The Flockmaster of Poison Creek Part 35

"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."

"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; she 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 a.s.sure 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 butcher lambs 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 no use 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.

"What's the straight of it, you old hide-bound sinner?"

Dad changed hands on his chin, fingering his beard with sc.r.a.ping 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-sh.e.l.led 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 a.s.semble the sheep for the night, and Tim let his Irish tongue wag as it 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."