“It’s going to stop, right here. What did you let him treat you this way for? Why didn’t some of your neighbors take a hand in it?”
“Nobody comes,” she sighed, shaking her head sadly. “The name of Swan Carlson is a curse on the wind. Nobody passes; we are far from any road that men travel; your face is the first I have seen since Swan put the chain on me like a wolf.”
“Where does he keep his tools?”
“Maybe in the barn––I do not know. Only there never is anything left in my reach. Will you set me free, kind stranger?”
“If I can find anything to cut that chain. Let me have the lantern.”
The woman hesitated, her eyes grown great with fright.
“My man, he is the one who choked two sheepherders with his hands. You must have read in the paper–––”
“Maybe it was before my time. Give me down the lantern.”
Swan Carlson appeared to be a man who got along 12 with very few tools. Mackenzie could not find a cold-chisel among the few broken and rusted odds and ends in the barn, although there was an anvil, such as every rancher in that country had, fastened to a stump in the yard, a hammer rusting beside it on the block. As Mackenzie stood considering what could be done with the material at hand, the woman called to him from the door, her voice vibrant with anxious excitement:
“My man will come soon,” she said.