The Flockmaster of Poison Creek Part 13

This was rather remarkable for a land out of which strife and contention, murder and sudden death were believed to have pa.s.sed long ago. The man wore two revolvers, slung about his slender frame on a broad belt looped around for cartridges. These loops were empty, but the weight of the weapons themselves sagged the belt far down on the wearer's hips. His leather cuffs were garnitured with silver stars in the Mexican style; he wore a red stone in his black necktie, which was tied with care, the flowing ends of it tucked into the bosom of his dark-gray flannel shirt.

"If you're tryin' to be funny, cut it out; I'm not a funny man," he said. "I asked you what you're doing over here east of Horsethief Canon?"

"I don't know that it's any of your business where I run my sheep,"

Mackenzie told him, resentful of the man's insolence.

"Tim Sullivan knows this is our winter grazing land, and this gra.s.s is in reserve. If he didn't tell you it was because he wanted to run you into trouble, I guess. You'll have to get them sheep out of here, and do it right now."

The stranger left it to Mackenzie's imagination to fix his ident.i.ty, not bending to reveal his name. Hector Hall, Mackenzie knew him to be, on account of his pistols, on account of the cold meanness of his eyes which Dad Frazer had described as holding such a throat-cutting look.

But armed as he was, severe and flash-tempered as he seemed, Mackenzie was not in any sort of a flurry to give ground before him. He looked up at him coolly, felt in his pocket for his pipe, filled it with deliberation, and smoked.

"Have you got a lease on this land?" he asked.

"I carry my papers right here," Hall replied, touching his belt.

Mackenzie looked about the range as if considering which way to go.

Then, turning again to Hall:

"I don't know any bounds but the horizon when I'm grazing on government land that's as much mine as the next man's. I don't like to refuse a neighbor a request, but my sheep are going to stay right here."

Hall leaned over a little, putting out his hand in a warning gesture, drawing his dark brows in a scowl.

"Your head's swelled, young feller," he said, "on account of that lucky thump you landed on Swan Carlson. You've got about as much chance with that man as you have with a grizzly bear, and you've got less chance with me. You've got till this time tomorrow to be six miles west of here with that band of sheep."

Hall rode off with that word, leaving a pretty good impression that he meant it, and that it was final. Mackenzie hadn't a doubt that he would come back to see how well the mandate had been obeyed next day.

If there was anything to Hall's claim on that territory, by agreement or right of priority which sheepmen were supposed to respect between themselves, Tim Sullivan knew it, Mackenzie reflected. For a month past Tim had been sending him eastward every time the wagon was moved, a scheme to widen the distance between him and Joan and make it an obstacle in her road, he believed at the time. Now it began to show another purpose. Perhaps this was the winter pasture claimed by the Hall brothers, and Tim had sent him in where he was afraid to come himself.

It seemed a foolish thing to squabble over a piece of grazing land where all the world lay out of doors, but Hector Hall's way of coming up to it was unpleasant. It was decidedly offensive, bullying, oppressive. If he should give way before it he'd just as well leave the range, Mackenzie knew; his force would be spent there, his day closed before it had fairly begun. If he designed seriously to remain there and become a flockmaster, and that he intended to do, with all the sincerity in him, he'd have to meet Hall's bluff with a stronger one, and stand his ground, whether right or wrong. If wrong, a gentleman's adjustment could be made, his honor saved.

So deciding, he settled that matter, and put it out of his head until its hour. There was something more pleasant to cogitate--the parallel of Jacob and Laban, Tim Sullivan and himself. It was strange how the craft of Laban had come down to Tim Sullivan across that mighty flight of time. It would serve Tim the right turn, in truth, if something should come of it between him and Joan. He smiled in antic.i.p.atory pleasure at Tim's discomfiture and surprise.

But that was not in store for him, he sighed. Joan would shake her wings out in a little while, and fly away, leaving him there, a dusty sheepman, among the husks of his dream. Still, a man might dream on a sunny afternoon. There was no interdiction against it; Hector Hall, with his big guns, could not ride in and order a man off that domain.

A shepherd had the ancient privilege of dreams; he might drink himself drunk on them, insane on them in the end, as so many of them were said to do in that land of lonesomeness, where there was scarcely an echo to give a man back his own faint voice in mockery of his solitude.

Evening, with the sheep homing to the bedding-ground, brought reflections of a different hue. Since the raid on his flock Mackenzie had given up his bunk in the wagon for a bed under a bush on the hillside nearer the sheep. Night after night he lay with the rifle at his hand, waiting the return of the grisly monster who had spent his fury on the innocent simpletons in his care.

Whether it was Swan Carlson, with the strength of his great arms, driven to madness by the blow he had received, or whether it was another whom the vast solitudes of that country had unhinged, Mackenzie did not know. But that it was man, he had no doubt.

Dad Frazer had gone away unconvinced, unshaken in his belief that it was a grizzly. Tim Sullivan had come over with the same opinion, no word of doubt in his mouth. But Mackenzie knew that when he should meet that wild night-prowler he would face a thing more savage than a bear, a thing as terrible to grapple with as the saber-tooth whose bones lay deep under the hills of that vast pasture-land.

CHAPTER X

WILD RIDERS OF THE RANGE

Joan missed her lessons for three days running, a lapse so unusual as to cause Mackenzie the liveliest concern. He feared that the mad creature who spent his fury tearing sheep limb from limb might have visited her camp, and that she had fallen into his b.l.o.o.d.y hands.

A matter of eight or nine miles lay between their camps; Mackenzie had no horse to cover it. More than once he was on the point of leaving the sheep to shift for themselves and striking out on foot; many times he walked a mile or more in that direction, to mount the highest hill he could discover, and stand long, sweeping the blue distance with troubled eyes. Yet in the end he could not go. Whatever was wrong, he could not set right at that late hour, he reasoned; to leave the sheep would be to throw open the gates of their defense to dangers always ready to descend upon them. The sheep were in his care; Joan was not.

That was what Tim Sullivan would say, in his hard way of holding a man to his bargain and his task.

Joan came late in the afternoon, rising the nearest hilltop with a suddenness quite startling, waving a cheerful greeting as if to a.s.sure him from a distance that all was well. She stood looking at him in amazement when she flipped to the ground like a bird, her face growing white, her eyes big.

"Well, what in the world! Where did you get those guns?" she said.

"A fellow left them here the other day."

"A fellow?" coming nearer, looking sharply at the belt. "That's Hector Hall's belt--I've seen him wearing it! There his initials are, worked out in silver tacks! Where did you get it?"

"Mr. Hall left it here. What kept you, Joan? I've been worried about you."

"Hector Hall _left_ it here? With both of his guns?"

"Yes, he left the guns with it. What was the matter, Joan?"

Joan looked him up and down, her face a study between admiration and fear.

"Left his guns! Well, what did you do with _him_?"

"I suppose he went home, Joan. Did anything happen over your way to keep you?"

"Charley was sick," she said, shortly, abstractedly, drowned in her wonder of the thing he told with his native reluctance when questioned on his own exploits. "Did you have a fight with Hector?"

"Is he all right now?"

"Charley's all right; he ate too many wild gooseberries. Did you have a fight with Hector Hall, Mr. Mackenzie?"

She came near him as she questioned him, her great, soft eyes pleading in fear, and laid her hand on his shoulder as if to hold him against any further evasion. He smiled a little, in his stingy way of doing it, taking her hand to allay her tumult of distress.

"Not much of a fight, Joan. Mr. Hall came over here to drive me off of this range, and I had to take his guns away from him to keep him from hurting me. That's all there was to it."

"All there was to it!" said Joan. "Why, he's one of the meanest men that ever lived! He'll never rest till he kills you. I wish you'd let him have the range."

"Is it his?"

"No, it belongs to us; we've got a lease on it from the government, and pay rent for it every year. Swan Carlson and the Hall boys have bluffed us out of it for the past three summers and run their sheep over here in the winter-time. I always wanted to fight for it, but dad let them have it for the sake of peace. I guess it was the best way, after all."

"As long as I was right, my last worry is gone, Joan. You're not on the contested territory, are you?"

"No; they lay claim as far as Horsethief Canon, but they'd just as well claim all our lease--they've got just as much right to it."

"That ends the matter, then--as far as I'm concerned."

"I wonder what kind of an excuse Hector made when he went home without his guns!" she speculated, looking off over the hills in the direction of the Hall brothers' ranch.

"Maybe he's not accountable to anybody, and doesn't have to explain."