The Flockmaster of Poison Creek Part 41

Mackenzie wondered what his plans might be, and whether he ought to go after him and try to put their differences out of the way. Reid did not stop at the wagon. He continued on to the top of the hill, defiant of the man who rode away with Hall's body, his pistol again on his thigh. There he stood looking this way and that a little while, as a man looks who is undecided of his road. Then he pa.s.sed on. When Mackenzie reached the spot where Reid had stood, he was no longer in sight.

Mackenzie thought Reid might be going deliberately to seek the battle from which he had been obliged so lately to flee unarmed. Mackenzie waited on the eminence, listening for the sounds of fight, ready to hasten to Reid's a.s.sistance if he should stand in need of it again. So the last hour of the afternoon pa.s.sed. Mackenzie turned back to his flock at length, believing Reid had gone on his way to the freedom he had weighed against his inheritance only a few hours before.

It was just as well then as another day, Mackenzie reflected, as he turned the sheep from their grazing. Not that he had meant to drive Reid out of the country when he told him to go, but it was just as well. Soon or late it would have to come to a show-down between them, and one would have been compelled to leave.

But how would Sullivan view this abrupt ending of the half-million-dollar penance, and the loss of three years' unpaid labor? Not kindly, certainly. It probably would result in the collapse of all Mackenzie's own calculations as well, and the blighting of his sheep-wealth dreams.

And that day he had slain a man in defense of Earl Reid's life, as Reid had killed in defense of his.

From the first hour he set his feet on the trail to the sheep country this culmination of his adventures had been shaping. Little by little it had been building, the aggression pressed upon him, his att.i.tude all along one of defense. Perhaps when trouble is heading for a man, as this was inevitably directed, the best thing to do is rush to meet it with a club in the hand.

That was the way it looked to John Mackenzie that evening. Trouble will put things over on a man who is bent to compromise, every time.

Undoubtedly it looked that way. But he had killed a man. It was a heavy thing to carry on his soul.

This depressing shadow thickened over him as the sun drew down to the hills, and he went working his flock slowly to the night's bedding-ground. The complaint of the lambs, weary from following and frisking the day through, was sadder to him than it ever had fallen on his ears before. It seemed a lament for the pollution of his hands in human blood, moving a regret in his heart that was harder to bear than fear.

Mackenzie sat above the resting sheep as the shadows drew toward him between the hills, a glow as of a distant city where the sun went down an hour past. The rifle was beside him, his pistol in his belt, for regret of past violence would not make the next hour secure. If trouble should lift its head in his path again, he vowed he would kill it before it could dart and strike.

No, it was not a joke that Reid had pulled on him that afternoon. Reid had meant to rob him, urged on to the deed by his preying discontent and racking desire to be away. Reid was on his way out of the country now, and if they caught him and took him before the judge who had sentenced him to this unique penance, he would have the plea that Mackenzie drove him out, and that he fled to save his life.

That might be sufficient for the judge; certainly it would be enough for Tim Sullivan. Sullivan would bring him back, and Mackenzie would be sent to pick up the trail of his fortunes in another place, with years of waiting between him and Joan, perhaps.

So Mackenzie sat with his moody thoughts, depressed, downhearted, regretting bitterly the necessity that had risen for taking away a fellow-creature's life. It bore on him heavily now that the heat of his blood had subsided; it stood before him an awful accusation. He had killed a man! But a man who had forfeited his right to live, a man who had attempted to take his life in the past, who had come again that day to hunt him like a coyote on the hills. The law would exculpate him; men would speak loudly of his justification. But it would stand against him in his own conscience all his days. Simple for thinking of it that way, he knew; simple as they held him to be in the sheep country, even down to old Dad Frazer, simplest among men.

He had no desire in his mouth for supper, although he set about preparing it, wanting it over before dark. No need of a blaze or a glow of a coal to guide anybody that might be prowling around to drop a bullet into him. That surly rascal who bore Hector Hall's body away might come back to do it, but the man who stood first in his thoughts and caution was Earl Reid, out there somewhere in the closing night with a gun on him and an itch in his hand to use it.

CHAPTER XXVII

A SUMMONS IN THE NIGHT

Somebody was calling on the hill behind the sheep-wagon. Mackenzie sat up, a chill in his bones, for he had fallen asleep on watch beside the ashes of his supper fire. He listened, the rack of sleep clearing from his brain in a breath.

It was Dad Frazer, and the hour was past the turn of night. Mackenzie answered, the sound of a horse under way immediately following. Dad came riding down the hill with loose shale running ahead of him, in such a hurry that he took the sharp incline straight.

"What's the matter?" Mackenzie inquired, hurrying out to meet him.

"I don't know," said Dad, panting from excitement as if he had run the distance between the camps on foot. "Mary come over on her horse a little while ago and rousted me out. She said somebody just pa.s.sed her camp, and one of 'em was Joan."

"Joan? What would she--what does Mary----?"

"That's what I said," Dad told him, sliding to the ground. "I said Joan wouldn't be trapsin' around this time of night with n.o.body, but if she did happen to be she could take care of herself. But Mary said she sounded like she was fussin' and she thought something must be wrong, and for me to hop her horse and come h.e.l.l-for-leather and tell you."

"How many--which way were they going?"

"Two horses, Mary said, from the sound, but she didn't hear n.o.body's voice but Joan's. She got Charley up, and they run out and hollered, but she didn't hear nothing more of Joan. The poor kid's scared out of her 'leven senses."

"Which way did they go--did Mary say?"

"Towards Swan Carlson's ranch, she said."

Mackenzie swung into the saddle and galloped off, leaving Dad listening to the sound of his going.

"Nutty, like the rest of 'em," said Dad.

Carlson's house was not more than eight miles from the range where Mackenzie was running his sheep. He held his course in that direction as he rode break-neck up hill and down. He had little belief that it could have been Joan who pa.s.sed Mary's camp, yet he was disturbed by an anxiety that made his throat dry, and a fear that clung to him like garments wet in the rain.

Reid could not have anything to do with it in any event, Joan or somebody else, for Reid was horseless upon the range. But if Joan, he was at entire loss to imagine upon what business she could be riding the country that hour of the night. Joan had no fear of either night or the range. She had cared for her sheep through storm and dark, penetrating all the terrors that night could present, and she knew the range too well to be led astray. It must have been a voice that Mary had heard in a dream.

Mackenzie felt easier for these reflections, but did not check his pace, holding on toward Carlson's house in as straight a line as he could draw. He recalled curiously, with a p.r.i.c.kling of renewed anxiety, that he always expected to be called to Carlson's house for the last act in the sheeplands tragedy. Why, he did not know.

Perhaps he had not expected it; maybe it was only a psychological lightning-play of the moment, reflecting an unformed emotion. That likely was the way of it, he reasoned. Surely he never could have thought of being called to Carlson's ranch.

In that fever of contradiction he pushed on, knees gripping his horse in the tensity of his desire to hasten, thinking to hold the animal up from stumbling as an anxious rider in the night will do. Now he believed it could not have been Joan, and felt a momentary ease; now he was convinced that Mary could not have mistaken her sister's voice, and the sweat of fear for her burst on his forehead and streamed down into his eyes.

From the side that he approached Carlson's house his way lay through a valley at the end, bringing him up a slight rise as he drew near the trees that stood thickly about the place. Here he dismounted and went on, leading his horse. A little way from the house he hitched his animal among the trees, and went forward in caution, wary of a dog that might be keeping watch beside the door.

There was no moon. The soft glow of a few misty, somnolent stars gave no light among the trees, no light shone from the house. Mackenzie recalled the night he had first approached that door and come suddenly around the corner into the pale beam of Hertha Carlson's lantern. Now the kitchen door might be shut, and there was no window on that side.

Mackenzie stopped to listen, his senses as keen as a savage's under his strain. One who has not approached danger and uncertainty, listening and straining in the night, cannot conceive the exquisite pitch to which human nerves can be attuned. The body then becomes a tower set with the filaments of wireless telegraphy, each of the thousand nerves straining forth to catch the faintest sound, the most shadowy disturbance. Even premonitions become verities; indistinct propositions tangible facts.

In that exalted pitch of nervous sensibility Mackenzie stood listening, fifty feet or less from the kitchen door. No sound, but a sharp scent of cigarette smoke came blowing from the dark house.

Mackenzie's heart seemed to gorge and stop. Earl Reid was there.

Perhaps Mary had not heard a voice in a dream.

At the closed door Mackenzie listened. For a little, no sound; then a foot shifted on the floor. Almost immediately someone began walking up and down the room, pushing a chair aside as if to clear the way.

Mackenzie remembered the window high in the wall beside the stove and went hastily around the house to it, restraining himself from bursting precipitately into something which might be no concern of his or warrant his interference at all. It seemed so preposterous even to suspect that Joan was there.

Reid was pacing up and down the room, a lantern standing on the floor beside the chair from which he had risen. The place had been readjusted since the ruin that fell over it in Mackenzie's fight with Swan; the table stood again in the place where he had eaten his supper on it, the broken leg but crudely mended.

Reid seemed to be alone, from what of the interior of the house Mackenzie could see, shifting to bring the door of the inner room to view. It was closed; Joan was not there.

Mackenzie watched Reid as he paced up and down the kitchen floor.

There was a nervousness over him, as of a man who faced a great uncertainty. He walked with bent head, now turning it sharply as he stood listening, now going on again with hands twitching. He threw down his cigarette and stamped it, went to the kitchen door, opened it and stood listening.

A little while Reid stood at the door, head turned, as if he harkened for the approach of somebody expected. When he turned from the door he left it open, rolled a cigarette, crossed to the door of the inner room, where he stood as if he debated the question of entering. A little while in that uncertain, hesitant way; then he struck a match on the door and turned again to his pacing and smoking.

Mackenzie almost decided to go to the open door and speak to Reid, and learn whether he might be of a.s.sistance to him in his evident stress.

He was ready to forgive much of what had pa.s.sed between them, blaming it to Reid's chafing against the restraint that was whetting him down to a bone.

Mackenzie felt now that he had not handled Reid in the right way. Reid was not of the slow, calculative, lead-balanced type of himself. He was a wolf of civilization, to whom these wilds were more galling than the bars of a prison. The judge who had agreed to this sentence had read deeply in the opaque soul of the youth.

Prison would not have been much of a penance for Reid. There he would have found intrigue, whispering, plottings; a hundred shadowy diversions to keep his perverted mind clear and sharp. Here he met only the silence of nature, the sternest accuser of a guilty soul.

Reid could not bear the accusation of silence. Under it his mind grew irritable with the inflammation of incipient insanity. In a little while it would break. Even now he was breaking; that was plain in his disordered eyes.

Still Mackenzie hesitated to speak to him, watching him as he went with increasing frequency to the open door to listen. It was not his affair; Joan could not be there. Even if she were there, she must have come for a purpose good and justifiable, and of her own free will. But she was not there, and Reid was waiting for somebody to come. Swan Carlson or his wife, it must be, and what business they had before them in this unrighteous hour Mackenzie could not imagine. But plainly it had nothing to do with Joan.