing of Matt Hall had not been good for Reid. He wanted more of it, and a bigger audience, a wider field.
If this was a taste of the adventure of the West’s past romantic times, Mackenzie felt that he was lucky he had come too late to share it. His own affair with Swan Carlson had been sordid enough, but this unlucky embroilment in which Reid had killed a man was a plain misfortune to the hero of the fight. He told Reid of Dad’s request.
“You go and run his sheep for him,” Reid suggested. “It’ll take you a little nearer Joan.”
This he added as with studied sneer, his face flushing darkly, his thin mouth twisted in an ugly grin.
Mackenzie passed it, but not without the hurt of the unkind stab showing in his face. It was so entirely unjustified as to be cruel, for Mackenzie was not in Reid’s way even to the extent of one lurking, selfish thought. Since Reid had saved his life from Matt Hall’s murderous hands, Mackenzie had withdrawn even155his most remote hope in regard to Joan. Before that he had spun his thread of dreams, quite honestly, and with intent that he would not have denied, but since, not at all.
He owed Reid too much to cross him with Joan; he stepped aside, denying himself a thought of her save only in relation of teacher and pupil, trying to convince himself that it was better in the end for Joan. Reid had all the advantage of him in prospects; he could lift up the curtain on his day and show Joan the splendors of a world that a schoolmaster could point out only from afar. Mackenzie seemed to ignore the youth’s suggestion that he go and tend Dad’s flock.
“If I had a thousand dollars I’d dust it for Mexico tomorrow,” said Reid. He turned to Mackenzie, pushing his hat back from his forehead, letting the sun on his savagely knotted face. “I haven’t got money to send a telegram, not even a special delivery letter! Look at me! A millionaire’s son and sole heir, up against a proposition like this for three years!”
Mackenzie let him sweat it out, offering neither water for his thirst nor wood for his fire. Reid sat in surly silence, running his thumb along his cartridge belt.
“A man’s friends forget him out here,” he complained; “he’s the same to them as dead.”
“It’s the way everywhere when a man wants to borrow money,” Mackenzie told him, not without the shade of a sneer.
“I’ve let them have enough in my time that they could afford to come across with what I asked for!”
“I think you’d better stick to the sheep business with156Tim,” Mackenzie advised, not unkindly, ashamed of his momentary weakness and scorn. “A man’s prospects don’t look very good back home when a bunch of parasites and grafters won’t come over with a little loan.”
“They can go to the devil! I can live without them.”
“And get fat on it, kid. Three years here will be little more to you than as many days, if you get––interested.”
Reid exclaimed impatiently, dismissing such assurance with a testy gesture.
“How much will you give me for my chances?” he asked.
“Nobody else can play your hand, kid.”
“On the square, Mackenzie. Will you give me a thousand dollars?”
“I’m not sole heir to any millionaire,” Mackenzie reminded him, taking the proposal in the jesting spirit that he supposed it was given.
“On the dead, Mackenzie––I mean it. Will you give me a thousand dollars for my place in the sheep game, girl and all? If you will, I’ll hit the breeze tonight for Mexico and kick it all over to you, win or lose.”
“If I could buy you out for a dime we couldn’t trade,” Mackenzie told him, a coldness in tone and manner that was more than a reproof.
“Joan ought to be worth that much to you!” Reid sneered.
Mackenzie got up, walked a few steps away, turned back presently, his temper in hand.
“It’s not a question open to discussion between gentlemen,” he said.
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Reid blinked up at him, an odd leer on his sophisticated face, saying no more. He made a pack on his saddle of the camp outfit, and started off along the ridge, leaving Mackenzie to follow as he pleased. A mile or more along Reid pitched upon a suitable camping place. He had himself established long before Mackenzie came to where he sat smoking amid his gloomy, impatient thoughts.
“I’m not going over to relieve that old skunk,” Reid announced, “not without orders from Sullivan. If he gets off you’ll have to relieve him yourself. I don’t want that Hall guy to get it into his nut that I’m runnin’ away from him.”
“All right, Earl,” said Mackenzie, good-naturedly, “I’ll go.”
“You’ll be half an hour nearer Joan’s camp––she’ll have that much longer to stay,” said Reid, his mean leer creeping into his wide, thin lips again.
Mackenzie turned slowly to look him squarely in the eyes. He stood so a few seconds, Reid coloring in hot resentment of the silent rebuke.
“I’ve heard enough of that to last me the rest of your three years,” Mackenzie said, something as hard as stones in a cushion under his calm voice.
Reid jerked his hip in his peculiar twisting movement to shift his pistol belt, turned, and walked away.
If it was the lonesomeness, Mackenzie thought, it was taking a mighty peculiar turn in that fellow. He was more like a cub that was beginning to find itself, and bristle and snarl and turn to bite the hand that had fended it through its helpless stage. Perhaps it would158pass in a little while, or perhaps it would get worse on him. In the latter case there would be no living on the range with Reid, for on the range Mackenzie believed Reid was destined to remain. He had been trying to borrow money to get away, with what view in his dissatisfied head Mackenzie could not guess. He hadn’t got it; he wouldn’t get it. Those who had fattened on him in his prosperity were strangers to him in his time of penance and disgrace.
Mackenzie put off his start to Dad’s camp until dusk, knowing the old man would prefer to take the road at night, after his mysterious way. He probably would hoof it over to Sullivan’s and borrow a buckboard to make a figure in before the widow-lady upon whom he had anchored his variable heart.
Reid was bringing in the sheep when Mackenzie left, too far away for a word. Mackenzie thought of going down to him, for he disliked to part with anything like a shadow between them, feeling that he owed Reid a great debt indeed. More than that, he liked the kid, for there seemed to be a streak of good in him that all his ugly moods could not cover. But he went his way over the hills toward Dad’s camp, the thought persisting in him that he would, indeed, be thirty minutes nearer Joan. And it was a thought that made his heart jump and a gladness burn in his eyes, and his feet move onward with a swift eagerness.
But only as a teacher with a lively interest in his pupil, he said; only that, and nothing more. On a hilltop a little way beyond his camp he stopped suddenly, his breath held to listen. Over the calm, far-carrying159silence of the early night there came the sound of 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!
160CHAPTER XVONLY ONE JACOB
Joan came riding over the next morning from Reid’s camp, not having heard of Mackenzie’s shift to oblige Dad Frazer. She was bareheaded, the sun in her warm hair, hat hanging on her saddle-horn.
“Dad might have come by and told me,” she said, flinging to the ground as lightly as a swallow. “It would have saved us half an hour.”
“We’ll have to work harder to make it up,” Mackenzie told her, thinking how much more a woman she was growing every day.
Joan was distrait again that day, her eyes fixed often in dreamy speculation as her teacher explained something that she found hard, against her wonted aptness, to understand. When the rather disjointed lesson came to an end Joan sighed, strapping her books in a way that seemed to tell that she was weary of them.
“Do you still think you’ll stick to the sheep business, John?” she asked, not lifting her eyes to his face, all out of her frank and earnest way of questioning.
“I’m only on probation, you know, Joan; something might happen between now and this time next year to change things all around. There’s a chance, anyhow, that I may not make good.”
“No, nothing will ever happen to change it,” said Joan, shaking her head sadly. “Nothing that ought to happen ever happens here. I don’t know whether I can161stand it to carry out my contract with dad or not. Three years between me and what I’m longing for!”
“It’s not very long when one’s young, Joan. Well, I don’t know of any short cuts to either fame or fortune, or I’d have taken them myself.”
“Yes, but you’re free to pick up and go whenever you want to. A man don’t have to have money to strike out and see the world––I don’t see why a woman should. I could work my way as well as anybody.”
“They’re harder masters out there than the range is to you here, Joan. And there’s the insolence of mastery, and the obloquy of poverty and situation that I hope you’ll never feel. Wait a little while longer with the probationers among the sheep.”
“Earl never will stay it out,” she said, lifting her eyes for a moment to his. “He’s sick of it now––he’d throw everything over if he had the money to get away.”
“He’d be a very foolish young man, then. But it’s like breaking off smoking, I guess, to quit the things you’ve grown up with on short notice like he had.”
“Maybe in about a year more my interest will amount to enough to let me out,” said Joan, pursuing her thought of winning to freedom in the way she had elected. She seemed innocent of any knowledge of the arrangement whereby Earl Reid was working for his reward. Mackenzie wondered if it could be so.
“If dad’ll buy me out then,” she said, speculatively, doubtfully, carrying on her thought in a disjointed way. “It would be like him to turn me down, though, if I want to quit before my time’s up. And he wouldn’t let me divide the sheep and sell my share to anybody else.”
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No, Joan could not yet know of Tim’s arrangement with Earl Reid’s father. It would be like Tim, indeed, to bargain her off without considering her in the matter at all. To a man like Tim his sons and daughters were as much his chattels as his sheep, kind as he was in his way. The apprenticeship of Joan to the range was proof of that. Somewhere out in that gray loneliness two younger daughters were running sheep, with little brothers as protectors and companions, beginning their adventures and lessons in the only school they were ever likely to know.
Tim made a great virtue of the fact that he had taught all of them to read and write. That much would serve most of them satisfactorily for a few years, but Mackenzie grinned his dry grin to himself when he thought of the noise there would be one day in Tim Sullivan’s cote when the young pigeons shook out their wings to fly away. It was in the breed to do that; it looked out of the eyes of every one.
“I sent and got a Bible from the mail-order house,” said Joan, looking up with lively eyes.
“Has it come already?”
“Charley got it yesterday. I found that story about Jacob and Rachel and the weak-eyed girl. It’s awful short.”
“But it tells a good deal, Joan.”
Joan seemed thinking over how much the short story really told, her eyes far away on the elusive, ever-receding blue curtain that was down between her and the world.
“Yes, it tells a lot,” she sighed. “But Jake must not163have been very bright. Well, he was a cowman, anyhow; he wasn’t running sheep.”
“I think he went into the sheep business afterwards,” Mackenzie said, diverted by her original comment on the old tale.
“Yes, when his girls got big enough to do the work!” The resentment of her hard years was in Joan’s voice, the hardness of unforgiving regret for all that had been taken from her life.
Mackenzie felt a sweep of depression engulf him like a leaping wave. Joan was in the humor to profit by any arrangement that would break her bondage to sheep; Tim Sullivan had been bringing her up, unconsciously, but none the less effectively, to fit into this scheme for marrying her to his old friend’s rakish son. When the day came for Joan to know of the arrangement, she would leap toward it as toward an open door.
Still, it should not concern him. Once he had believed there was a budding blossom on his hitherto dry branch of romance; if he had been so ungenerous as to take advantage of Joan’s loneliness and urge the promise to florescence, they might have been riding down out of the sheeplands together that day.
It would have been a venture, too, he admitted. For contact with the world of men must prove a woman, even as the hardships of the range must prove a man. Perhaps the unlimited variety displayed before her eyes would have made Joan dissatisfied with her plain choice.
At that moment it came to him that perhaps Joan was to be tested and proved here, even as he was being tested in Tim Sullivan’s balance for his fitness to become164a master over sheep. Here were two fair samples of men out of the world’s assorted stock––himself and Reid. One of them, deliberate, calm, assured of his way, but with little in his hand; the other a grig that could reel and spin in the night-lights, and flutter to a merry tune.
With Mackenzie the rewards of life would come to her slowly, but with a sweet savor of full understanding and appreciation as they were won. Many of them most desired might never be attained; many more might be touched and withdrawn in the mockery that fate practices so heartlessly upon men. Reid could convey her at once over the rough summits which men and women wear their hearts threadbare to attain. With Reid the journey would begin where, with the best hoping, it must in his own company almost end.
“It was unlucky for Earl that he killed Matt Hall,” said Joan, taking up another thread of thought in her discursive, unfixed humor of that day.
“It’s unfortunate for any man to have to kill another, I guess. But it has to be done sometimes.”
“Matt deserved it, all right––he ought have been killed for his mean face long ago––but it’s turned Earl’s head, haven’t you noticed? He thinks he’s got one foot on each side of this range, herdin’ everybody between his legs.”
“He’ll get over it in a little while.”
“He’s not got brains enough to hold him down when the high winds begin to blow. If he’s a fair sample of what they’ve got in Omaha, I’ll cross it off my map when I begin to travel.”
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“Dad says he’s got the lonesomeness.”
“More of the cussedness.”
Her words warmed Mackenzie like a precious cordial. At every one of them in derogation of Reid his heart jumped, seeming to move him by its tremendous vibration a little nearer to her. He felt that it was traitorous exultation at the expense of one who had befriended him to a limit beyond which it is hard for a man to go, but he could not drown the exhilaration of a reborn hope in even the deepest waters of his gratitude.
Somebody ought to tell Joan what they had designed for her in company with Earl Reid; somebody ought to tell her, but it was not his place. It was strange that she had read the young man’s weakness so readily. Mackenzie had noted more than once before in his life that those who live nearest to nature are the most apt in reading all her works.
“He’ll never stay here through a winter,” Joan predicted, with certainty that admitted no argument. “Give him a touch of twenty-two below, and a snow on a high wind, and send him out to bed down the sheep where it’ll blow over them! I can see him right now. You’ll do it, all right, and I’ll have to, like I have done many a time. But we’re not like Earl. Earl’s got summer blood.”
Mackenzie took her hand, feeling it tremble a little, seeing her face grow pale. The sun was red on the hill, the sheep were throwing long shadows down the slope as they grazed lazily, some of them standing on knees to crop the lush bunch grass.
“Yes, Joan, you and I are of different blood,” he said. “We are of the blood of the lonesome places, and166we’ll turn back to them always from our wandering and seeking contentment among the press of men. He can’t have you––Earl Reid can’t have you––ever in this world!”
So it was out, and from his own mouth, and all his reserve was nothing, and his silent pledging but as an idle word. Joan was looking at him with wide and serious eyes.
“Earl Reid?”
“Earl Reid,” he nodded. “I’d be a coward to give you up to him.”
Joan was not trembling now. She put her free hand over Mackenzie’s where it gripped her fingers so hard that Earl Reid might have been on the opposite side of her, trying to rive her away from him by force; she looked up into his eyes and smiled. And there were flecks of golden brown in Joan’s eyes, like flakes of metal from her rich hair. They seemed to increase, and to sparkle like jewels struck through placid water by strong sunbeams as she looked up into his face.
“I thought dad had made some kind of a deal with him,” she said, nodding in her wise way, a truant strand of hair on her calm forehead. “They didn’t tell me anything, but I knew from the way dad looked at me out of the corners of his eyes that he had a trade of some kind on. Tell me about it, John.”
There was no explanation left to Mackenzie but the degrading truth, and he gave it to her as Tim Sullivan had given it to him.
“They had their nerve!” said Joan, flushed with resentment.
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“It’s all off, as far as it affects you and me,” Mackenzie said, fetching his brows together in a frown of denial. “Reid can’t have you, not even if he comes into two million when the old man dies.”
“No,” said Joan softly, her hand stroking his, her eyes downcast, the glow of the new-old dawn upon her cheek; “there’s only room for one Jacob on this range.”
“I thought I owed it to Reid, as a matter of honor between men, to step aside and let him have you, according to the plan. But that was a mistake. A man can’t pay his debts by robbing his heart that way.”
“I saw something was holding you back, John,” said the wise Joan.
Mackenzie started as if she had thrust him with a needle, felt his telltale blood flare red in his face, but grinned a little as he turned to her, meeting her eye to eye.
“So, you saw through me, did you, Joan?”
“When you called me Rachel that day.”
“I nearly told you that time,” he sighed.
“You might have, John,” said she, a bit accusingly; “you didn’t owe him anything then––that was before he came.”
“I respected you too much to take advantage of your coming to me that way for your lessons day by day, Joan. I had to fight to keep it back.”
“I tried to pull it out of you,” Joan said, as serious as a penitent, although there was a smile breaking on her lips as she turned her face away.
“I’d never want to do anything, or say anything, that would lower your respect for me one little degree, Joan,”168he said, still clinging to her hand as though he feared he had not quite won her, and must hold her fast by his side for the final word.
“I know you wouldn’t, John,” said she, her voice shaking a little, and low beneath her breath.
“I wouldn’t want to––to––go as far as Jacob went that first time he saw Rachel,” said he in desperation, his grip tightening on her fingers, sweat bursting on his brow. “I wouldn’t want to––I’dwantto, all right, but I wouldn’t even––even–––”
Joan looked up at him with calm, placid eyes, with pale cheeks, with yearning lips, a flutter in her heart that made her weak. She nodded, anxious to help him to his climax, but not bold, not bolder than himself, indeed, and he was shaking like a sick man in the sun.
“Unless I could make it holy, unless you could understand it so, I wouldn’t even––I wouldn’t so much as–––” He took her face between his hands, and bent over her, and a glad little sob trembled between Joan’s lips as she rested her hands on his shoulders for the benediction of his kiss.
Joan did not stay to help him bring in the sheep that day, for there was nothing left for her to wonder over, or stand wistfully by her saddle waiting to receive. Neither was there any sound of weeping as she rode up the hill, for the male custom of expressing joy in that way had gone out of fashion on the sheep ranges of this world long before John Mackenzie’s day.
Nothing that he could owe a man could equal what he had gained that hour, Mackenzie thought, standing there with heart as light as the down of cottonwood.169With his great debt paid to Earl Reid, even to the measure of his own life, he would still leave the world a rich man. He had come into the fresh pastures of romance at last.
Joan waved him good-bye from the hilltop and went on, the understanding of his fortune growing on him as he recalled her eyes in that moment when she closed them to his salute upon her lips. She gave up that first kiss that she ever had yielded to any man as though he had reached down and plucked it out of her heart.
Let them go on planning for years of labor, let them go on scheming for inheritances, and piece their broken arrangements together as they might when they found he had swept Joan out of their squalid calculations as a rider stoops and lifts a kerchief from the ground. There would be bitterness and protestations, and rifts in his own bright hopes, as well.
But if Tim Sullivan would not give her up to him with the good grace of a man, Mackenzie said, smiling and smiling like a daft musician, he would take her from both of them and ride away with her into the valleys of the world which she was so hungry in her young heart to behold.
He rounded his sheep to their hillside, and made his fire, a song in his heart, but his lips sealed, for he was a silent man. And at dusk there came riding into his camp a man, whose coat was at his cantle, who was belted with pistols, who roved his eye with cautious look as he halted and gave the shepherd good evening. Mackenzie invited him down to the hospitality of the camp, which the stranger accepted with hearty grace.
170
“I was lookin’ for a young feller by the name of Reid; you’re not the man,” the stranger said with finality, after one more shrewd look into Mackenzie’s face.
“My name’s Mackenzie––Reid’s running a band of sheep for the same outfit about five miles east of here.”
The stranger said nothing more, being busy at that moment unsaddling his horse, which he hobbled and turned to graze. He came over to the fire where Mackenzie was baking biscuits in a tilted pan, and sat down, dusty from his day’s ride.
“I’m the sheriff of this county,” he announced, not going into the detail of his name. Mackenzie nodded his acknowledgment, the sheriff keeping his hungry eye on the pan. “I took a cut across here from servin’ some subpoenas in a murder case on some fellers up on Farewell Creek,” he explained, “to see how that feller Reid’s behavin’.”
“I haven’t heard any complaint,” Mackenzie told him, wondering why this official interest. The sheriff seemed satisfied with what he heard, and made no further inquiry or explanation until after he had eaten his supper. As he smoked a cracked cigar which he took from the pocket of his ornate vest, he talked.
“I didn’t know anything about that boy when Sullivan put him in here on the range,” he said, “but the other day I got a letter from the sheriff in Omaha askin’ me to keep my eye on him. The news of Reid’s killin’ Matt Hall got over to Omaha. You know Reid, he’s under sentence of three years in the pen.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Yeah. Daddy got him paroled to Sullivan’s sheep171ranch to serve it. If he breaks over here he goes to the pen. That’s the wayhestands.”
“In that case, he’ll more than likely stay it out.”
“He will if he’s wise. He’s been a kind of a streak of wildness, the sheriff in Omaha said. Sent me his full history, three pages. Married somebody a year or so ago, but the old man got him out of that by buyin’ off the girl. Then he started out forgin’, and pushed it so hard the old man refused to make good any more. But he didn’t want to see the kid go to the pen, and he’s here. I got to keep my eye on him to see he don’t break over.”
The sheriff stretched out when he had finished his cigar and went to sleep in a blanket provided by his host. He was up with dawn, ready to resume his journey. Mackenzie pressed him to stay for breakfast, but he said he wanted to make a start before the sun and reach Sullivan’s ranch-house.
“Does Sullivan know how things stand with Reid?” Mackenzie inquired.
“I reckon he must. If he don’t he soon will. Kind of watch that feller, will you, and slip me word if he shows any signs of streakin’ out of the country.”
“No, I’ve got my eye full looking after two thousand sheep. That’s up to Sullivan, he’s responsible for Reid.”
The sheriff turned a sharp look of suspicion on Mackenzie, but said nothing. He led his horse down to the little stream for water, and came leading it back, a cast of disfavor in his face.
“You’re a bad bunch up in here,” he said, “you and Carlson and Hall. If there’s any more killin’ and172fightin’ up this way I’ll come in and clean you all out. Where did you say that feller was at?”
Mackenzie told him again, and he rode off to take a look at Reid, and put what caution into his ear he had a mind to give. Mackenzie saw him blend into the gloom of early morning with a feeling of self-felicitation on his act of yesterday. He was inspired yesterday when he took Joan under his protection and laid claim to her in his own right.
173CHAPTER XVIREID BEGINS HIS PLAY
Dad Frazer came back after five days, diminished in facial outline on account of having submitted his stubble beard to the barber at Four Corners. In reverse of all speculation on Mackenzie’s part, this operation did not improve the old man’s appearance. Dad’s face was one of the kind that are built to carry a beard; without it his weaknesses were too apparent to the appraising eye.
Dad made glowing report of his success with the widow at Four Corners. Preliminaries were smoothed; he had left the widow wearing his ring.
“We’ll jump the broomstick in about a month from now,” Dad said, full of satisfaction for his business stroke. “I aim to settle down and quit my roamin’, John.”
“And your marrying, too, I hope, you old rascal!”
“Yes, this one will be my last, I reckon. I don’t mind, though; I’ve had doin’s enough with women in my day.”
“Is she a good looker, Dad?”
“Well, I’ve seen purtier ones and I’ve seen uglier ones, John. No, she ain’t what you might call stylish, I guess, but she’s all right for me. She’s a little off in one leg, but not enough to hurt.”
“That’s a slight blemish in a lady with money in the bank, Dad.”