233CHAPTER XXIIPHANTOMS OF FEVER
“That was ten or twelve days ago,” Dad explained, when Mackenzie found himself blinking understandingly at the sunlight through the open end of the sheep-wagon one morning. “You was chawed and beat up till you was hangin’ together by threads.”
Mackenzie was as weak as a young mouse. He closed his eyes and lay thinking back over those days of delirium through which a gleam of understanding fell only once in a while. Dad evidently believed that he was well now, from his manner and speech, although Mackenzie knew that if his life depended on rising and walking from the wagon he would not be able to redeem it at the price.
“I seem to remember a woman around me a good deal,” he said, not trusting himself to look at Dad. “It wasn’t––was it–––?”
Mackenzie felt his face flush, and cursed his weakness, but he could not pronounce the name that filled his heart.
“Yes, it was Rabbit,” said Dad, catching him up without the slightest understanding of his stammering. “She’s been stickin’ to you night and day. I tell you, John, them Indians can’t be beat doctorin’ a man up when he’s been chawed up by a animal.”
“I want to thank her,” Mackenzie said, feeling his heart swing very low indeed.
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“You won’t see much of her now since you’ve come to your head, I reckon she’ll be passin’ you over to me to look after. She’s shy that way. Yes, sir, any time I git bit up by man or beast, or shot up or knifed, I’ll take Rabbit ahead of any doctor you can find. Them Indians they know the secrets of it. I wouldn’t be afraid to stand and let a rattlesnake bite me till it fainted if Rabbit was around. She can cure it.”
But Mackenzie knew from the odor of his bandages that Rabbit was not depending on her Indian knowledge in his case, or not entirely so. There was the odor of carbolic acid, and he was conscious all along that his head had been shaved around the wound in approved surgical fashion. He reasoned that Rabbit went about prepared with the emergency remedies of civilization, and put it down to her schooling at the Catholic sisters’ hands.
“Was there anybody––did anybody else come around?” Mackenzie inquired.
“Tim’s been by a couple of times. Oh, well––Joan.”
“Oh, Joan,” said Mackenzie, trying to make it sound as if he had no concern in Joan at all. But his voice trembled, and life came bounding up in him again with glad, wild spring.
“She was over the day after you got hurt, but she ain’t been back,” said Dad, with such indifference that he must have taken it for granted that Mackenzie held no tenderness for her, indeed. “I met Charley yesterday; he told me Joan was over home. Mary’s out here with him––she’s the next one to Joan, you know.”
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Mackenzie’s day clouded; his sickness fell over him again, taking the faint new savor out of life. Joan was indifferent; she did not care. Then hope came on its white wings to excuse her.
“Is she sick?” he inquired.
“Who––Mary?”
“Joan. Is she all right?”
“Well, if I was married to her I’d give up hopes of ever bein’ left a widower. That girl’s as healthy as a burro––yes, and she’ll outlive one, I’ll bet money, and I’ve heard of ’em livin’ eighty years down in Mexico.”
Dad did not appear to be cognizant of Mackenzie’s weakness. According to the old man’s pathology a man was safe when he regained his head out of the delirium of fever. All he needed then was cheering up, and Dad did not know of any better way of doing that than by talking. So he let himself go, and Mackenzie shut his eyes to the hum of the old fellow’s voice, the sound beating on his ears like wind against closed doors.
Suddenly Dad’s chatter ceased. The silence was as welcome as the falling of a gale to a man at sea in an open boat. Mackenzie heard Dad leaving the wagon in cautious haste, and opened his eyes to see. Rabbit was beside him with a bowl of savory-smelling broth, which she administered to him with such gentle deftness that Mackenzie could not help believing Dad had libeled her in his story of the accident that had left its mark upon her face.
Rabbit would not permit her patient to talk, denying him with uplifted finger and shake of head when he attempted it. She did not say a word during her visit, although236her manner was only gentle, neither timid nor shy.
Rabbit was a short woman, turning somewhat to weight, a little gray in her black hair, but rather due to trouble than age, Mackenzie believed. Her skin was dark, her face bright and intelligent, but stamped with the meekness which is the heritage of women of her race. The burn had left her marked as Dad had said, the scar much lighter than the original skin, but it was not such a serious disfigurement that a man would be justified in leaving her for it as Dad had done.
When Rabbit went out she drew a mosquito netting over the opening in the back of the wagon. Mackenzie was certain that Dad had libeled her after that. There was not a fly in the wagon to pester him, and he knew that the opening in the front end had been similarly screened, although he could not turn to see. Grateful to Rabbit, with the almost tearful tenderness that a sick man feels for those who have ministered kindly to his pain, Mackenzie lay with his thoughts that first day of consciousness after his tempestuous season of delirium.
They were not pleasant thoughts for a man whose blood was not yet cool. As they surged and hammered in his brain his fever flashed again, burning in his eyes like a desert wind. Something had happened to alienate Joan.
That was the burden of it as the sun mounted with his fever, heating the enclosed wagon until it was an oven. Something had happened to alienate Joan. He did not believe her weak enough, fickle enough, to yield to the allurements of Reid’s prospects. They must have237slandered him and driven her away with lies. Reid must have slandered him; there was the stamp of slander in his wide, thin mouth.
It would be many days, it might be weeks, before he could go abroad on the range again to set right whatever wrong had been done him. Then it would be too late. Surely Joan could not take his blunder into Carlson’s trap in the light of an unpardonable weakness; she was not so sheep-blind as that. Something had been done outside any act of his own to turn her face and her sympathies away.
Consumed in impatience to be up, anxiety for the delay, Mackenzie lay the throbbing day through like a disabled engine spending its vain power upon a broken shaft. Kind Rabbit came frequently to give him drink, to bathe his forehead, to place a cool cloth over his burning eyes. But Dad did not come again. How much better for his peace if the garrulous old rascal had not come at all!
And then with the thought of Joan there came mingling the vexing wonder of the train of violence that had attended him into the sheeplands. He had come there to be a master over flocks, not expecting to encounter any unfriendly force save the stern face of nature. He had begun to muddle and meddle at the outset; he had continued to muddle, if not meddle, to the very end.
For this would be the end. No sheepman would countenance a herder who could not take care of his flock in summer weather on a bountiful range. His day was done in that part of the country so far as his plans of238becoming a sharing herdsman went. Earl Reid, a thin, anemic lad fresh from city life, had come in and made much more a figure of a man.
So his fever boiled under the fuel of his humiliating thoughts. The wagon was a bake-oven, but there was no sweat in him to cool his parching skin. He begged Rabbit to let him go and lie under the wagon, where the wind could blow over him, but she shook her head in denial and pressed him down on the bunk. Then she gave him a drink that had the bitterness of opium in it, and he threw down his worrying snarl of thoughts, and slept.
239CHAPTER XXIIICONCERNING MARY
“Yes, I’ve heard tell of sheepmen workin’ Swan’s dodge on one another, but I never took no stock in it, because I never believed even a sheepman was fool enough to let anybody put a thing like that over on him.”
“A sheepman oughtn’t to be,” Mackenzie said, in the bitterness of defeat.
“Swan knew you was an easy feller, and green to the ways of them tricky sheepmen,” said Dad. “You let him off in that first fight with a little crack on the head when you’d ought to ’a’ laid him out for good, and you let Hector Hall go that time you took his guns away from him. Folks in here never could understand that; they say it was like a child playin’ with a rattlesnake.”
“It was,” Mackenzie agreed.
“Swan thought he could run them sheep of his over on you and take away five or six hundred more than he brought, and I guess he’d ’a’ done it if it hadn’t been for Reid.”
“It looks that way, Dad. I sure was easy, to fall into his trap the way I did.”
Mackenzie was able to get about again, and was gaining strength rapidly. He and Dad were in the shade of some willows along the creek, where Mackenzie stretched in the indolent relaxation of convalescence, Dad smoking his miserable old pipe close at hand.
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And miserable is the true word for Dad’s pipe, for it was miserable indeed, and miserable the smell that came out of it, going there full steam on a hot afternoon of early autumn. Dad always carefully reamed out the first speck of carbon that formed in his pipe, and kept it reamed out with boring blade of his pocket knife. He wanted no insulation against nicotine, and the strength thereof; he was not satisfied unless the fire burned into the wood, and drew the infiltrations of strong juice therefrom. When his charge of tobacco burned out, and the fire came down to this frying, sizzling abomination of smells at last, Dad beamed, enjoying it as a sort of dessert to a delightful repast of strong smoke.
Dad was enjoying his domestic felicity to the full these days of Mackenzie’s convalescence. Rabbit was out with the sheep, being needed no longer to attend the patient, leaving Dad to idle as he pleased. His regret for the one-eyed widow seemed to have passed, leaving no scar behind.
“Tim don’t take no stock in it that Swan planned before to do you out of a lot of your sheep. He was by here this morning while you was wanderin’ around somewhere.”
“He was by, was he?”
“Yeah; he was over to see Reid––he’s sent him a new wagon over there. Tim says you and Swan must both ’a’ been asleep and let the two bands stray together, and of course it was human for Swan to want to take away more than he brought. Well, it was sheepman, anyhow, if it wasn’t human.”
“Did Sullivan say that?”
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“No, that’s what I say. I know ’em; I know ’em to the bone. Reid knew how many sheep him and you had, and he stuck out for ’em like a little man. More to that feller than I ever thought he had in him.”
“Yes,” Mackenzie agreed. He lay stretched on his back, squinting at the calm-weather clouds.
“Yeah; Tim says both of you fellers must ’a’ been asleep.”
“I suppose he’ll fire me when he sees me.”
“No, I don’t reckon he will. Tim takes it as a kind of a joke, and he’s as proud as all git-out of the way Reid stacked up. If that boy hadn’t happened up when he did, Swan he’d ’a’ soaked you another one with that gun of yourn and put you out for good. They say that kid waltzed Swan around there and made him step like he was standin’ on a red-hot stove.”
“Did anybody see him doing it?”
“No, I don’t reckon anybody did. But he must ’a’ done it, all right, Swan didn’t git a head of sheep that didn’t belong to him.”
“It’s funny how Reid arrived on the second,” Mackenzie said, reflecting over it as a thing he had pondered before.
“Well, it’s natural you’d feel a little jealous of him, John––most any feller would. But I don’t think he had any hand in it with Swan to run him in on you, if that’s what you’re drivin’ at.”
“It never crossed my mind,” said Mackenzie, but not with his usual regard for the truth.
“I don’t like him, and I never did like him, but you’ve got to hand it to him for grit and nerve.”
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“Has he got over the lonesomeness?”
“Well, he’s got a right to if he ain’t.”
“Got a right to? What do you mean?”
Dad chuckled, put both hands to the back of his head, smoothed his long, bright hair.
“I don’t reckon you knew when you was teachin’ Joan you was goin’ to all that trouble for that feller,” he said.
“Sullivan told me him and old man Reid had made an agreement concerning the young folks,” Mackenzie returned, a sickness of dread over him for what he believed he was about to hear.
“Oh, Tim told you, did he? Never said nothin’ to me about it till this mornin’. He’s goin’ to send Joan off to the sisters’ school down at Cheyenne.”
Mackenzie sat up, saying nothing for a good while. He sat looking at the ground, buried in his thoughts as deep as a grave. Dad turned curious eyes upon him, but yet not eyes which probed to the secret of his heart or weighed his loss.
“I guess I didn’t––couldn’t teach her enough to keep her here,” Mackenzie said.
“You could teach her a danged sight more than she could remember. I think Tim and her had a spat, but I’m only guessin’ from what Charley said. Reid was at the bottom of it, I’ll bet a purty. That feller was afraid you and Joan might git to holdin’ hands out here on the range so much together, heads a touchin’ over them books.”
Mackenzie heard the old man as the wind. No, he had not taught Joan enough to keep her in the sheeplands;243she had not read deeply enough into that lesson which he once spoke of as the easiest to learn and the hardest to forget. Joan’s desire for life in the busy places had overbalanced her affection for him. Spat or no spat, she would have come to see him more than once in his desperate struggle against death if she had cared.
He could not blame her. There was not much in a man who had made a failure of even sheepherding to bind a maid to him against the allurements of the world that had been beckoning her so long.
“Tim said he’d be around to see you late this evening or tomorrow. He’s went over to see how Mary and Charley’re makin’ out, keepin’ his eye on ’em like he suspicioned they might kill a lamb once in a while to go with their canned beans.”
“All right,” said Mackenzie, abstractedly.
Dad looked at him with something like scorn for his inattention to such an engrossing subject. Mackenzie was not looking his way; his thoughts seemed to be a thousand leagues from Tim Sullivan’s range and the lambs on it, let them be alive or slaughtered to go with canned beans.
But Joan would come back to the sheeplands, as she said everybody came back to them who once had lived in their silences and breathed their wide freedom. She would come back, not lost to him, but regained, her lesson learned, not to go away with that youth who wore the brand of old sins on his face. So hope came to lift him and assure him, just when he felt the somber cloud of the lonesomeness beginning to engulf his soul.
“I know Tim don’t like it, but me and Rabbit butcher244lambs right along, and we’ll keep on doin’ it as long as we run sheep. A man’s got to have something besides the grub he gits out of tin cans. That ain’t no life.”
“You’re right, Dad. I’d been in a hole on the side of some hill before now if it hadn’t been for the broth and lamb stew Rabbit fed me. There’s nothing like it.”
“You right they ain’t!” said Dad, forgetting Mackenzie’s lapse of a little while before. “I save the hides and turn ’em over to him, and he ain’t got no kick. If I was them children I’d butcher me a lamb once a week, anyhow. But maybe they don’t like it––I don’t know. I’ve known sheepmen that couldn’t go mutton, never tasted it from one year to another. May be the smell of sheep when you git a lot of ’em in a shearin’ pen and let ’em stand around for a day or two.”
But what had they told Joan that she would go away without a word, leaving him in a sickness from which he might never have turned again? Something had been done to alienate her, some crafty libel had been poured into her ears. Let that be as it might, Joan would come back, and he would wait in the sheeplands for her, and take her by the hand and clear away her troubled doubts. The comfort of this thought would drive the lonesomeness away.
He would wait. If not in Tim Sullivan’s hire, then with a little flock of his own, independent of the lords of sheep. He would rather remain with Sullivan, having more to prove now of his fitness to become a flockmaster than at the beginning. Sullivan’s doubt of him would have increased; the scorn which he could not quite cover before would be open now and expressed. They had no245use in the sheeplands for a man who fought and lost. They would respect him more if he refused to fight at all.
Dad was still talking, rubbing his fuzzy chin with reflective hand, looking along the hillside to where Rabbit stood watch over the sheep.
“Tim wanted to buy that big yellow collie from Rabbit,” he said. “Offered her eighty dollars. Might as well try to buy me from that woman!”
“I expect she’d sell you quicker than she would the collie, Dad.”
“Wish she would sell that dang animal, he never has made friends with me. The other one and me we git along all right, but that feller he’s been educated on the scent of that old vest, and he’ll be my enemy to my last day.”
“You’re a lucky man to have a wife like Rabbit, anyhow, dog or no dog. It’s hard for me to believe she ever took a long swig out of a whisky jug, Dad.”
“Well, sir, me and Rabbit was disputin’ about that a day or so ago. Funny how I seem to ’a’ got mixed up on that, but I guess it wasn’t Rabbit that used to pull my jug too hard. That must ’a’ been a Mexican woman I was married to one time down by El Paso.”
“I’ll bet money it was the Mexican woman. How did Rabbit get her face scalded?”
“She tripped and fell in the hog-scaldin’ vat like I told you, John.”
Mackenzie looked at him severely, almost ready to take the convalescent’s prerogative and quarrel with his best friend.
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“What’s the straight of it, you old hide-bound sinner?”
Dad changed hands on his chin, fingering his beard with scraping noise, eyes downcast as if a little ashamed.
“I guess it was me that took a snort too many out of the jug that day, John,” he confessed.
“Of course it was. And Rabbit tripped and fell into the tub trying to save you from it, did she?”
“Well, John, them fellers said that was about the straight of it.”
“You ought to be hung for running away from her, you old hard-shelled scoundrel!”
Dad took it in silence, and sat rubbing it into his beard like a liniment. After a while he rose, squinted his eye up at the sun with a quick turn of his head like a chicken.
“I reckon every man’s done something he ought to be hung for,” he said.
That ended it. Dad went off to begin supper, there being potatoes to cook. Sullivan had sent a sack of that unusual provender out to camp to help Mackenzie get his strength back in a hurry, he said.
Tim himself put in his appearance at camp a little later in the day, when the scent of lamb stew that Dad had in the kettle was streaming over the hills. Tim could not resist it, for it was seasoned with wild onions and herbs, and between the four of them they left the pot as clean as Jack Spratt’s platter, the dogs making a dessert on the bones.
Dad and Rabbit went away presently to assemble the sheep for the night, and Tim let his Irish tongue wag as247it would. He was in lively and generous mood, making a joke of the mingling of the flocks which had come so dearly to Mackenzie’s account. He bore himself like a man who had gained something, indeed, and that was the interpretation put on it by Mackenzie.
Tim led up to what he had come to discuss presently, beaming with stew and satisfaction when he spoke of Joan.
“Of course you understand, John, I don’t want you to think it was any slam on you that I took Joan off the range and made her stop takin’ her book lessons from you. That girl got too fresh with me, denyin’ my authority to marry her to the man I’ve picked.”
Mackenzie nodded, a great warmth of understanding glowing in his breast.
“But I don’t want you to feel that it was any reflection on your ability as a teacher, you understand, John; I don’t want you to look at it that way at all.”
“Not at all,” Mackenzie echoed, quite sincerely.
“You could ’a’ had her, for all the difference it was to me, if I hadn’t made that deal with Reid. A man’s got to stick to his word, you know, lad, and not have it thwarted by any little bobbin of a girl. I’d as soon you’d have one of my girls as any man I know, John.”
“Thanks.”
“Of course I could see how it might turn out between you and Joan if she kept on ridin’ over to have lessons from you every day. You can’t blame Earl if he saw it the same way, lad.”
“She isn’t his yet,” said Mackenzie confidently.
“Now look here, John”––Sullivan spoke with a certain248sharpness, a certain hardness of dictation in his tone, “you’d just as well stand out of it and let Earl have her.”
Mackenzie’s heart swung so high it seemed to brush the early stars. It was certain now that Joan had not gone home without a fight, and that she had not remained there throughout his recovery from his wounds without telling protest. More confidently than before he repeated:
“She isn’t his yet!”
“She’ll never get a sheep from me if she marries any other man––not one lone ewe!”
“How much do you value her in sheep?” Mackenzie inquired.
“She’ll get half a million dollars or more with Earl. It would take a lot of sheep to amount to half a million, John.”
“Yes,” said Mackenzie, with the indifference of a man who did not have any further interest in the case, seeing himself outbid. “That’s higher than I’ll ever be able to go. All right; let him have her.” But beneath his breath he added the condition: “If he can get her.”
“That’s the spirit I like to see a man show!” Tim commended. “I don’t blame a man for marryin’ into a sheep ranch if he can––I call him smart––and I’d just as soon you as any man’d marry one of my girls, as I said, John. But you know, lad, a man can’t have them that’s sealed, as the Mormons say.”
“You’re right,” Mackenzie agreed, and the more heartily because it was sincere. If he grinned a little to himself, Tim did not note it in the dusk.
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“Now, there’s my Mary; she’s seventeen; she’ll be a woman in three years more, and she’ll make two of Joan when she fills out. My Mary would make the fine wife for a lad like you, John, and I’ll give you five thousand sheep the day you marry her.”
“All right; the day I marry Mary I’ll claim five thousand sheep.”
Mackenzie said it so quickly, so positively, that Tim glowed and beamed as never before. He slapped the simpleton of a schoolmaster who had come into the sheeplands to be a great sheepman on the back with hearty hand, believing he had swallowed hook and all.
“Done! The day you marry Mary you’ll have your five thousand sheep along wi’ her! I pass you my word, and it goes.”
They shook hands on it, Mackenzie as solemn as though making a covenant in truth.
“The day I marry Mary,” said he.
“It’ll be three years before she’s old enough to take up the weight of carryin’ babies, and of course you understand you’ll have to wait on her, lad. A man can’t jump into these things the way he buys a horse.”
“Oh, sure.”
“You go right on workin’ for me like you are,” pursued Tim, drunk on his bargain as he thought it to be, “drawin’ your pay like any hand, without favors asked or given, takin’ the knocks as they come to you, in weather good and bad. That’ll be a better way than goin’ in shares on a band next spring like we talked; it’ll be better for you, lad; better for you and Mary.”
“All right,” Mackenzie assented.
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“I’m thinkin’ only of your own interests, you see, lad, the same as if you was my son.”
Tim patted Mackenzie’s shoulder again, doubtless warm to the bottom of his sheep-blind heart over the prospect of a hand to serve him three years who would go break-neck and hell-for-leather, not counting consequences in his blind and simple way, or weather or hardships of any kind. For there was Mary, and there were five thousand sheep. As for Joan, she was out of Tim’s reckoning any longer. He had a new Jacob on the line, and he was going to play him for all he was worth.
“All right; I’ve got a lot to learn yet,” Mackenzie agreed.
“You have, you have that,” said Tim with fatherly tenderness, “and you’ll learn it like a book. I always said from the day you come you had in you the makin’ of a sheepman. Some are quick and some are slow, but the longer it takes to learn the harder it sticks. It’s been that way wi’ me.”
“That’s the rule of the world, they say.”
“It is; it is so. And you can put up a good fight, even though you may not always hold your own; you’ll be the lad to wade through it wi’ your head up and the mornin’ light on your face. Sure you will, boy. I’ll be tellin’ Mary.”
“I’d wait a while,” Mackenzie said, gently, as a man who was very soft in his heart, indeed. “I’d rather we’d grow into it, you know, easy, by gentle stages.”
“Right you are, lad, right you are. Leave young hearts to find their own way––they can’t miss it if there’s nobody between them. I’ll say no word to Mary251at all, but you have leave to go and see her as often as you like, lad, and the sooner you begin the better, to catch her while she’s young. How’s your hand?”
“Well enough.”
“When you think you’re able, I’ll put you back with the sheep you had. I’ll be takin’ Reid over to the ranch to put him in charge of the hospital band.”
“I’m able to handle them now, I think.”
“But take your time, take it easy. Reid gets on with Swan, bein’ more experienced with men than you, I guess. Well, a schoolteacher don’t meet men the way other people do; he’s shut up with the childer all the day, and he gets so he measures men by them. That won’t do on the sheep range, lad. But I guess you’re findin’ it out.”
“I’m learning a little, right along.”
“Yes, you’ve got the makin’ of a sheepman in you; I said you had it in you the first time I put my eyes on your face. Well, I’ll be leavin’ you now, lad. And remember the bargain about my Mary. You’ll be a sheepman in your own way the day you marry her. When a man’s marryin’ a sheep ranch what difference is it to him whether it’s a Mary or a Joan?”
“No difference––when he’s marrying a sheep ranch,” Mackenzie returned.
252CHAPTER XXIVMORE ABOUT MARY
Mackenzie took Tim at his word two days after their interview, and went visiting Mary. He made the journey across to her range more to try his legs than to satisfy his curiosity concerning the substitute for Joan so cunningly offered by Tim in his Laban-like way. He was pleased to find that his legs bore him with almost their accustomed vigor, and surprised to see the hills beginning to show the yellow blooms of autumn. His hurts in that last encounter with Swan Carlson and his dogs had bound him in camp for three weeks.
Mary was a smiling, talkative, fair-haired girl, bearing the foundation of a generous woman. She had none of the shyness about her that might be expected in a lass whose world had been the sheep range, and this Mackenzie put down to the fact of her superior social position, as fixed by the size of Tim Sullivan’s house.
Conscious of this eminence above those who dwelt in sheep-wagons or log houses by the creek-sides, Tim’s girls walked out into their world with assurance. Tim had done that much for them in rearing his mansion on the hilltop, no matter what he had denied them of educational refinements. Joan had gone hungry on this distinction; she had developed the bitterness that comes from the seeds of loneliness. This was lacking in Mary, who was all smiles, pink and white in spite of sheeplands253winds and suns. Mary was ready to laugh with anybody or at anybody, and hop a horse for a twenty-mile ride to a dance any night you might name.
Mackenzie made friends with her in fifteen minutes, and had learned at the end of half an hour that friend was all he might ever hope to be even if he had come with any warmer notions in his breast. Mary was engaged to be married. She told him so, as one friend to another, pledging him to secrecy, showing a little ring on a white ribbon about her neck. Her Corydon was a sheepman’s son who lived beyond the Sullivan ranch, and could dance like a butterfly and sing songs to the banjo in a way to melt the heart of any maid. So Mary said, but in her own way, with blushes, and wide, serious eyes.
Mackenzie liked Mary from the first ingenuous word, and promised to hold her secret and help her to happiness in any way that a man might lift an honorable hand. And he smiled when he recalled Tim Sullivan’s word about catching them young. Surely a man had to be stirring early in the day to catch them in the sheeplands. Youth would look out for its own there, as elsewhere. Tim Sullivan was right about it there. He was wiser than he knew.
Mary was dressed as neatly as Joan always dressed for her work with the sheep. And she wore a little black crucifix about her neck on another ribbon which she had no need to conceal. When she touched it she smiled and smiled, and not for the comfort of the little cross, Mackenzie understood, but in tenderness for what lay beneath it, and for the shepherd lad who gave it. There254was a beauty in it for him that made the glad day brighter.
This fresh, sprightly generation would redeem the sheeplands, and change the business of growing sheep, he said. The isolation would go out of that life; running sheep would be more like a business than a penance spent in heartache and loneliness. The world could not come there, of course. It had no business there; it should not come. But they would go to it, those young hearts, behold its wonders, read its weaknesses, and return. And there would be no more straining of the heart in lonesomeness such as Joan had borne, and no more discontent to be away.
“I hoped you’d marry Joan,” said Mary, with a sympathetic little sigh. “I don’t like Earl Reid.”
“Mary?” said Mackenzie. Mary looked up inquiringly. “Can you keep a secret for me, Mary?”
“Try me, John.”
“Iamgoing to marry Joan.”
“Oh, you’ve got it all settled? Did Joan wear your ring when she went home?”
“No, she didn’t wear my ring, Mary, but she would have worn it if I’d seen her before she was sent away.”
“I thought you were at the bottom of it, John,” the wise Mary said. “You know, dad’s taken her sheep away from her, and she had a half-interest in at least a thousand head.”
“I didn’t know that, but it will not make any difference to Joan and me. But why hasn’t she been over to see me, Mary?”
“Oh, dad’s sore at her because she put her foot down255flat when she heard it was fixed for her to marry Earl. She told dad to take his sheep and go to the devil––she was going to go away and work somewhere else. He made her go home and stay there like a rabbit in a box––wouldn’t let her have a horse.”
“Of course; I might have known it. I wonder if she knows I’m up?”
“She knows, all right. Charley slips word to her.”
“Charley’s a good fellow, and so are you,” Mackenzie said, giving Mary his hand.
“You’ll get her, and it’s all right,” Mary declared, in great confidence. “It’ll take more than bread and water to tame Joan.”
“Is that all they’re giving her?”
“That’s dad’s idea of punishment––he’s put most of us on bread and water one time or another. But mother has ideas of her own what a kid ought to have to eat.”
Mary smiled over the recollection, and Mackenzie joined her. Joan would not grow thin with that mother on the job.
They talked over the prospects ahead of Joan and himself in the most comfortable way, leaving nothing unsaid that hope could devise or courage suggest. A long time Mackenzie remained with his little sister, who would have been dear to him for her own sweet sake if she had not been dearer because of her blood-tie to Joan. When he was leaving, he said:
“If anybody gets curious about my coming over to see you, Mary, you might let them think I’m making love to you. It would help both of us.”
256
Mary turned her eyes without moving her head, looking at him across her nose in the arch way she had, and smiled with a deep knowingness.
“Not so bad!” said she.
They let it go at that, understanding each other very well indeed.
Mackenzie returned to Dad’s camp thinking that the way to becoming a flockmaster was a checkered one, and filled with more adventures, harsh and gentle, than he ever had believed belonged to his apportionment in life. But he could not blame Tim Sullivan for placing Reid above him in rating on account of the encounters they had shared, or for bending down a bit in his manner, or taking him for a soft one who could be led into long labors on the promise of an uncertain reward.
Truly, he had been only second best all the way through, save for that “lucky blow,” as Tim called it, that had laid Swan out in the first battle. Now Swan and he were quits, a blow on each side, nobody debtor any more, and Reid was away ahead of anybody who had figured in the violence that Mackenzie had brought into the sheeplands with him as an unwelcome stranger lets in a gust of wind on a winter night.
In spite of all this, the vocation of sheepman never appeared so full of attractive possibilities to Mackenzie as it looked that hour. All his old calculations were revived, his first determination proved to him how deeply it had taken root. He had come into the sheep country to be a flockmaster, and a flockmaster he would be. Because he was fighting his way up to it only confirmed him in the belief that he was following a destined course,257and that he should cut a better figure in the end, somehow, than he had made at the beginning.
Tim Sullivan thought him simple; he looked at him with undisguised humor in his eyes, not taking the trouble to turn his back when he laughed. And they had taken Joan away out of his hands, like a gold-piece snatched from a child. But that was more to his credit than his disgrace, for it proved that they feared him more than they scorned him, let them laugh as they might.
But it was time for him to begin putting the credits over on the other side of the book. Mackenzie took it up with Dad Frazer that evening, Rabbit sitting by in her quiet way with a nod and a smile now and then when directly addressed.
“I don’t think you’re able to go over there and let that feller off,” Dad objected. “You can’t tell about Swan; he may come round lookin’ for more trouble, and you not half the man you was before him and that dog chawed you up that way.”
“I think I’ll make out, Dad. I’ll keep my eyes open this time, anyhow.”
“He may not be able to slip up on you any more, but if he crowds a fuss where’ll you be at, with that hand hardly able to hold a gun?”
“It will be different this time if he does. I’m going back to the sheep in the morning, Dad. I’ve got to get busy, and keep busy if I ever make good at this game.”
Dad grunted around his pipestem, his charge being burned down to the wood, and the savor too sweet on his tongue to lose even a whiff by giving room for a258word in the door of his mouth. Presently the fire fried and blubbered down in the pipe to the last atrocious smell, and there followed the noise of more strong twist-tobacco being milled between the old shepherd’s rasping palms. Rabbit toddled off to bed without a word; Dad put a match to his new charge, the light making him blink, discovering his curiously sheared face with its picturesque features strong, its weakness under the shadows.
“What did you think of Mary?” he inquired, free to discuss the ladies, now Rabbit was gone.
“Mary’s a little bit of all right, Dad.”
“Yes, and not such a little bit, either. Mary’s some chunk of a girl; she’ll grow up to a woman that suits my eye. You could do worse than set your cap for that little lady, it seems to me, John.”
“Any man could. She’s got a lively eye, and wise head, too, if I’m not away off.”
“She looks soft when you first glance her, but she’s as deep as a well. Mary ain’t the build of a girl that fools a man and throws him down. Now, you take Joan, a kind of a high-headed touch-me-not, with that gingerbread hair and them eyes that don’t ever seem to be in fifty-five mile of you when you’re talkin’ to her. I tell you, the man that marries her’s got trouble up his sleeve. He’ll wake up some morning and find her gone off with some other man.”
“What makes you think that, Dad?”
“Not satisfied with what she’s got, always lookin’ off over the hill like a breachy cow calculatin’ on how much better the grazin’d be if she could hop the fence and go259tearin’ off over there. Joan ain’t the kind that settles down to nuss babies and make a man a home. Mary is. That’s the difference between them two girls.”
“Maybe you’re right about it, Dad––I expect you are. You ought to know women if any man does.”
“Well, neither one of ’em ain’t a woman in the full meanin’ of the word,” Dad reflected, “but they’ve got the marks on ’em of what they’ll turn out to be. The man that marries Mary he’ll play safe; the feller that gits Joan takes on a gamble. If she ever does marry Reid he’ll not keep her seven months. Shucks! I married a red-headed woman one time back in Oklahomey, and that blame woman run off with a horse-doctor inside of three months. I never did hear tell of that fool woman any more.”
“I don’t agree with you on the way you’ve got Joan sized up, no difference if your wife did run off with a horse-doctor. Her hair ain’t red, anyway.”
“Might as well be. You ain’t so much of a hand at readin’ people, anyhow, John; before you marry you ought to see a fortune-teller and have your hand read. You got away off on Reid, holdin’ up for him agin’ my judgment when he first come here on the range––don’t you remember?”
“I didn’t want to pass judgment on him in advance; that was all, Dad.”
“Course, you couldn’t be expected to know men and women like us fellers that’s batted around among ’em all our lives, and you shut up with a houseful of kids teachin’ ’em cipherin’ and spellin’. I never did see a schoolteacher in my life, man or woman, that you260couldn’t take on the blind side and beat out of their teeth, not meanin’ any disrespect to you or any of ’em, John.”
“Oh, sure not. I understand what you mean.”
“I mean you’re too trustful, too easy to take folks at their word. You’re kids in your head-works, and you always will be. I advise you strong, John, to have somebody read your hand.”
“Even before marrying Mary?”
“We-el-l, youmightbe safe in marryin’ Mary. If I’d ’a’ had my hand read last spring before I come up here to this range I bet I’d ’a’ missed the trap I stumbled into. I’d ’a’ been warned to look out for a dark woman, like I was warned once before, and I bet you a dime I’d ’a’lookedout, too! Oh, well, it’s too late now. I guess I was fated.”
“Everybody’s fated; we’re all branded.”
“I’ve heard it said, and I’m beginnin’ to believe it. Well, I don’t know as I’d ’a’ been any better off if I’d ’a’ got that widow-lady. Rabbit ain’t so bad. She can take care of me when I git old, and maybe she’ll treat me better’n a stranger would.”
“Don’t you have any doubt about it in the world. It was a lucky day for you when Rabbit found you and saved you from the Four Corners widow.”
“Yes, I expect that woman she’d ’a’ worked me purty hard––she had a drivin’ eye. But a feller’s got one consolation in a case where his woman ribs him a little too hard; the road’s always open for him to leave, and a woman’s nearly always as glad to see a man go as he is to git away.”