“You’ll be half an hour nearer Joan’s camp––she’ll have that much longer to stay,” said Reid, his mean leer creeping into his wide, thin lips again.

Mackenzie turned slowly to look him squarely in the eyes. He stood so a few seconds, Reid coloring in hot resentment of the silent rebuke.

“I’ve heard enough of that to last me the rest of your three years,” Mackenzie said, something as hard as stones in a cushion under his calm voice.

Reid jerked his hip in his peculiar twisting movement to shift his pistol belt, turned, and walked away.

If it was the lonesomeness, Mackenzie thought, it was taking a mighty peculiar turn in that fellow. He was more like a cub that was beginning to find itself, and bristle and snarl and turn to bite the hand that had fended it through its helpless stage. Perhaps it would 158 pass in a little while, or perhaps it would get worse on him. In the latter case there would be no living on the range with Reid, for on the range Mackenzie believed Reid was destined to remain. He had been trying to borrow money to get away, with what view in his dissatisfied head Mackenzie could not guess. He hadn’t got it; he wouldn’t get it. Those who had fattened on him in his prosperity were strangers to him in his time of penance and disgrace.

Mackenzie put off his start to Dad’s camp until dusk, knowing the old man would prefer to take the road at night, after his mysterious way. He probably would hoof it over to Sullivan’s and borrow a buckboard to make a figure in before the widow-lady upon whom he had anchored his variable heart.

Reid was bringing in the sheep when Mackenzie left, too far away for a word. Mackenzie thought of going down to him, for he disliked to part with anything like a shadow between them, feeling that he owed Reid a great debt indeed. More than that, he liked the kid, for there seemed to be a streak of good in him that all his ugly moods could not cover. But he went his way over the hills toward Dad’s camp, the thought persisting in him that he would, indeed, be thirty minutes nearer Joan. And it was a thought that made his heart jump and a gladness burn in his eyes, and his feet move onward with a swift eagerness.

But only as a teacher with a lively interest in his pupil, he said; only that, and nothing more. On a hilltop a little way beyond his camp he stopped suddenly, his breath held to listen. Over the calm, far-carrying 159 silence of the early night there came the sound of a woman singing, and this was the manner of her song:

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!