“No, I ain’t seen him. Is he still roamin’ and restless?”
“He left yesterday; I thought he was going to the ranch.”
“Didn’t pass my way. That feller’s off, I tell you, John; he’s one of the kind that can’t stand the lonesomeness. Leave him out here alone two months, and he’d put a bullet in his eye.”
“It seems to me like it’s a land of daftness,” Mackenzie said.
“You’ll find a good many cracked people all over the sheep country––I’m kind o’ cracked myself. I must be, or I never would ’a’ left that vest.”
Dad took off his hat to smooth his sweeping curled locks, as white as shredded asbestos, and full of the same little gleams that mineral shows when a block of it from the mine is held in the sun. His beard was whitening over his face again, like a frost that defied the heat of day, easing its hollows and protuberances, easing some of the weakness that the barber’s razor had laid so pitilessly bare. In a few days more he would appear himself again, and be ready for the sheep-shears in due time.
“I reckon I’ll have to make the best of the place I’m 199 in, but for a man of puncture, as the feller said, like I used to think I was, I sure did miscombobble it when I married that educated squaw. No woman I ever was married to in my life ever had sense enough to track a man like that woman’s follered me. She sure is a wonder on the scent.”
Patiently Rabbit was sitting among the bushes, waiting the turn of events, not to be fooled again, not to be abandoned, if vigilance could insure her against such distress. Mackenzie’s admiration for the woman grew with Dad’s discomfiture over his plight. There was an added flavor of satisfaction for him in the old man’s blighted career. Wise Rabbit, to have a priest marriage, and wiser still to follow this old dodger of the sheeplands and bring him up with a short halter in the evening of his days.
“I’ll go on back and look after them sheep,” said Dad, with a certain sad inflection of resignation; “there’s nothing else to be done. I was aimin’ to serve notice on Tim to find another man in my place, but I might as well keep on. Well, I can set in the shade, anyhow, and let Rabbit do the work––her and them blame dogs.”
Dad sighed. It helped a great deal to know that Rabbit could do the work. He looked long toward the spot where his unshaken wife kept her watch on him, but seemed to be looking over her head, perhaps trying to measure all he had lost by this coming between him and the one-eyed widow-lady of Four Corners.