“I sent and got a Bible from the mail-order house,” said Joan, looking up with lively eyes.
“Has it come already?”
“Charley got it yesterday. I found that story about Jacob and Rachel and the weak-eyed girl. It’s awful short.”
“But it tells a good deal, Joan.”
Joan seemed thinking over how much the short story really told, her eyes far away on the elusive, ever-receding blue curtain that was down between her and the world.
“Yes, it tells a lot,” she sighed. “But Jake must not 163 have been very bright. Well, he was a cowman, anyhow; he wasn’t running sheep.”
“I think he went into the sheep business afterwards,” Mackenzie said, diverted by her original comment on the old tale.
“Yes, when his girls got big enough to do the work!” The resentment of her hard years was in Joan’s voice, the hardness of unforgiving regret for all that had been taken from her life.
Mackenzie felt a sweep of depression engulf him like a leaping wave. Joan was in the humor to profit by any arrangement that would break her bondage to sheep; Tim Sullivan had been bringing her up, unconsciously, but none the less effectively, to fit into this scheme for marrying her to his old friend’s rakish son. When the day came for Joan to know of the arrangement, she would leap toward it as toward an open door.
Still, it should not concern him. Once he had believed there was a budding blossom on his hitherto dry branch of romance; if he had been so ungenerous as to take advantage of Joan’s loneliness and urge the promise to florescence, they might have been riding down out of the sheeplands together that day.