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Before them the long valley widened as it reached away, the sheep a dusty brown splotch in it, spread at their grazing, the sound of the lambs' wailing rising clear in the pastoral silence. "I stopped at Carlson's house after dark last night," Mackenzie explained, seeing that such explanation must be made, "and turned his wife loose. Carlson resented it when he came home.

I've stood up with four men against me, with meat cleavers and butcher knives in their hands, when I used to work as a sheep butcher back in the packin' house in Chicago, and I've come through with my life. But them was friends of mine," he sighed; "a man knew how they lived. Swan Carlson's got a wolf's blood in his veins. He ain't a human man."

"Dog nothin'! Do I look like a man that'd lose a dog?" "Well, Dad," Mackenzie said, in his slow, thoughtful way, "I don't exactly know how a man that would lose a dog looks, but I don't believe you do." "Swan Carlson's back on the range!" said Dad, delivering it before he was ready, perhaps, and before he had fully prepared the way, but unable to hold it a second longer. "Swan Carlson?"

They were as calm and untroubled as the sky, which Mackenzie thought, with a poignant sweep of transcendant fear for his life, he never had beheld so placid and beautiful as in that dreadful moment. Carlson's huge fingers began to tighten in the grip of death; relax, tighten, each successive clutch growing longer, harder.

Carlson stood weaving on his legs a moment as the fragments of the dish clattered around him, swaying like a tree that waits the last blow of the ax to determine which way it will fall. Mackenzie threw the fragment that remained in his hand into Carlson's face, laying open a long gash in his cheek. As the hot blood gushed down over his jaw Carlson steadied himself on his swaying legs and laughed.

Mackenzie lay still under Carlson's hand, trying to read his intention in his clear, ice-cold, expressionless eyes, watching for his moment to renew the fight which he must push under such hopeless disadvantage. Swan's eyes betrayed nothing of his thoughts.

Charley laughed. "You didn't tear up no boards off the floor tryin' to git away!" said he. Joan smiled; that seemed to express her opinion of it, also. She admired the schoolmaster's modest reluctance when he gave them a bare outline of what followed, shuddering when he laughed over Mrs. Carlson's defense of her husband with the ax. "Gee!" said Charley, "I hope dad'll give you a job."

The joy of his strength, the pleasure in the agony that spoke from his victim's face, gleamed for a moment in Carlson's eyes as he bent, gazing; then flickered like a light in the wind, and died. Mackenzie's revolver lay not more than four feet from his hand. He gathered his strength for a struggle to writhe from under Carlson's pressing knee.

The next day at a village near Priluk Lt. Carlson's men on patrol encountered a Bolo combat patrol and inflicted severe losses and took five prisoners. Christmas Day and several other days were occupied with these patrol combats by the two opposing forces, each of which thought the other had gone into winter quarters.

Joan's eyes were still severe, but a question grew in them as she faced him, looking at him searchingly, as if to read what it was he hid. "Where have you been all day? Dad's been looking high and low for you." "I guess I was over at Carlson's when the old snoozer came," Reid told her, easy and careless, confident and open, in his manner. "Carlson's? What business could you "