“I ain’t so sure,” he said. “Them looks like man’s tracks, but a grizzly’s got a foot like a nigger, and one of them big fellers makes a noise like a lopin’ horse when he tears off through the bresh. I tell you, John, no human man that ever lived could take a live sheep and tear it up that a-way!”
“All right, then; it was a bear,” Mackenzie said, not disposed to argue the matter, for argument would not change what he knew to be a fact, nor yet convince Dad 86 Frazer against his reason and experience. But Mackenzie knew that they were the footprints of a man, and that the noise of the creature running away from camp was the noise of a galloping horse.
CHAPTER IX
A TWO-GUN MAN
“You know, John, if a man’s goin’ to be a sheepman, John, he’s got to keep awake day and night. He ain’t goin’ to set gabbin’ and let a grizzly come right up under his nose and kill his sheep. It’s the difference between the man that wouldn’t do it and the man that would that makes the difference between a master and a man. That’s the difference that stands against Dad Frazer. He’d never work up to partnership in a band of sheep if he lived seven hundred years.”
So Tim Sullivan, a few days after the raid on John Mackenzie’s flock. He had come over on hearing of it from Dad Frazer, who had gone to take charge of another band. Tim was out of humor over the loss, small as it was out of the thousands he numbered in his flocks. He concealed his feelings as well as he could under a friendly face, but his words were hard, the accusation and rebuke in them sharp.
Mackenzie flared up at the raking-over Tim gave him, and turned his face away to hold down a hot reply. Only after a struggle he composed himself to speak.
“I suppose it was because you saw the same difference in me that you welched on your agreement to put me in a partner on the increase of this flock as soon as Dad taught me how to work the sheep and handle the dogs,” he said. “That’s an easy way for a man to slide out from under his obligations; it would apply anywhere in 88 life as well as in the sheep business. I tell you now I don’t think it was square.”