Perhaps the fellow was not dead, but hurt so badly that he would die without surgical aid. It was the part of duty and humanity to go back and see. He resolved to do this, keeping the resolution to himself.
Joan told him much of the sheep business, and much about the art of running a big band over that sparse range, in which this green valley lay like an oasis, a gladdening sight seldom to be met with among those sulky hills. She said she hoped her father would find a place for him, for the summer, at least.
“But I wouldn’t like to see you shut yourself up in this country like the rest of us are,” she said, gazing off over the hills with wistful eyes. “A man that knows enough to teach school oughtn’t fool away his time on sheep.”
She was working toward her own emancipation, she told him, running that band of two thousand sheep on shares for her father, just the same as an ordinary herdsman. In three years she hoped her increase, and share of the clip, would be worth ten thousand dollars, and then she would sell out and go away.
“What would you want to leave a good business like this for?” he asked, rather astonished at her cool calculation upon what she believed to be freedom. “There’s 46 nothing out in what people call the world that you could turn your hand to that would make you a third of the money.”
“I want to go away and get some education,” she said.
“But you are educated, Miss Sullivan.”
She turned a slow, reproachful look upon him, a shadow of sadness over her wholesome young face.
“I’m nearly nineteen; I don’t know as much as a girl of twelve,” she said.
“I’ve never met any of those precocious twelve-year-olds,” he told her, shaking his head gravely. “You know a great deal more than you’re conscious of, I think, Miss Sullivan. We don’t get the best of it out of books.”