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From his way of plunging abruptly into this matter, which he never had discussed with her before, and his sharpness and apparent displeasure with her, Joan knew that he had seen Reid overnight. They were beside the sheep-wagon, to a wheel of which Joan's horse was tied, all saddled and ready to mount.
And there was the picture of the red-haired giant of the sheeplands and that flat-chested, sharp-faced youth drinking beside the sheep-wagon in the night. There was Swan, lofty, cold, unbending; there was Reid, the craft, the knowledge of the world's under places written on his brow, the deceit that he practiced against his host hidden away in his breast.
As she followed the sheep she carried her books; at night, long after Charley had gone to sleep, she sat with them by the lantern light in the sheep-wagon. Unspoiled by the diversions and distractions which divide the mind of the city student, she acquired and held a month's tasks in a week. The thirsty traveler in the desert places had come to the oasis of her dreams.
"Oh no; though I was asked, and so was Miss Wetmore, I believe. Of course poor Mrs. Yellett had no other recourse, as I suppose you know. I chose to be disobliging that time, and was sorry for it afterwards—sorry when I heard about the letter that really went! Do you find the sheep-wagon so very dreadful?"
Tim Sullivan arrived toward evening, entering the sheep-wagon softly, his loud tongue low in awe for this fighting man. "How are you, John? How are you, lad?" he whispered, coming on his toes to the cot, his face as expressive of respect as if he had come into the presence of the dead. Mackenzie grinned over this great mark of respect in the flockmaster of Poison Creek. "I'm all right," he said.
"Drinking whisky beside the wagon with Hector Hall. They will not fight. No." "No," he echoed, abstractedly, making a mental picture of Carlson and Hall beside the sheep-wagon, the light of a lantern on their faces, cards in their fists, a jug of whisky in the middle ground within reach from either hand.
When Tim mounted to leave he looked round the range again with a drawing of trouble in his face, as if he searched the peaceful landscape for the shadow of wings. "I ain't got another sheep-wagon to give you right now, John; I guess you'll have to make out with a tent till winter," he said. "I'd rather have it," Mackenzie replied.
"That was ten or twelve days ago," Dad explained, when Mackenzie found himself blinking understandingly at the sunlight through the open end of the sheep-wagon one morning. "You was chawed and beat up till you was hangin' together by threads." Mackenzie was as weak as a young mouse.
He told her that the time of idling now was over; she must go with him in a sheep-wagon to the range and care for her band of sheep, sharing the labors of his life as she shared its rewards. No; that was not to her liking. The wife of a rich man should not live as a peasant woman, dew in her draggled skirts to her knees, the sun browning her skin and bleaching her hair.
I told her you had seen two men on horseback pass her out there in the hills, that I had seen the mark of her buggy wheels and the tracks of the two horses on the run and that the print of moccasins led from the sheep-wagon into the brush. She looked at me with that kind of stare where you can see the lie lying back of it and said "I didn't see anybody.
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