Mackenzie took Tim at his word two days after their interview, and went visiting Mary. He made the journey across to her range more to try his legs than to satisfy his curiosity concerning the substitute for Joan so cunningly offered by Tim in his Laban-like way. He was pleased to find that his legs bore him with almost their accustomed vigor, and surprised to see the hills beginning to show the yellow blooms of autumn. His hurts in that last encounter with Swan Carlson and his dogs had bound him in camp for three weeks.
Mary was a smiling, talkative, fair-haired girl, bearing the foundation of a generous woman. She had none of the shyness about her that might be expected in a lass whose world had been the sheep range, and this Mackenzie put down to the fact of her superior social position, as fixed by the size of Tim Sullivan’s house.
Conscious of this eminence above those who dwelt in sheep-wagons or log houses by the creek-sides, Tim’s girls walked out into their world with assurance. Tim had done that much for them in rearing his mansion on the hilltop, no matter what he had denied them of educational refinements. Joan had gone hungry on this distinction; she had developed the bitterness that comes from the seeds of loneliness. This was lacking in Mary, who was all smiles, pink and white in spite of sheeplands 253 winds and suns. Mary was ready to laugh with anybody or at anybody, and hop a horse for a twenty-mile ride to a dance any night you might name.
Mackenzie made friends with her in fifteen minutes, and had learned at the end of half an hour that friend was all he might ever hope to be even if he had come with any warmer notions in his breast. Mary was engaged to be married. She told him so, as one friend to another, pledging him to secrecy, showing a little ring on a white ribbon about her neck. Her Corydon was a sheepman’s son who lived beyond the Sullivan ranch, and could dance like a butterfly and sing songs to the banjo in a way to melt the heart of any maid. So Mary said, but in her own way, with blushes, and wide, serious eyes.
Mackenzie liked Mary from the first ingenuous word, and promised to hold her secret and help her to happiness in any way that a man might lift an honorable hand. And he smiled when he recalled Tim Sullivan’s word about catching them young. Surely a man had to be stirring early in the day to catch them in the sheeplands. Youth would look out for its own there, as elsewhere. Tim Sullivan was right about it there. He was wiser than he knew.
Mary was dressed as neatly as Joan always dressed for her work with the sheep. And she wore a little black crucifix about her neck on another ribbon which she had no need to conceal. When she touched it she smiled and smiled, and not for the comfort of the little cross, Mackenzie understood, but in tenderness for what lay beneath it, and for the shepherd lad who gave it. There 254 was a beauty in it for him that made the glad day brighter.
This fresh, sprightly generation would redeem the sheeplands, and change the business of growing sheep, he said. The isolation would go out of that life; running sheep would be more like a business than a penance spent in heartache and loneliness. The world could not come there, of course. It had no business there; it should not come. But they would go to it, those young hearts, behold its wonders, read its weaknesses, and return. And there would be no more straining of the heart in lonesomeness such as Joan had borne, and no more discontent to be away.
“I hoped you’d marry Joan,” said Mary, with a sympathetic little sigh. “I don’t like Earl Reid.”
“Mary?” said Mackenzie. Mary looked up inquiringly. “Can you keep a secret for me, Mary?”
“Try me, John.”