Mackenzie attempted neither comment nor reply to this, feeling that it was Joan’s heart speaking to herself alone. He looked away over the sleeping sheeplands, vast as the sea, and as mysterious under the starlight, thinking that it would require more than hard lessons and unusual tasks to discourage this girl. She stood at the fountain-edge, leaning with dry lips to drink, her wistful eyes strong to probe the mysteries which lay locked in books yet strange to her, but wiser in her years than many a man who had skimmed a college course. There was a vast difference between knowledge and learning, indeed; it never had been so apparent to him as in the presence of that outspoken girl of the sheep range that summer night.
What would the world do with Joan Sullivan if she ever broke her fetters and went to it? How would it accept her faith and frankness, her high scorn for the deceits upon which it fed? Not kindly, he knew. There would be disillusionment ahead for her, and bitter awakening from long-wrapping dreams. If he could teach her to be content in the wide freedom of that place he would accomplish the greatest service that he could bring her in the days of her untroubled youth. Discourage her, said Tim Sullivan. Mackenzie felt that this was not his job.
“Maybe Charley’s right about it,” she said, her voice low, and soft with that inherited gentleness which must have come from Tim Sullivan’s mother, Mackenzie 64 thought. “He’s a wise kid, maybe I would want to come back faster than I went away. But I get so tired of it sometimes I walk up and down out here by the wagon half the night, and wear myself out making plans that I may never be able to put through.”
“It’s just as well,” he told her, nodding again in his solemn, weighty fashion; “everybody that amounts to anything has this fever of unrest. Back home we used to stack the wheat to let it sweat and harden. You’re going through that. It takes the grossness out of us.”
“Have you gone through it?”
“Years of it; over the worst of it now, I hope.”
“And you came here. Was that the kind of an ambition you had? Was that all your dreams brought you?”
“But I’ve seen more here than I ever projected in my schemes, Miss Joan. I’ve seen the serenity of the stars in this vastness; I’ve felt the wind of freedom on my face.” And to himself: “And I have seen the firelight leap in a maiden’s eyes, and I have looked deep into the inspiring fountain of her soul.” But there was not the boldness in him, nor the desire to risk her rebuke again, to bring it to his lips.
“Do you think you’ll like it after you get over the lonesomeness?”
“Yes, if I take the lonesomeness.”