The Flockmaster of Poison Creek Part 20

"Rabbit's still up there on the Big Wind waiting for you, is she?"

"She'll wait a long time! I'm done with Indians. Joan comin' over today?"

"Tomorrow."

"I don't guess you'll have her to bother with much longer--her and that Reid boy they'll be hitchin' up one of these days from all the signs. He skirmishes off over that way nearly every day. Looks to me like Tim laid it out that way, givin' him a horse to ride and leavin'

me and you to hoof it. It'd suit Tim, all right; I've heard old Reid's a millionaire."

"I guess it would," Mackenzie said, trying to keep his voice from sounding as cold as his heart felt that moment.

"Yes, I think they'll hitch. Well, I'd like to see Joan land a better man than him. I don't like a man that can draw a blinder over his eyes like a frog."

Mackenzie smiled at the aptness of Dad's comparison. It was, indeed, as if Reid interposed a film like a frog when he plunged from one element into another, so to speak; when he left the sheeplands in his thoughts and went back to the haunts and the companions lately known.

"If Joan had a little more meat on her she wouldn't be a bad looker,"

said Dad. "Well, when a man's young he likes 'em slim, and when he's old he wants 'em fat. It'd be a calamity if a man was to marry a skinny girl like Joan and she was to stay skinny all his life."

"I don't think she's exactly skinny, Dad."

"No, I don't reckon you could count her ribs. But you put fifty pounds more on that girl and see how she'd look!"

"I can't imagine it," said Mackenzie, not friendly to the notion at all.

As Dad went back to unburden himself of his unwelcome companion, Mackenzie could not suppress the thought that a good many unworthy notions hatched beneath that dignified white hair. But surely Dad might be excused by a more stringent moralist than the schoolmaster for abandoning poor Rabbit after her complexion had suffered in the hog-scalding vat.

Toward sundown Earl Reid came riding over, his winning smile as easy on his face as he was in the saddle. The days were doing him good, all around, toughening his face, taking the poolroom pastiness out of it, putting a bracer in his back. Mackenzie noted the improvement as readily as it could be seen in some quick-growing plant.

Mackenzie was living a very primitive and satisfactory life under a few yards of tent canvas since the loss of his wagon. He stretched it over such bushes as came handy, storing his food beneath it when he slept, save on such nights as threatened showers. Reid applauded this arrangement. He was tired of Dad Frazer's wagon, and the greasy bunk in it.

"I've been wild to stretch out in a blanket with my feet to a little fire," he said, with a flash of the eagerness belonging to the boyhood buried away too soon, as Dad had remarked. "Dad wouldn't let me do it--fussed at me three days because I sneaked out on him one night and laid under the wagon."

"Dad didn't want a skunk to bite you, I guess. He felt a heavy responsibility on your account."

"Old snoozer!" said Reid.

Reid was uncommonly handy as a camp-cook, far better in that respect than Mackenzie, who gladly turned the kitchen duties over to him and let him have his way. After supper they sat talking, the l.u.s.ty moon lifting a wondering face over the hills in genial placidity as if sure, after all its ages, of giving the world a surprise at last.

"Joan told me to bring you word she'd be over in the morning instead of tomorrow afternoon," said Reid.

"Thanks."

Reid smoked in reflective silence, his thin face clear in the moonlight.

"Some girl," said he. "I don't see why she wants to go to all this trouble to get a little education. That stuff's all bunk. I wish I had the coin in my jeans right now the old man spent on me, pourin'

stuff into me that went right on through like smoke through a handkerchief."

"I don't think it would be that way with Joan," Mackenzie said, hoping Reid would drop the discussion there, and not go into the arrangement for the future, which was a matter altogether detestable in the schoolmaster's thoughts.

Reid did not pursue his speculations on Joan, whether through delicacy or indifference Mackenzie could not tell. He branched off into talk of other things, through which the craving for the life he had left came out in strong expressions of dissatisfaction with the range. He complained against the penance his father had set, looking ahead with consternation to the three years he must spend in those solitudes.

"But I'm goin' to stick," he said, an unmistakable determination in his tone. "I'll show him they're making as good men now as they did when he was a kid." He laughed, a raucous, short laugh, an old man's laugh, which choked in a cigarette cough and made a mockery of mirth.

"I'll toughen up out here and have better wind for the big finish when I sit in on the old man's money."

No, Joan was not cast for any important part in young Reid's future drama, Mackenzie understood. As if his thoughts had penetrated to the young man's heart, making fatuous any further attempt at concealment of his true sentiments, Reid spoke.

"They've sewed me up in a sack with Joan--I guess you know about it?"

"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.

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 b.e.s.t.i.a.l 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 a.s.sailant 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 pressure that in a moment more must snap his spine. As the a.s.sa.s.sin 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, a.s.suring 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 eyeb.a.l.l.s, 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.

"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.