“I never heard of such inhuman treatment!” Mackenzie declared, hot to the bone in his burning resentment of this barbarity. “How long has he kept you tied up this way?”
“Three years now,” said she, with a weary sigh.
“It’s going to stop, right here. What did you let him treat you this way for? Why didn’t some of your neighbors take a hand in it?”
“Nobody comes,” she sighed, shaking her head sadly. “The name of Swan Carlson is a curse on the wind. Nobody passes; we are far from any road that men travel; your face is the first I have seen since Swan put the chain on me like a wolf.”
“Where does he keep his tools?”
“Maybe in the barn––I do not know. Only there never is anything left in my reach. Will you set me free, kind stranger?”
“If I can find anything to cut that chain. Let me have the lantern.”
The woman hesitated, her eyes grown great with fright.
“My man, he is the one who choked two sheepherders with his hands. You must have read in the paper–––”
“Maybe it was before my time. Give me down the lantern.”
Swan Carlson appeared to be a man who got along with very few tools. Mackenzie could not find a cold-chisel among the few broken and rusted odds and ends in the barn, although there was an anvil, such as every rancher in that country had, fastened to a stump in the yard, a hammer rusting beside it on the block. As Mackenzie stood considering what could be done with the material at hand, the woman called to him from the door, her voice vibrant with anxious excitement:
“My man will come soon,” she said.
Mackenzie started back to the house, hammer in hand, thinking that he might break the chain near her foot and give her liberty, at least. A pile of logs lay in the dooryard, an ax hacked into the end of one. With this tool added to the hammer, he hurried to the prisoner.
“I think we can make it now,” he said.
The poor creature was panting as if the hand of her man hung over her in threat of throttling out her life as he had smothered the sheepherders in the tragedy that gave him his evil fame. Mackenzie urged her to a chair, giving her the lantern to hold and, with the edge of the ax set against a link of her chain, the poll on the floor, he began hammering the soft metal against the bit.
Once she put her hand on his shoulder, her breath caught in a sharp exclamation of alarm.
“I thought it was Swan’s step!” she whispered. “Listen––do you hear?”
“There’s nobody,” he assured her, turning his head to listen, the sweat on his lean cheek glistening in the light.
“It is my fear that he will come too soon. Strike fast, good young man, strike fast!”
If Swan Carlson had been within half a mile he would have split the wind to find out the cause of such a clanging in his shunned and proscribed house, and that he did not appear before the chain was severed was evidence that he was nowhere near at hand. When the cut links fell to the floor Mrs. Carlson stood the lantern down with gentle deliberation, as if preparing to enter the chamber of someone in a desperate sickness to whom had come a blessed respite of sleep. Then she stood, her lips apart, her breath suspended, lifting her freed foot with a joyous relief in its lightness.
Mackenzie remained on his knees at her feet, looking up strangely into her face. Suddenly she bent over him, clasped his forehead between her hands, kissed his brow as if he were her son. A great hot tear splashed down upon his cheek as she rose again, a sob in her throat that ended in a little, moaning cry. She tossed her long arms like an eagle set free from a cramping cage, her head thrown back, her streaming hair far down her shoulders. There was an appealing grace in her tall, spare body, a strange, awakening beauty in her haggard face.
“God sent you,” she said. “May He keep His hand over you wherever you go.”
Mackenzie got to his feet; she picked up the ax and leaned it against the table close to her hand.
“I will give you eggs, you can cook them at a fire,” she said, “and bread I will give you, but butter I cannot give. That I have not tasted since I came to this land, four years ago, a bride.”
She moved about to get the food, walking with awkwardness on the foot that had dragged the chain so long, laughing a little at her efforts to regain a normal balance.
“Soon it will pass away, and I will walk like a lady, as I once knew how.”
“But I don’t want to cook at a fire,” Mackenzie protested; “I want you to make me some coffee and fry me some eggs, and then we’ll see about things.”
She came close to him, her great gray eyes seeming to draw him until he gazed into her soul.
“No; you must go,” she said. “It will be better when Swan comes that nobody shall be here but me.”
“But you! Why, you poor thing, he’ll put that chain on you again, knock you down, for all I know, and fasten you up like a beast. I’m not going; I’ll stay right here till he comes.”
“No,” shaking her head in sad earnestness, “better it will be for all that I shall be here alone when he comes.”
“Alone!” said he, impatiently; “what can you do alone?”
“When he comes,” said she, drawing a great breath, shaking her hair back from her face, her deep grave eyes holding him again in their earnest appeal, “then I will stand by the door and kill him with the ax!”
* * *
CHAPTER II
SWAN CARLSON
Mackenzie found it hard to bend the woman from this plan of summary vengeance. She had suffered and brooded in her loneliness so long, the cruel hand of Swan Carlson over her, that her thoughts had beaten a path to this desire. This self-administration of justice seemed now her life’s sole aim. She approached it with glowing eyes and flushed cheeks; she had lived for that hour.
Harshly she met Mackenzie’s efforts at first to dissuade her from this long-planned deed, yielding a little at length, not quite promising to withhold her hand when the step of her savage husband should sound outside the door.
“If you are here when he comes, then it will do for another night; if you are gone, then I will not say.”
That was the compromise she made with him at last, turning with no more argument to prepare his supper, carrying the ax with her as she went about the work. Often she stood in rigid concentration, listening for the sound of Swan’s coming, such animation in her eyes as a bride’s might show in a happier hour than hers. She sat opposite her visitor as he made his supper on the simple food she gave him, and told him the story of her adventure into that heartless land, the ax-handle against her knee.
A minister’s daughter, educated to fit herself for a minister’s wife. She had learned English in the schools of her native land, as the custom is, and could speak it fairly when family reverses carried her like a far-blown seed to America. She had no business training, for what should a minister’s wife know of business beyond the affairs of the parish and the economy of her own home? She found, therefore, nothing open to her hands in America save menial work in the households of others.
Not being bred to it, nor the intention or thought of it as a future contingency, she suffered in humbling herself to the services of people who were at once her intellectual and social inferiors. The one advantage in it was the improvement of her English speech, through which she hoped for better things in time.
It was while she was still new to America, its customs and social adjustments, and the shame of her menial situation burned in her soul like a corrosive acid, that she saw the advertisement of Swan Carlson in a Swedish newspaper. Swan Carlson was advertising for a wife. Beneath a handsome picture of himself he stated his desires, frankly, with evident honesty in all his representations. He told of his holdings in sheep and land, of his money in the bank.
A dream of new consequence in this strange land came to Hertha Jacobsen as she read the advertisement, as she studied the features of Swan Carlson, his bold face looking at her from the page. She had seen men, and the women of such men
sharing their honors, who had risen from peasants to governors and senators, to positions of wealth and consequence in this strange land with all the romance of a tale out of a book. Perhaps fate had urged her on to this unfriendly shore only to feed her on the bitter herbs for her purification for a better life.
The minister of her church investigated Swan Carlson and his claims, finding him all that he professed to be. Hertha wrote to him; in time Swan came to visit her, a tall, long-striding man, handsomer than his picture in the paper, handsome as a Viking lord with his proud foot on the neck of a fallen foe.
So she married him, and came away with him to the sheeplands, and Swan’s hand was as tender of her as a summer wind. It was shearing time when they reached home; Swan was with her every day for a little while, gathering his flocks from the range into the shearing sheds. He was master of more than fifteen thousand sheep.
When the shearing was done, and Swan had gone with his wagons to ship the clip, returning with his bankbook showing thousands in added wealth, a change came into her life, so radiant with the blossoms of a new happiness. Swan’s big laugh was not so ready in his throat any more; his great hand seemed forgetful of its caress. He told her that the time of idling now was over; she must go with him in a sheep-wagon to the range and care for her band of sheep, sharing the labors of his life as she shared its rewards.
No; that was not to her liking. The wife of a rich man should not live as a peasant woman, dew in her draggled skirts to her knees, the sun browning her skin and bleaching her hair. It was not for his woman to give him no, said Swan. Be ready at a certain hour in the morning; they must make an early start, for the way was long.
But no; she refused to take the burden of a peasant woman on her back. That was the first time Swan knocked her senseless. When she recovered, the sheep-wagon was rocking her in its uneasy journey to the distant range. Swan’s cruelties multiplied with his impatience at her slowness to master the shepherd’s art. The dogs were sullen creatures, unused to a woman’s voice, unfriendly to a woman’s presence. Swan insisted that she lay aside her woman’s attire and dress as a man to gain the good-will of the dogs.
Again she defied his authority, all her refinement rising against the degradation of her sex; again Swan laid her senseless with a blow. When she woke her limbs were clad in overalls, a greasy jumper was buttoned over her breast. But the dogs were wiser than their master; no disguise of man’s could cover her from the contempt of their shrewd senses. They would not obey her shrilled commands.
Very well, said Swan; if she did not have it in her to win even the respect of a dog, let her do a dog’s work. So he took the collies away, leaving her to range her band of sheep in terrible labor, mind-wrenching loneliness, over the sage-gray hills. Wolves grew bold; the lambs suffered. When Swan came again to number her flock, he cursed her for her carelessness, giving her blows which were kinder than his words.
With the first snow she abandoned her flock and fled. Disgraceful as it was for a woman to leave her man, the frenzy of loneliness drove her on. With his companionship she could have endured Swan’s cruelty, but alone her heart was dead. Three days she wandered. Swan found her after she had fallen in the snow.
His great laugh woke her, and she was home in this house, the light of day in her eyes. Swan was sitting beside her, merry in the thought of how he had cheated her out of her intention to die like an old ewe among the mountain drifts.
She was good for nothing, he said, but to sit at home like a cat. But he would make sure that she sat at home, to be there at his coming, and not running away from the bounty of a man who had taken a beggar to his bosom. Then he brought the chain and the anvil, and welded the red-hot iron upon her limb. He laughed when the smoke of her burning flesh rose hissing; laughed when he mounted his horse and rode away, leaving her in agony too great to let her die.
This summer now beginning was the fourth since that melancholy day. In the time that had passed, Swan had come into the ways of trouble, suffering a great drain upon his hoarded money, growing as a consequence sullen and somber in his moods. No more he laughed; even the distress of his chained wife, the sight of her wasting face and body, the pleading of her tortured eyes, could not move his loud gales of merriment again.
Swan had killed two of his sheepherders, as she had mentioned before. It grew out of a dispute over wages, in which the men were right. That was the winter following her attempt to run away, Swan being alone with them upon the stormy range. He declared both of them set upon him at once like wolves, and that he fought only to defend his life. He strangled them, the throat of each grasped in his broad, thick hand, and held them from him so, stiff arms against their desperate struggles, until they sank down in the snow and died.
Only a little while ago the lawyers had got him off from the charge of murder, after long delays. The case had been tried in another county, for Swan Carlson’s neighbors all believed him guilty of a horrible crime; no man among them could have listened to his story under oath with unprejudiced ear. The lawyers had brought Swan off, for at the end it had been his living word against the mute accusations of two dead men. There was nobody to speak for the herders; so the lawyers had set him free. But it had cost him thousands of dollars, and Swan’s evil humor had deepened with the drain.
Crazy, he said of his wife; a poor mad thing bent on self-destruction in wild and mournful ways. In that Swan was believed, at least. Nobody came to inquire of her, none ever stopped to speak a word. The nearest neighbor was twelve or fifteen miles distant, a morose man with sour face, master of a sea of sheep.
All of this Swan himself had told her in the days when he laughed. He told her also of the lawyers’ drain upon his wealth, starving her days together to make a pebble of saving to fill the ruthless breach.
“Tonight Swan will come,” she said. “After what I have told you, are you not afraid?”
“I suppose I ought to be,” Mackenzie returned, leaving her to form her own conclusion.
She searched his face with steady eyes, her hand on the ax-helve, in earnest effort to read his heart.
“No, you are not afraid,” she said. “But wait; when you hear him speak, then you will be afraid.”
“How do you know he is coming home tonight?”
She did not speak at once. Her eyes were fixed on the open door at Mackenzie’s side, her face was set in the tensity of her mental concentration as she listened. Mackenzie bent all his faculties to hear if any foot approached. There was no sound.
“The fishermen of my country can feel the chill of an iceberg through the fog and the night,” she said at last. “Swan Carlson is an iceberg to my heart.”
She listened again, bending forward, her lips open. Mackenzie fancied he heard the swing of a galloping hoof-beat, and turned toward the door.
“Have you a pistol?” she inquired.
“No.”
“He is coming; in a little while he will be at the door. There is time yet for you to leave.”
“I want to have a word with your man; I’ll wait.”
Mrs. Carlson got up, keeping the ax in hand, moved her chair to the other side of the door, where she stationed herself in such position as Swan must see her first when he looked within. She disposed the ax to conceal it entirely beneath her long apron, her hand under the garment grasping the helve.
“For your own sake, not his, I ask you not to strike him,” Mackenzie pleaded, in all the earnestness he could command.
“I have given you the hour of my vengeance,” she replied. “But if he curses me, if he lifts his hand!”
Mackenzie was more than a little uneasy on the probable outcome of his meeting with the tempestuous Swan. He got out his pipe and lit it, considering the situation with fast-running thoughts. Still, a man could not go on and leave that beaten, enslaved woman to the mercies of her tyrant; Swan Carlson must be given to understand that he would be held to answer to the law for his future behavior toward her.
“If I were you I’d put th
e ax behind the door and get his supper ready,” said he.
Mrs. Carlson got up at the suggestion, with such readiness that surprised Mackenzie, put the ax back of the open door, stood a moment winding up her fallen hair.
“Yes, he is my man,” she said.
Swan was turning his horse into the barn; Mackenzie could hear him talking to the animal, not unkindly. Mrs. Carlson put fresh fuel in the stove, making a rattling of the lids which must have sounded cheerful to the ears of a hungry man. As she began breaking eggs into a bowl she took up her song again, with an unconscious air of detachment from it, as one unwittingly follows the habit that has been for years the accompaniment to a task.
As before, the refinement of accent was wanting in her words, but the sweet melancholy of her voice thrilled her listener like the rich notes of an ancient violin.
Na-a-fer a-lo-o-one, na-a-fer a-lone,
He promise na-fer to leafe me,
Na-fer to leafe me a-lone!
Mackenzie sat with his elbow on the table, his chair partly turned toward the door, just within the threshold and a little to one side, where the flockmaster would see him the moment he stepped into the light. The traveler’s pack lay on the floor at the door jamb; the smoke from his pipe drifted out to tell of his presence in the honest announcement of a man who had nothing to hide.
So Swan Carlson found him as he came home to his door.
Swan stopped, one foot in the door, the light on his face. Mrs. Carlson did not turn from the stove to greet him by word or look, but stood bending a little over the pan of sputtering eggs, which she shook gently from side to side with a rhythmic, slow movement in cadence with her song. Swan turned his eyes from one to the other, his face clouding for a moment as for a burst of storm, clearing again at once as Mackenzie rose and gave him good evening in cheerful and unshaken voice.
Mrs. Carlson had spoken a true word when she described Swan as a handsome man. Almost seven feet tall, Mackenzie took him to be, so tall that he must stoop to enter the door; lithe and sinewy of limbs, a lightness in them as of an athlete bred; broad in the shoulders, long of arms. His face was stern, his red hair long about the ears, his Viking mustache long-drooping at the corners of his mouth.
The Flockmaster of Poison Creek Page 2
