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Sullivan's doubt of him would have increased; the scorn which he could not quite cover before would be open now and expressed. They had no use in the sheeplands for a man who fought and lost. They would respect him more if he refused to fight at all. Dad was still talking, rubbing his fuzzy chin with reflective hand, looking along the hillside to where Rabbit stood watch over the sheep.
He grinned dustily as he found himself wishing, in all seriousness, that somebody would take a day off and teach her the rest of the hymn. Mackenzie's bones were weary of the road, hard as he tried to make himself believe they were not, and that he was a tough man, ready to take and give as it might come to him in the life of the sheeplands.
The fellow behind the horse, too sure of his safety, too contemptuous of this shepherd schoolmaster whose notorious simplicity had gone abroad in the sheeplands exciting the rough risibilities of men, was careless of whether his target stood still or ran; he did not lift his eyes from the reloading of his gun to see.
Perhaps she did not expect her teacher to remain there in the sheeplands, shut away from the life that he had breathed so long and put aside for what seemed to her an unaccountable whim. "You'll be reading Caesar by winter," Mackenzie told her as she prepared to ride back to her camp. "You'll have to take it slower then; we can't have lessons every day." "Why not?"
A mile, and the short breath of anger died out of her panting lungs, the long, deep inspiration of restored balance in its place; the pale shade left her cold cheeks, where the warm blood came again. Joan, drawing new hope from the thoughts which came winging to her, looked abroad over the sunlit sheeplands, and smiled.
Mackenzie felt the leg of his trousers wet from the blood of his wound, and began to have some concern lest an artery had been cut. But this he put off investigating until he heard Reid ride out to the dim road in front of Carlson's cabin, and go his way out of the sheeplands to whatever destiny lay ahead. Then Mackenzie looked himself over, to find that it was not a serious wound.
He diminished down the hill. Bathsheba watched. So did all the rest. Tall cantered along the bridle-path through Sixteen Acres, Sheeplands, Middle Field The Flats, Cappel's Piece, shrank almost to a point, crossed the bridge, and ascended from the valley through Springmead and Whitepits on the other side.
A little while, now in the pressure of those hairy, bare arms, now free for one gasping breath, fighting as man never fought in the sheeplands before that hour, and Mackenzie felt himself snatched up bodily and thrown down from uplifted arms with a force that must have ended all for him then but for the interposition of a sage-clump that broke the fall. Instantly the silent monster was upon him.
"But how did you get out of there?" Joan asked. "I took an unfair advantage of Swan and hit him with a table leg." "Gee! dad's got to give you a job," said Charley; "I'll make him." "I'll hold you to that, Charley," Mackenzie laughed. In the boy's eyes Mackenzie was already a hero, greater than any man that had come into the sheeplands in his day. Sheep people are not fighting folks.
Tim had done that much for them in rearing his mansion on the hilltop, no matter what he had denied them of educational refinements. Joan had gone hungry on this distinction; she had developed the bitterness that comes from the seeds of loneliness. This was lacking in Mary, who was all smiles, pink and white in spite of sheeplands winds and suns.
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