“On the dead, Mackenzie, I don’t see how it’s going to be comfortable with me and you in camp together.”
“The road’s open, Earl.”
“I wish it was open out of this damned country!” Reid complained. In his voice Mackenzie read the rankling discontent of his soul, wearing itself out there in 266 the freedom that to him was not free, chafing and longing and fretting his heart away as though the distant hills were the walls of a prison, the far horizon its bars.
“Sullivan wants you over at the ranch,” Mackenzie told him, moved to pitying kindness for him, although he knew that it was wasted and undeserved.
“I’d rather stay over here, I’d rather hear the coyotes howl than that pack of Sullivan kids. That’s one-hell of a family for a man to have to marry into, Mackenzie.”
“I’ve seen men marry into worse,” Mackenzie said.
Reid got up in morose impatience, flinging away his cigarette, went to the wagon, looked in, slammed the little canvas door with its mica window shut with a bang, and turned back.
There seemed little of the carelessness, the easy spirit that had made him so adaptable at first to his surroundings, which Reid had brought with him into the sheeplands left in him now. He was sullen and downcast, consumed by the gnawing desire to be away out of his prison. Mackenzie studied him furtively as he compounded his coffee and set it to boil on the little fire, thinking that it required more fortitude, indeed, to live out a sentence such as Reid faced in the open than behind a lock. Here, the call to be away was always before a man; the leagues of freedom stretched out before his eyes. It required some holding in on a man’s part to restrain his feet from taking the untrammeled way to liberty under such conditions, more than he would have believed Reid capable of, more than he expected him to be equal to much longer.
Reid came slowly over to where he had left his hat, took it up, and stood looking at it as if he had found some strange plant or unusual flower, turning it and regarding it from all sides. It was such strange behavior that Mackenzie kept his eye on him, believing that the solitude and discontent had strained his mind.