Mackenzie received the apprentice as cordially as he could, but it was not as ardent a welcome as the young man may have expected, owing to the gloom of resentment into which Sullivan’s outbreak had thrown this unlucky herder on the frontier of the range.
Reid was rather a sophisticated looking youth of twenty-two or twenty-three, city broke, city marked. There was a poolroom pallor about this thin face, a poolroom stoop to his thin shoulders, that Mackenzie did not like. But he was frank and ingenuous in his manner, with a ready smile that redeemed his homely face, and a pair of blue eyes that seemed young in their innocence 132 compared to the world-knowledge that his face betrayed.
“Take the horses down there to the crick and water ’em,” Tim directed his new herder, “and then you’ll ride back with me as far as Joan’s camp and fetch over some grub to hold you two fellers till the wagon comes. Joan, she’ll know what to give you, and I guess you can find your way back here?”
“Surest thing you know,” said Earl, with easy confidence, riding off to water the horses.
“That kid’s no stranger to the range,” Mackenzie said, more to himself than to Tim, as he watched him ride off.
“No, he used to be around with the cowboys on Malcolm’s ranch when he was in the cattle business. He can handle a horse as good as you or me. Malcolm was the man that set me up in the sheep business; I started in with him like you’re startin’ with me, more than thirty years ago. He was the first sheepman on this range, and he had to fight to hold his own, I’m here to say!”
“You’d better send the kid over into peaceful territory,” Mackenzie suggested, crabbedly.
“No, the old man wants him to get a taste of what he went through to make his start––he was tickled to the toes when he heard the way them Hall boys are rarin’ up and you standin’ ’em off of this range of mine. ‘Send him over there with that man,’ he says; ‘that’s the kind of a man I want him to break in under.’ The old feller was tickled clean to his toes.”
“Is he over at the ranch?”
“No, he went back home last night. Come down to 133 start the kid right, and talk it over with me. It was all a surprise to me, I didn’t know a thing about it, but I couldn’t turn Malcolm down.” Tim winked, looked cunning, nodded in a knowing way. “Kid’s been cuttin’ up throwin’ away too much money; gettin’ into scrapes like a boy in town will, you know. Wild oats and a big crop of ’em. The old man’s staked him out with me for three years, and he ain’t to draw one cent of pay, or have one cent to spend, in that time. If he breaks over, it’s all off between them two. And the kid’s sole heir to nearly half a million.”