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Mackenzie returned to Dad's camp thinking that the way to becoming a flockmaster was a checkered one, and filled with more adventures, harsh and gentle, than he ever had believed belonged to his apportionment in life.
Mackenzie sat a long time on his hill that night, his ear turned to the wind, smoking his pipe and thinking the situation over while listening for the first sound of commotion among the sheep. He had pledged himself to Tim and Joan that he would not quit the sheep country without proving that he had in him the mettle of a flockmaster. Hector Hall had been given to understand the same thing.
Could anything, for example, have exceeded the bitterness and the boorishness of the other rich flockmaster whom David's youths, with Eastern frankness, had asked, "Give, we pray thee, whatsoever cometh to thine hand unto thy servants, and to thy son David" "Who is David? and who is the son of Jesse?" burst out Nabal in a fury.
There must have been some psychological undercurrent carrying strength and skill to him through all the years of his romantic imaginings; the spirits of old heroes of that land must have lent him their counsel and might in that desperate battle with the Norse flockmaster. Adventure was not dead out of the land, it seemed, although this was a rather sordid and ignoble brand.
Mackenzie sat with his elbow on the table, his chair partly turned toward the door, just within the threshold and a little to one side, where the flockmaster would see him the moment he stepped into the light. The traveler's pack lay on the floor at the door jamb; the smoke from his pipe drifted out to tell of his presence in the honest announcement of a man who had nothing to hide.
As he sat and weighed the argument for and against the sheep business, the calling of flockmaster began to take on the color of romantic attraction which had not been apparent to him before. In his way, every flockmaster was a hero, inflexible against the unreckoned forces which rose continually to discourage him.
He was dependent on the flockmaster for his clothing and keep, even tobacco and papers for his cigarettes. If he knew anything about the arrangement between his father and Sullivan in regard to Joan, he did not mention it. That he knew it, Mackenzie fully believed, for Tim Sullivan was not the man to keep the reward sequestered.
A man never could advance to notability in a community that rated him as mildly simple; he would have a hard time of it even to become notorious. Only one man there had taken an interest in him as man to man, a flockmaster who had come into that country twenty years before, a schoolteacher like himself.
Mackenzie knew the flockmaster had reached a point at last where he would stand, writing or no writing, for there was the earnestness of truth in his voice, the vibrant softness of affection. He gave the flockmaster his hand, saying no word.
"If anybody's tryin' such a game as that, it's you," Mackenzie told him. "Get 'em out of here, and keep 'em out." "I got fifteen hundred in that band you'll have to help me cut 'em out," said Swan. "You had about seven hundred," Mackenzie returned, dispassionately, although it broke on him suddenly what the big flockmaster was trying to put through.
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