Tim rode away, leaving Mackenzie to his reflections as he watched his boss’ broad back grow smaller from hill to hill. The sheepherder smiled as he recalled Tim’s puzzled inquiry on the other consideration of Jacob’s contract with the slippery Laban.
What is this thou hast done unto me? Did not I 91 serve with thee for Rachel? Wherefore then hast thou beguiled me?
“Tim would do it, too,” Mackenzie said, nodding his grave head; “he’d work off the wrong girl on a man as sure as he had two.”
It was queer, the way Tim had thought, at the last minute, of the “something else” Jacob had worked for; queer, the way he had turned, his foot up in the stirrup, that puzzled, suspicious expression in his mild, shrewd face. Even if he should remember on the way home, or get out his Bible on his arrival and look the story up, there would be nothing of a parallel between the case of Jacob and that of John Mackenzie to worry his sheepman’s head. For though Jacob served his seven years for Rachel, which “seemed to him but a few days, for the love he had to her,” he, John Mackenzie, was not serving Tim Sullivan for Joan.
“Nothing to that!” said he, but smiling, a dream in his eyes, over the thought of what might have been a parallel case with Jacob’s, here in the sheeplands of the western world.
Tim was scarcely out of sight when a man came riding over the hills from the opposite direction. Mackenzie sighted him afar off, watching him as each hill lifted him to a plainer view. He was a stranger, and a man unsparing of his horse, pushing it uphill and down with unaltered speed. He rode as if the object of his journey lay a long distance ahead, and his time for reaching it was short.
Mackenzie wondered if the fellow had stolen the horse, having it more than half in mind to challenge his passage 92 until he could give an account of his haste, when he saw that the rider had no intention of going by without speech. As he mounted the crest of the hill above the flock, he swung straight for the spot where Mackenzie stood.
The stranger drew up with a short grunt of greeting, turning his gaze over the range as if in search of strayed stock. He was a short, spare man, a frowning cast in his eyes, a face darkly handsome, but unsympathetic as a cougar’s. He looked down at Mackenzie presently, as if he had put aside the recognition of his presence as a secondary matter, a cold insolence in his challenging, sneering eyes.
“What are you doing over here east of Horsethief?” he inquired, bending his black brows in a frown, his small mustache twitching in catlike threat of a snarl.
“I’m grazing that little band of sheep you see down yonder,” Mackenzie returned, evenly, running his eyes over the fellow’s gear.