“Sheep!” said she. “Swan thinks only of sheep; he is worse since he bought Hall’s flock. It is more than I can endure!”
Mrs. Carlson was worried and worn, fast losing all she had gained in flesh and color during Swan’s period of kindness when she had thrown herself into his wild ways and ridden the range like a fighting woman at his side. Much of her comeliness remained in her sad face and great, luminous, appealing eyes, for it was the comeliness of melancholy which sorrow and hard usage refined. She would carry her grace with her, and the pale shred of her youthful beauty, down to the last hard day. But it was something that Swan was insensible to; it could not soften his hand toward her, nor bend his wild thoughts to gentleness. Now he had denied her again the little share he had granted her in his wild life, and must break the thing he had made, going his morose way alone.
“I hadn’t heard he’d bought Hall’s sheep,” Mackenzie said. “Is he going to run them on this range?”
“No, he says I shall go there, where the wolves are many and bold, even by daylight, to watch over them. There I would be more alone than here. I cannot go, I cannot go! Let him kill me, but I will not go!”
“He’s got a right to hire a man to run them; he can afford it.”
“His money grows like thistles. Where Swan touches 185 the earth with the seed of it, money springs. Money is a disease that he spreads when he walks, like the scales that fall from a leper. Money! I pray God night and day that a plague will sweep away his flocks, that a thief will find his hiding place, that a fire will burn the bank that locks in his gold, and make him poor. Poor, he would be kind. A man’s proud heart bends down when he is poor.”
“God help you!” said Mackenzie, pitying her from the well of his tender heart.
“God is deaf; he cannot hear!” she said, bitter, hopeless, yet rebellious against the silence of heaven and earth that she could not penetrate with her lamentations and bring relief.
“No, you shouldn’t let yourself believe any such thing,” he chided, yet with a gentleness that was almost an encouragement.
“This land is a vacuum, out of which sound cannot reach him, then,” she sighed, bending her sad head upon her hands. “I have cried out to him in a sorrow that would move a stone on the mountain-side, but God has not heard. Yes, it must be that this land is a vacuum, such as I read of when I was a girl in school. Maybe––” looking up with eager hopefulness––“if I go out of it a little way, just on the edge of it and pray, God will be able to hear my voice?”