“You’ll have to read the story,” said Mackenzie. “It’s sundown; don’t you think you’d better be going back to camp, Joan?”
But Joan was in no haste to leave. She walked with him as he worked the sheep to their bedding-ground, her bridle-rein over her arm. She could get back to camp before dark, she said; Charley would not be worried.
Joan could not have said as much for herself. Her eyes were pools of trouble, her face was anxious and strained. She went silently beside Mackenzie while the dogs worked the sheep along with more than human patience, almost human intelligence. Frequently she looked into his face with a plea dumbly eloquent, but did not again put her fear for him into words. Only when she stood beside her horse near the sheep-wagon, ready to mount and leave him to his solitary supper, she spoke of Hector Hall’s revolvers, which Mackenzie had unstrapped and put aside.
“What are you going to do with them, John?”
She had fallen into the use of that familiar address only that day, moved by the tenderness of the old tale he had told her, perhaps; drawn nearer to him by the discovery of a gentle sentiment in him which she had not known before. He heard it with a warm uplifting of the heart, all without reason, he knew, for it was the range way to be familiar on a shorter acquaintance than theirs.
“I’m going to give them back to him,” he said. “I’ve been carrying them around ever since he left them in the hope he’d get ashamed of himself and come for them.”
Joan started at the sound of galloping hoofs, which 103 rose suddenly out of complete silence as the riders mounted the crest behind them.
“I guess he’s coming for them now,” she said.
There were two riders coming down the slope toward them at a pace altogether reckless. Mackenzie saw at a glance that neither of them was Hector Hall, but one a woman, her loose garments flapping as she rode.
“It’s Swan Carlson and his wife!” he said, unable to cover his amazement at the sight.