The Flockmaster of Poison Creek Part 2

The minister of her church investigated Swan Carlson and his claims, finding him all that he professed to be. Hertha wrote to him; in time Swan came to visit her, a tall, long-striding man, handsomer than his picture in the paper, handsome as a Viking lord with his proud foot on the neck of a fallen foe.

So she married him, and came away with him to the sheeplands, and Swan's hand was as tender of her as a summer wind. It was shearing time when they reached home; Swan was with her every day for a little while, gathering his flocks from the range into the shearing sheds. He was master of more than fifteen thousand sheep.

When the shearing was done, and Swan had gone with his wagons to ship the clip, returning with his bankbook showing thousands in added wealth, a change came into her life, so radiant with the blossoms of a new happiness. Swan's big laugh was not so ready in his throat any more; his great hand seemed forgetful of its caress. He told her that the time of idling now was over; she must go with him in a sheep-wagon to the range and care for her band of sheep, sharing the labors of his life as she shared its rewards.

No; that was not to her liking. The wife of a rich man should not live as a peasant woman, dew in her draggled skirts to her knees, the sun browning her skin and bleaching her hair. It was not for his woman to give him _no_, said Swan. Be ready at a certain hour in the morning; they must make an early start, for the way was long.

But no; she refused to take the burden of a peasant woman on her back.

That was the first time Swan knocked her senseless. When she recovered, the sheep-wagon was rocking her in its uneasy journey to the distant range. Swan's cruelties multiplied with his impatience at her slowness to master the shepherd's art. The dogs were sullen creatures, unused to a woman's voice, unfriendly to a woman's presence. Swan insisted that she lay aside her woman's attire and dress as a man to gain the good-will of the dogs.

Again she defied his authority, all her refinement rising against the degradation of her s.e.x; again Swan laid her senseless with a blow.

When she woke her limbs were clad in overalls, a greasy jumper was b.u.t.toned over her breast. But the dogs were wiser than their master; no disguise of man's could cover her from the contempt of their shrewd senses. They would not obey her shrilled commands.

Very well, said Swan; if she did not have it in her to win even the respect of a dog, let her do a dog's work. So he took the collies away, leaving her to range her band of sheep in terrible labor, mind-wrenching loneliness, over the sage-gray hills. Wolves grew bold; the lambs suffered. When Swan came again to number her flock, he cursed her for her carelessness, giving her blows which were kinder than his words.

With the first snow she abandoned her flock and fled. Disgraceful as it was for a woman to leave her man, the frenzy of loneliness drove her on. With his companionship she could have endured Swan's cruelty, but alone her heart was dead. Three days she wandered. Swan found her after she had fallen in the snow.

His great laugh woke her, and she was home in this house, the light of day in her eyes. Swan was sitting beside her, merry in the thought of how he had cheated her out of her intention to die like an old ewe among the mountain drifts.

She was good for nothing, he said, but to sit at home like a cat. But he would make sure that she sat at home, to be there at his coming, and not running away from the bounty of a man who had taken a beggar to his bosom. Then he brought the chain and the anvil, and welded the red-hot iron upon her limb. He laughed when the smoke of her burning flesh rose hissing; laughed when he mounted his horse and rode away, leaving her in agony too great to let her die.

This summer now beginning was the fourth since that melancholy day. In the time that had pa.s.sed, Swan had come into the ways of trouble, suffering a great drain upon his h.o.a.rded money, growing as a consequence sullen and somber in his moods. No more he laughed; even the distress of his chained wife, the sight of her wasting face and body, the pleading of her tortured eyes, could not move his loud gales of merriment again.

Swan had killed two of his sheepherders, as she had mentioned before.

It grew out of a dispute over wages, in which the men were right. That was the winter following her attempt to run away, Swan being alone with them upon the stormy range. He declared both of them set upon him at once like wolves, and that he fought only to defend his life. He strangled them, the throat of each grasped in his broad, thick hand, and held them from him so, stiff arms against their desperate struggles, until they sank down in the snow and died.

Only a little while ago the lawyers had got him off from the charge of murder, after long delays. The case had been tried in another county, for Swan Carlson's neighbors all believed him guilty of a horrible crime; no man among them could have listened to his story under oath with unprejudiced ear. The lawyers had brought Swan off, for at the end it had been his living word against the mute accusations of two dead men. There was n.o.body to speak for the herders; so the lawyers had set him free. But it had cost him thousands of dollars, and Swan's evil humor had deepened with the drain.

Crazy, he said of his wife; a poor mad thing bent on self-destruction in wild and mournful ways. In that Swan was believed, at least. n.o.body came to inquire of her, none ever stopped to speak a word. The nearest neighbor was twelve or fifteen miles distant, a morose man with sour face, master of a sea of sheep.

All of this Swan himself had told her in the days when he laughed. He told her also of the lawyers' drain upon his wealth, starving her days together to make a pebble of saving to fill the ruthless breach.

"Tonight Swan will come," she said. "After what I have told you, are you not afraid?"

"I suppose I ought to be," Mackenzie returned, leaving her to form her own conclusion.

She searched his face with steady eyes, her hand on the ax-helve, in earnest effort to read his heart.

"No, you are not afraid," she said. "But wait; when you hear him speak, then you will be afraid."

"How do you know he is coming home tonight?"

She did not speak at once. Her eyes were fixed on the open door at Mackenzie's side, her face was set in the tensity of her mental concentration as she listened. Mackenzie bent all his faculties to hear if any foot approached. There was no sound.

"The fishermen of my country can feel the chill of an iceberg through the fog and the night," she said at last. "Swan Carlson is an iceberg to my heart."

She listened again, bending forward, her lips open. Mackenzie fancied he heard the swing of a galloping hoof-beat, and turned toward the door.

"Have you a pistol?" she inquired.

"No."

"He is coming; in a little while he will be at the door. There is time yet for you to leave."

"I want to have a word with your man; I'll wait."

Mrs. Carlson got up, keeping the ax in hand, moved her chair to the other side of the door, where she stationed herself in such position as Swan must see her first when he looked within. She disposed the ax to conceal it entirely beneath her long ap.r.o.n, her hand under the garment grasping the helve.

"For your own sake, not his, I ask you not to strike him," Mackenzie pleaded, in all the earnestness he could command.

"I have given you the hour of my vengeance," she replied. "But if he curses me, if he lifts his hand!"

Mackenzie was more than a little uneasy on the probable outcome of his meeting with the tempestuous Swan. He got out his pipe and lit it, considering the situation with fast-running thoughts. Still, a man could not go on and leave that beaten, enslaved woman to the mercies of her tyrant; Swan Carlson must be given to understand that he would be held to answer to the law for his future behavior toward her.

"If I were you I'd put the ax behind the door and get his supper ready," said he.

Mrs. Carlson got up at the suggestion, with such readiness that surprised Mackenzie, put the ax back of the open door, stood a moment winding up her fallen hair.

"Yes, he is my man," she said.

Swan was turning his horse into the barn; Mackenzie could hear him talking to the animal, not unkindly. Mrs. Carlson put fresh fuel in the stove, making a rattling of the lids which must have sounded cheerful to the ears of a hungry man. As she began breaking eggs into a bowl she took up her song again, with an unconscious air of detachment from it, as one unwittingly follows the habit that has been for years the accompaniment to a task.

As before, the refinement of accent was wanting in her words, but the sweet melancholy of her voice thrilled her listener like the rich notes of an ancient violin.

_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!_

Mackenzie sat with his elbow on the table, his chair partly turned toward the door, just within the threshold and a little to one side, where the flockmaster would see him the moment he stepped into the light. The traveler's pack lay on the floor at the door jamb; the smoke from his pipe drifted out to tell of his presence in the honest announcement of a man who had nothing to hide.

So Swan Carlson found him as he came home to his door.

Swan stopped, one foot in the door, the light on his face. Mrs.

Carlson did not turn from the stove to greet him by word or look, but stood bending a little over the pan of sputtering eggs, which she shook gently from side to side with a rhythmic, slow movement in cadence with her song. Swan turned his eyes from one to the other, his face clouding for a moment as for a burst of storm, clearing again at once as Mackenzie rose and gave him good evening in cheerful and unshaken voice.

Mrs. Carlson had spoken a true word when she described Swan as a handsome man. Almost seven feet tall, Mackenzie took him to be, so tall that he must stoop to enter the door; lithe and sinewy of limbs, a lightness in them as of an athlete bred; broad in the shoulders, long of arms. His face was stern, his red hair long about the ears, his Viking mustache long-drooping at the corners of his mouth.

"I thought a man was here, or my woman had begun to smoke," said Swan, coming in, flinging his hat down on the floor. "What do you want, loafin' around here?"

Mackenzie explained his business in that country in direct words, and his presence in the house in the same breath. Mollified, Swan grunted that he understood and accepted the explanation, turning up his sleeves, unfastening the collar of his flannel shirt, to wash. His woman stood at the stove, her song dead on her lips, sliding the eggs from the pan onto a platter in one piece. Swan gave her no heed, not even a curious or questioning look, but as he crossed the room to the wash bench he saw the broken chain lying free upon the floor.

A breath he paused over it, his eyes fastened on it in a glowering stare. Mackenzie braced himself for the storm of wrath which seemed bursting the doors of Swan Carlson's gloomy heart. But Swan did not speak. He picked up the chain, examined the cut link, threw it down with a clatter. At the sound of its fall Mackenzie saw Mrs. Carlson start. She turned her head, terror in her eyes, her face blanched.

Swan bent over the basin, snorting water like a strangling horse.

There were eight eggs on the platter that Swan Carlson's woman put before him when he sat down to his supper. One end of the great trencher was heaped with brown bacon; a stack of bread stood at Swan's left hand, a cup of coffee at his right. Before this provender the flockmaster squared himself, the unwelcome guest across the table from him, the smoke of his pipe drifting languidly out into the tranquil summer night.

Swan had said no word since his first inquiry. Mackenzie had ventured nothing more. Mrs. Carlson sat down in the chair that she had placed near the door before Swan's arrival, only that she moved it a little to bring her hand within reach of the hidden ax.

Swan had brushed his long, dark-red hair back from his broad, deep forehead, bringing it down across the tips of his ears in a savage fashion admirably suited to his grave, harsh, handsome face. He devoured his food noisily, bending low over his plate.

"You want to learn the sheep business, huh?" said he, throwing up his eyes in quick challenge, pausing a moment in his champing and clatter.