“Now, there’s my Mary; she’s seventeen; she’ll be a woman in three years more, and she’ll make two of Joan when she fills out. My Mary would make the fine wife for a lad like you, John, and I’ll give you five thousand sheep the day you marry her.”
“All right; the day I marry Mary I’ll claim five thousand sheep.”
Mackenzie said it so quickly, so positively, that Tim glowed and beamed as never before. He slapped the simpleton of a schoolmaster who had come into the sheeplands to be a great sheepman on the back with hearty hand, believing he had swallowed hook and all.
“Done! The day you marry Mary you’ll have your five thousand sheep along wi’ her! I pass you my word, and it goes.”
They shook hands on it, Mackenzie as solemn as though making a covenant in truth.
“The day I marry Mary,” said he.
“It’ll be three years before she’s old enough to take up the weight of carryin’ babies, and of course you understand you’ll have to wait on her, lad. A man can’t jump into these things the way he buys a horse.”
“Oh, sure.”
“You go right on workin’ for me like you are,” pursued Tim, drunk on his bargain as he thought it to be, “drawin’ your pay like any hand, without favors asked or given, takin’ the knocks as they come to you, in weather good and bad. That’ll be a better way than goin’ in shares on a band next spring like we talked; it’ll be better for you, lad; better for you and Mary.”
“All right,” Mackenzie assented.