“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 assure 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 scraping 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-shelled 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 assemble 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 a
uthority to marry her to the man I’ve picked.”
Mackenzie nodded, a great warmth of understanding glowing in his breast.
“But I don’t want you to feel that it was any reflection on your ability as a teacher, you understand, John; I don’t want you to look at it that way at all.”
“Not at all,” Mackenzie echoed, quite sincerely.
“You could ’a’ had her, for all the difference it was to me, if I hadn’t made that deal with Reid. A man’s got to stick to his word, you know, lad, and not have it thwarted by any little bobbin of a girl. I’d as soon you’d have one of my girls as any man I know, John.”
“Thanks.”
“Of course I could see how it might turn out between you and Joan if she kept on ridin’ over to have lessons from you every day. You can’t blame Earl if he saw it the same way, lad.”
“She isn’t his yet,” said Mackenzie confidently.
“Now look here, John”––Sullivan spoke with a certain sharpness, a certain hardness of dictation in his tone, “you’d just as well stand out of it and let Earl have her.”
Mackenzie’s heart swung so high it seemed to brush the early stars. It was certain now that Joan had not gone home without a fight, and that she had not remained there throughout his recovery from his wounds without telling protest. More confidently than before he repeated:
“She isn’t his yet!”
“She’ll never get a sheep from me if she marries any other man––not one lone ewe!”
“How much do you value her in sheep?” Mackenzie inquired.
“She’ll get half a million dollars or more with Earl. It would take a lot of sheep to amount to half a million, John.”
“Yes,” said Mackenzie, with the indifference of a man who did not have any further interest in the case, seeing himself outbid. “That’s higher than I’ll ever be able to go. All right; let him have her.” But beneath his breath he added the condition: “If he can get her.”
“That’s the spirit I like to see a man show!” Tim commended. “I don’t blame a man for marryin’ into a sheep ranch if he can––I call him smart––and I’d just as soon you as any man’d marry one of my girls, as I said, John. But you know, lad, a man can’t have them that’s sealed, as the Mormons say.”
“You’re right,” Mackenzie agreed, and the more heartily because it was sincere. If he grinned a little to himself, Tim did not note it in the dusk.
“Now, there’s my Mary; she’s seventeen; she’ll be a woman in three years more, and she’ll make two of Joan when she fills out. My Mary would make the fine wife for a lad like you, John, and I’ll give you five thousand sheep the day you marry her.”
“All right; the day I marry Mary I’ll claim five thousand sheep.”
Mackenzie said it so quickly, so positively, that Tim glowed and beamed as never before. He slapped the simpleton of a schoolmaster who had come into the sheeplands to be a great sheepman on the back with hearty hand, believing he had swallowed hook and all.
“Done! The day you marry Mary you’ll have your five thousand sheep along wi’ her! I pass you my word, and it goes.”
They shook hands on it, Mackenzie as solemn as though making a covenant in truth.
“The day I marry Mary,” said he.
“It’ll be three years before she’s old enough to take up the weight of carryin’ babies, and of course you understand you’ll have to wait on her, lad. A man can’t jump into these things the way he buys a horse.”
“Oh, sure.”
“You go right on workin’ for me like you are,” pursued Tim, drunk on his bargain as he thought it to be, “drawin’ your pay like any hand, without favors asked or given, takin’ the knocks as they come to you, in weather good and bad. That’ll be a better way than goin’ in shares on a band next spring like we talked; it’ll be better for you, lad; better for you and Mary.”
“All right,” Mackenzie assented.
“I’m thinkin’ only of your own interests, you see, lad, the same as if you was my son.”
Tim patted Mackenzie’s shoulder again, doubtless warm to the bottom of his sheep-blind heart over the prospect of a hand to serve him three years who would go break-neck and hell-for-leather, not counting consequences in his blind and simple way, or weather or hardships of any kind. For there was Mary, and there were five thousand sheep. As for Joan, she was out of Tim’s reckoning any longer. He had a new Jacob on the line, and he was going to play him for all he was worth.
“All right; I’ve got a lot to learn yet,” Mackenzie agreed.
“You have, you have that,” said Tim with fatherly tenderness, “and you’ll learn it like a book. I always said from the day you come you had in you the makin’ of a sheepman. Some are quick and some are slow, but the longer it takes to learn the harder it sticks. It’s been that way wi’ me.”
“That’s the rule of the world, they say.”
“It is; it is so. And you can put up a good fight, even though you may not always hold your own; you’ll be the lad to wade through it wi’ your head up and the mornin’ light on your face. Sure you will, boy. I’ll be tellin’ Mary.”
“I’d wait a while,” Mackenzie said, gently, as a man who was very soft in his heart, indeed. “I’d rather we’d grow into it, you know, easy, by gentle stages.”
“Right you are, lad, right you are. Leave young hearts to find their own way––they can’t miss it if there’s nobody between them. I’ll say no word to Mary at all, but you have leave to go and see her as often as you like, lad, and the sooner you begin the better, to catch her while she’s young. How’s your hand?”
“Well enough.”
“When you think you’re able, I’ll put you back with the sheep you had. I’ll be takin’ Reid over to the ranch to put him in charge of the hospital band.”
“I’m able to handle them now, I think.”
“But take your time, take it easy. Reid gets on with Swan, bein’ more experienced with men than you, I guess. Well, a schoolteacher don’t meet men the way other people do; he’s shut up with the childer all the day, and he gets so he measures men by them. That won’t do on the sheep range, lad. But I guess you’re findin’ it out.”
“I’m learning a little, right along.”
“Yes, you’ve got the makin’ of a sheepman in you; I said you had it in you the first time I put my eyes on your face. Well, I’ll be leavin’ you now, lad. And remember the bargain about my Mary. You’ll be a sheepman in your own way the day you marry her. When a man’s marryin’ a sheep ranch what difference is it to him whether it’s a Mary or a Joan?”
“No difference––when he’s marrying a sheep ranch,” Mackenzie returned.
* * *
CHAPTER XXIV
MORE ABOUT MARY
Mackenzie took Tim at his word two days after their interview, and went visiting Mary. He made the journey across to her range more to try his legs than to satisfy his curiosity concerning the substitute for Joan so cunningly offered by Tim in his Laban-like way. He was pleased to find that his legs bore him with almost their accustomed vigor, and surprised to see the hills beginning to show the yellow blooms of autumn. His hurts in that last encounter with Swan Carlson and his dogs had bound him in camp for three weeks.
Mary was a smiling, talkative, fair-haired girl, bearing the foundation of a generous woman. She had none of the shyness about her that might be expected in a lass whose world had been the sheep range, and this Mackenzie put down to the fact of her superior social position, as fixed by the size of Tim Sullivan’s house.
Conscious of this eminence above those who dwelt in sheep-wagons or log houses by the creek-sides, Tim’s girls walked out into their world with assurance. Tim had done that much for them in rearing his mansion on the hilltop, no matter what he had denied them of educational refinements. Joan had gone hungry on this distinction; she had developed the bitterness that comes from the seeds of loneliness. This was lacking in Mary, who was all smiles, pink and white in sp
ite of sheeplands winds and suns. Mary was ready to laugh with anybody or at anybody, and hop a horse for a twenty-mile ride to a dance any night you might name.
Mackenzie made friends with her in fifteen minutes, and had learned at the end of half an hour that friend was all he might ever hope to be even if he had come with any warmer notions in his breast. Mary was engaged to be married. She told him so, as one friend to another, pledging him to secrecy, showing a little ring on a white ribbon about her neck. Her Corydon was a sheepman’s son who lived beyond the Sullivan ranch, and could dance like a butterfly and sing songs to the banjo in a way to melt the heart of any maid. So Mary said, but in her own way, with blushes, and wide, serious eyes.
Mackenzie liked Mary from the first ingenuous word, and promised to hold her secret and help her to happiness in any way that a man might lift an honorable hand. And he smiled when he recalled Tim Sullivan’s word about catching them young. Surely a man had to be stirring early in the day to catch them in the sheeplands. Youth would look out for its own there, as elsewhere. Tim Sullivan was right about it there. He was wiser than he knew.
Mary was dressed as neatly as Joan always dressed for her work with the sheep. And she wore a little black crucifix about her neck on another ribbon which she had no need to conceal. When she touched it she smiled and smiled, and not for the comfort of the little cross, Mackenzie understood, but in tenderness for what lay beneath it, and for the shepherd lad who gave it. There was a beauty in it for him that made the glad day brighter.
This fresh, sprightly generation would redeem the sheeplands, and change the business of growing sheep, he said. The isolation would go out of that life; running sheep would be more like a business than a penance spent in heartache and loneliness. The world could not come there, of course. It had no business there; it should not come. But they would go to it, those young hearts, behold its wonders, read its weaknesses, and return. And there would be no more straining of the heart in lonesomeness such as Joan had borne, and no more discontent to be away.
The Flockmaster of Poison Creek Page 20
