“You want to be shown. All right; I’m game, even at forty dollars and found.”
Tim beamed at this declaration, but the fires of his satisfaction he was crafty enough to hide from even Mackenzie’s penetrating eyes. Perhaps the glow was due to a thought that this schoolmaster, who owed his notoriety in the sheeplands to a lucky blow, would fail, leaving him far ahead on the deal. He tightened his girths and set his foot in the stirrup, ready to mount and ride home; paused so, hand on the saddle-horn, with a queer, half-puzzled, half-suspicious look in his sheep-wise eyes.
“Wasn’t there something else that feller Jacob was workin’ for besides the interest in the stock?” he asked.
“Seems to me like there was,” Mackenzie returned, carelessly. “The main thing I remember in the transaction was the stone he set up between the old man and himself on the range. ‘The Lord watch between thee and me,’ you know, it had on it. That’s a mighty good motto yet for a sheepherder to front around where his 90 boss can read it. A man’s got to have somebody to keep an eye on a sheepman when his back’s turned, even today.”
Tim laughed, swung into the saddle, where he sat roving his eyes over the range, and back to the little band of sheep that seemed only a handful of dust in the unbounded pastures where they fed. The hillsides were green in that favored section, greener than anywhere Mackenzie had been in the sheeplands, the grass already long for the lack of mouths to feed. Tim’s face glowed at the sight.
“This is the best grazin’ this range has ever produced in my day,” he said, “too much of it here for that little band you’re runnin’. I’ll send Dad over with three thousand more this week. You can camp together––it’ll save me a wagon, and he’ll be company. How’s Joan gettin on with the learnin’?”
“She’s eating it up.”
“I was afraid it’d be that way,” said Tim, gloomily; “you can’t discourage that girl.”
“She’s too sincere and capable to be discouraged. I laid down my hand long ago.”
“And it’s a pity to ruin a good sheepwoman with learnin’,” Tim said, shaking his head with the sadness of it.