“Yes, and I never did have no use for a talkin’ man. Nothin’ to ’em; they don’t stand the gaff.”
In spite of his friendly defense of young Reid, Mackenzie felt that Dad had read him aright. There was something of subtle knowledge, an edge of guile showing through his easy nature and desire to please, that was like acid on the teeth. Reid had the faculty of making himself agreeable, and he was an apt and willing hand, but back of this ingenuous appearance there seemed to be something elusive and shadowy, a thing which he tried to keep hidden by nimble maneuvers, but which would show at times for all his care.
Mackenzie did not dislike the youth, but he found it impossible to warm up to him as one man might to another in a place where human companionship is a luxury. When Reid sat with a cigarette in his thin lips––it was a wide mouth, worldly hard––hazy in abstraction and smoke, there came a glaze over the clearness of his eyes, a look of dead harshness, a cast of cunning. In such moments his true nature seemed to express itself unconsciously, and Dad Frazer, simple as he was in many ways, was worldly man enough to penetrate the smoke, and sound the apprentice sheepman to his soul.
Reid seemed to draw a good deal of amusement out of his situation under Tim Sullivan. He was dependent on the flockmaster for his clothing and keep, even tobacco and papers for his cigarettes. If he knew anything about the arrangement between his father and Sullivan in regard to Joan, he did not mention it. That he knew it, Mackenzie fully believed, for Tim Sullivan was not the man to keep the reward sequestered.
Whether Reid looked toward Joan as adequate compensation for three years’ exile in the sheeplands, there was no telling. Perhaps he did not think much of her in comparison with the exotic plants of the atmosphere he had left; more than likely there was a girl in the background somewhere, around whom some of the old man’s anxiety to save the lad revolved. Mackenzie hoped to the deepest cranny of his heart that it was so.
“He seems to get a good deal of humor out of working here for his board and tobacco,” Mackenzie said.
“Yes, he blatters a good deal about it,” said Dad. 139 “‘I’ll take another biscuit on Tim Sullivan,’ he says, and ‘here goes another smoke on Tim.’ I don’t see where he’s got any call to make a joke out of eatin’ another man’s bread.”
“Maybe he’s never eaten any man’s bread outside of the family before, Dad.”
“I reckon he wouldn’t have to be doin’ it now if he’d ’a’ been decent. Oh well, maybe he ain’t so bad.”