“Your head’s swelled, young feller,” he said, “on account of that lucky thump you landed on Swan Carlson. You’ve got about as much chance with that man as you have with a grizzly bear, and you’ve got less chance with me. You’ve got till this time tomorrow to be six miles west of here with that band of sheep.”
Hall rode off with that word, leaving a pretty good impression that he meant it, and that it was final. Mackenzie hadn’t a doubt that he would come back to see how well the mandate had been obeyed next day.
If there was anything to Hall’s claim on that territory, by agreement or right of priority which sheepmen were supposed to respect between themselves, Tim Sullivan knew it, Mackenzie reflected. For a month past Tim had been sending him eastward every time the wagon was moved, a scheme to widen the distance between him and Joan and make it an obstacle in her road, he believed at the time. Now it began to show another purpose. Perhaps this was the winter pasture claimed by the Hall brothers, and Tim had sent him in where he was afraid to come himself.
It seemed a foolish thing to squabble over a piece of grazing land where all the world lay out of doors, but Hector Hall’s way of coming up to it was unpleasant. It was decidedly offensive, bullying, oppressive. If he should give way before it he’d just as well leave the range, Mackenzie knew; his force would be spent there, his day closed before it had fairly begun. If he designed seriously to remain there and become a flockmaster, and that he intended to do, with all the sincerity in him, he’d have to meet Hall’s bluff with a stronger one, and stand 95 his ground, whether right or wrong. If wrong, a gentleman’s adjustment could be made, his honor saved.
So deciding, he settled that matter, and put it out of his head until its hour. There was something more pleasant to cogitate––the parallel of Jacob and Laban, Tim Sullivan and himself. It was strange how the craft of Laban had come down to Tim Sullivan across that mighty flight of time. It would serve Tim the right turn, in truth, if something should come of it between him and Joan. He smiled in anticipatory pleasure at Tim’s discomfiture and surprise.
But that was not in store for him, he sighed. Joan would shake her wings out in a little while, and fly away, leaving him there, a dusty sheepman, among the husks of his dream. Still, a man might dream on a sunny afternoon. There was no interdiction against it; Hector Hall, with his big guns, could not ride in and order a man off that domain. A shepherd had the ancient privilege of dreams; he might drink himself drunk on them, insane on them in the end, as so many of them were said to do in that land of lonesomeness, where there was scarcely an echo to give a man back his own faint voice in mockery of his solitude.
Evening, with the sheep homing to the bedding-ground, brought reflections of a different hue. Since the raid on his flock Mackenzie had given up his bunk in the wagon for a bed under a bush on the hillside nearer the sheep. Night after night he lay with the rifle at his hand, waiting the return of the grisly monster who had spent his fury on the innocent simpletons in his care.
Whether it was Swan Carlson, with the strength of his great arms, driven to madness by the blow he had received, or whether it was another whom the vast solitudes of that country had unhinged, Mackenzie did not know. But that it was man, he had no doubt.