“And you don’t congratulate me on becoming a paid sheepherder, my first step on the way to flockmaster!”
“I don’t know that you’re to be congratulated,” she returned, facing him seriously. “All there is to success here is brute strength and endurance against storms and winter weather––it don’t take any brains. Out there where you’ve been and I’m going, there must be something bigger and better for a man, it seems to me. But maybe men get tired of it––I don’t know.”
“You’ll understand it better when you go there, Joan.”
“Yes, I’ll understand a lot of things that are locked up to me now. Well, I don’t want to go as much all the time now as I did––only in spells sometimes. If you stay here and teach me, maybe I’ll get over it for good.”
Joan laughed nervously, half of it forced, her face averted.
“If I could teach you enough to keep you here, Joan, I’d think it was the biggest thing I’d ever done.”
“I don’t want to know any more if it means giving up,” she said.
“It looks like giving up to you, Joan, but I’ve only started,” he corrected her, in gentle spirit.
“I oughtn’t talk that way to you,” she said, turning 72 to him contritely, her earnest eyes lifted to his, “it’s none of my business what you do. If you hadn’t come here I’d never have heard of––of amare, maybe.”
Joan bent her head, a flush over her brown cheeks, a smile of mischief at the corners of her mouth. Mackenzie laughed, but strained and unnaturally, his own tough face burning with a hot tide of mounting blood.