The Flockmaster of Poison Creek Part 5

"Have you been in a fight?" the boy inquired.

"Not much of a one," Mackenzie told him, rather wishing that the particulars might be reserved.

"Your neck's black like somebody'd been chokin' you, and your face is bunged up some, too. Who done it?"

"Do you know Swan Carlson?" Mackenzie inquired, turning slowly to the boy.

"Swan Carlson?" Charley's face grew pale at the name; his eyes started in round amazement. "You couldn't never 'a' got away from Swan; he choked two fellers to death, one in each hand. No man in this country could whip one side of Swan."

"Well, I got away from him, anyhow," said Mackenzie, in a manner that even the boy understood to be the end of the discussion.

But Charley was not going to have it so. He jumped up and ran to meet Joan as she came from the wagon.

"Mr. Mackenzie had a fight with Swan Carlson--that's what's the matter with his neck!" he said. There was unbounded admiration in the boy's voice, and exultation as if the distinction were his own. Here before his eyes was a man who had come to grips with Swan Carlson, and had escaped from his strangling hands to eat his breakfast with as much unconcern as if he had no more than been kicked by a mule.

Joan came on a little quicker, excitement reflected in her lively eyes. Mackenzie was filling his pipe, which had gone through the fight in his pocket in miraculous safety--for which he was duly grateful--ashamed of his bruises, now that the talk of them had brought them to Joan's notice again.

"I hope you killed him," she said, coming near, looking down on Mackenzie with full commendation; "he keeps his crazy wife chained up like a dog!"

"I don't think he's dead, but I'd like to know for sure," Mackenzie returned, his eyes bent thoughtfully on the ground.

"n.o.body will ever say a word to you if you did kill him," Joan a.s.sured. "They'd all know he started it--he fusses with everybody."

She sat on the ground near him, Charley posting himself a little in front, where he could admire and wonder over the might of a man who could break Swan Carlson's hold upon his throat and leave his house alive. Before them the long valley widened as it reached away, the sheep a dusty brown splotch in it, spread at their grazing, the sound of the lambs' wailing rising clear in the pastoral silence.

"I stopped at Carlson's house after dark last night," Mackenzie explained, seeing that such explanation must be made, "and turned his wife loose. Carlson resented it when he came home. He said I'd have to fight him. But you're wrong when you believe what Carlson says about that woman; she isn't crazy, and never was."

That seemed to be all the story, from the way he hastened it, and turned away from the vital point of interest. Joan touched his arm as he sat smoking, his speculative gaze on the sheep, his brows drawn as if in troubled thought.

"What did you do when he said you had to fight him?" she inquired, her breath coming fast, her cheeks glowing.

Mackenzie laughed shortly. "Why, I tried to get away," he said.

"Why didn't you, before he got his hands on you?" Charley wanted to know.

"Charley!" said Joan.

"Carlson locked the door before I could get out." Mackenzie nodded to the boy, very gravely, as one man to another. Charley laughed.

"You didn't tear up no boards off the floor tryin' to git away!" said he.

Joan smiled; that seemed to express her opinion of it, also. She admired the schoolmaster's modest reluctance when he gave them a bare outline of what followed, shuddering when he laughed over Mrs.

Carlson's defense of her husband with the ax.

"Gee!" said Charley, "I hope dad'll give you a job."

"But how did you get out of there?" Joan asked.

"I took an unfair advantage of Swan and hit him with a table leg."

"Gee! dad's _got_ to give you a job," said Charley; "I'll make him."

"I'll hold you to that, Charley," Mackenzie laughed.

In the boy's eyes Mackenzie was already a hero, greater than any man that had come into the sheeplands in his day. Sheep people are not fighting folks. They never have been since the world's beginning; they never will be to the world's end. There is something in the peaceful business of attending sheep, some appeal in their meekness and pa.s.sivity, that seems to tincture and curb the savage spirit that dwells in the breast of man. Swan Carlson was one of the notorious exceptions in that country. Even the cattlemen were afraid of him.

Joan advised against Mackenzie's expressed intention of returning to Carlson's house to find out how badly he was hurt. It would be a blessing to the country, she said, if it should turn out that Carlson was killed. But Mackenzie had an uneasy feeling that it would be a blessing he could not share. He was troubled over the thing, now that the excitement of the fight had cooled out of him, thinking of the blow he had given Carlson with that heavy piece of oak.

Perhaps the fellow was not dead, but hurt so badly that he would die without surgical aid. It was the part of duty and humanity to go back and see. He resolved to do this, keeping the resolution to himself.

Joan told him much of the sheep business, and much about the art of running a big band over that spa.r.s.e range, in which this green valley lay like an oasis, a gladdening sight seldom to be met with among those sulky hills. She said she hoped her father would find a place for him, for the summer, at least.

"But I wouldn't like to see you shut yourself up in this country like the rest of us are," she said, gazing off over the hills with wistful eyes. "A man that knows enough to teach school oughtn't fool away his time on sheep."

She was working toward her own emanc.i.p.ation, she told him, running that band of two thousand sheep on shares for her father, just the same as an ordinary herdsman. In three years she hoped her increase, and share of the clip, would be worth ten thousand dollars, and then she would sell out and go away.

"What would you want to leave a good business like this for?" he asked, rather astonished at her cool calculation upon what she believed to be freedom. "There's nothing out in what people call the world that you could turn your hand to that would make you a third of the money."

"I want to go away and get some education," she said.

"But you are educated, Miss Sullivan."

She turned a slow, reproachful look upon him, a shadow of sadness over her wholesome young face.

"I'm nearly nineteen; I don't know as much as a girl of twelve," she said.

"I've never met any of those precocious twelve-year-olds," he told her, shaking his head gravely. "You know a great deal more than you're conscious of, I think, Miss Sullivan. We don't get the best of it out of books."

"I'm a prisoner here," she said, stretching her arms as if she displayed her bonds, "as much of a prisoner in my way as Swan Carlson's wife was in hers. You cut her chain; n.o.body ever has come to cut mine."

"Your knight will come riding over the hill some evening. One comes into every woman's life, sooner or later, I think."

"Mostly in imagination," said Joan. And her way of saying it, so wise and superior, as if she spoke of some toy which she had outgrown, brought a smile again to her visitor's grave face.

Charley was not interested in his sister's bondage, or in the coming of a champion to set her free. He went off to send the dogs after an adventurous bunch of sheep that was straying from the main flock. Joan sighed as she looked after him, putting a strand of hair away behind her ear. Presently she brightened, turning to Mackenzie with quickening eyes.

"I'll make a bargain with you, Mr. Mackenzie, if you're in earnest about learning the sheep business," she said.

"All right; let's hear it."

"Dad's coming over here today to finish cutting hay. I'll make a deal with him for you to get a band of sheep to run on shares if you'll agree to teach me enough to get into college--if I've got brains enough to learn."

"The doubt would be on the side of the teacher, not the pupil, Miss Sullivan. Maybe your father wouldn't like the arrangement, anyway."

"He'll like it, all right. What do you say?"

"I don't think it would be very much to my advantage to take charge of a band of sheep under conditions that might look as if I needed somebody to plug for me. Your father might think of me as an incompetent and good-for-nothing person."