“I wanted to get into the heart of the sheep country for one thing, and several of my friends recommended you as the best sheepman on the range, for another. I want to learn under a master, if I learn at all.”
“Right,” Tim nodded, “right and sound. Do you think you’ve got the stuff in you to make a sheepman out of?”
“It will have to be a pretty hard school if I can’t stick it through.”
“Summers are all right,” said Tim, reflectively, nodding away at the distant hills, “and falls are all right, but you take it winter and early spring, and it tries the 50 mettle in a man. Blizzards and starvation, and losses through pile-ups and stampedes, wolves and what not, make a man think sometimes he’ll never go through it any more. Then spring comes, with the cold wind, and slush up to your ankles, and you out day and night lookin’ after the ewes and lambs. Lambin’ time is the hard time, and it’s the time when a man makes it or loses, accordin’ to what’s in him to face hardship and work.”
“I’ve heard about it; I know what I’m asking to go up against, Mr. Sullivan.”
“You want to buy in, or take a band on shares?”
“I’d rather take a band on shares. If I put what little money I’ve got into it I’ll go it alone.”
“That’s right; it’s safer to let the other man take the risk. It ain’t fair to us sheepmen, but we have to do it to get men. Well, when we hit on a good man, it pays better than hirin’ poor ones at fifty dollars a month and found. I’ve had old snoozers workin’ for me that the coyotes eat the boots off of while they was asleep. You look kind of slim and light to tackle a job on the range.”
Mackenzie made no defense of his weight, advancing no further argument in behalf of his petition for a job. Sullivan measured him over with his appraising eyes, saying nothing about the bruises he bore, although Mackenzie knew he was burning with curiosity to go into the matter of how and when he received them.
Sullivan was a man of calm benignity of face, a placid certainty of his power and place in the world; a rugged man, broad-handed, slow. His pleasure was in the distinction 51 of his wealth, and not in any use that he made of it for his own comfort or the advancement of those under his hand. Even so, he was of a type superior to the general run of flockmasters such as Mackenzie had met.