The Flockmaster of Poison Creek Part 23

"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."

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 not have 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. .h.i.therto 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 become a master over sheep. Here were two fair samples of men out of the world's a.s.sorted stock--himself and Reid. One of them, deliberate, calm, a.s.sured 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."

"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 grat.i.tude.

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 gra.s.s.

"Yes, Joan, you and I are of different blood," he said. "We are of the blood of the lonesome places, and we'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.

"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."