“You’ll take it, all right. But if you ever do work up to be a sheepman, and of course you will if you stick to the range long enough, you’ll never be able to leave again. Sheep tie a person down like a houseful of children.”
“Maybe I’d never want to go. I’ve had my turn at it out there; I’ve been snubbed and discounted, all but despised, because I had a little learning and no money to go with it. I can hide my little learning here, and nobody seems to care about the money. Yes, I think I’ll stay on the range.”
Joan turned her face away, and he knew the yearning was in her eyes as they strained into the starlit horizon after the things she had never known.
“I don’t see what could ever happen that would make me want to stay here,” she said at last. She got up with the sudden nimbleness of a deer, so quickly that Mackenzie though she must be either startled or offended, but saw in a moment it was only her natural way of moving in the untrammeled freedom of her lithe, strong limbs.
“You’ll find a soft place on the side of the hill somewhere to sleep,” she said, turning toward the wagon. “I’m going to pile in. Good night.”
Mackenzie sat again by the ashes of the little fire after giving her good night. He felt that he had suffered in her estimation because of his lowly ambition to follow her father, and the hundred other obscure heroes of the sheep country, and become a flockmaster, sequestered and safe among the sage-gray hills.
Joan expected more of a man who was able to teach school; expected lofty aims, far-reaching ambitions. But that was because Joan did not know the world that lifted the lure of its flare beyond the rim of her horizon. She must taste it to understand, and come back with a bruised heart to the shelter of her native hills.
And this lonesomeness of which she had been telling him, this dread sickness that fell upon a man in those solitudes, and drained away his courage and hope––must he experience it, like a disease of adolescence from which few escape? He did not believe it. Joan had said she was immune to it, having been born in its atmosphere, knowing nothing but solitude and silence, in which there was no strange nor fearful thing.