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Mackenzie was not looking his way; his thoughts seemed to be a thousand leagues from Tim Sullivan's range and the lambs on it, let them be alive or slaughtered to go with canned beans. But Joan would come back to the sheeplands, as she said everybody came back to them who once had lived in their silences and breathed their wide freedom.
With bent head, this first trouble and sorrow of her life upon her, and with the full understanding in her heart that all which had passed before this day was nothing but the skimming of light shadows across her way, Joan rode homeward. A mile, and the drooping shoulders stiffened; the bent head lifted; Joan looked about her at the sun making the sheeplands glad.
He cast about him, wondering what it could be, wishing that he might supply it and take away the shadow out of her eyes. It was his last thought as he fell asleep in a little swale below the wagon where the grass was tall and soft that he might find what was lacking to make Joan content with the peace and plenty of the sheeplands, and supply that want.
So she married him, and came away with him to the sheeplands, and Swan's hand was as tender of her as a summer wind. It was shearing time when they reached home; Swan was with her every day for a little while, gathering his flocks from the range into the shearing sheds. He was master of more than fifteen thousand sheep.
When she touched it she smiled and smiled, and not for the comfort of the little cross, Mackenzie understood, but in tenderness for what lay beneath it, and for the shepherd lad who gave it. There was a beauty in it for him that made the glad day brighter. This fresh, sprightly generation would redeem the sheeplands, and change the business of growing sheep, he said.
"Nothing to that!" said he, but smiling, a dream in his eyes, over the thought of what might have been a parallel case with Jacob's, here in the sheeplands of the western world. Tim was scarcely out of sight when a man came riding over the hills from the opposite direction. Mackenzie sighted him afar off, watching him as each hill lifted him to a plainer view.
He looked away over the sleeping sheeplands, vast as the sea, and as mysterious under the starlight, thinking that it would require more than hard lessons and unusual tasks to discourage this girl.
Kind Rabbit came frequently to give him drink, to bathe his forehead, to place a cool cloth over his burning eyes. But Dad did not come again. How much better for his peace if the garrulous old rascal had not come at all! And then with the thought of Joan there came mingling the vexing wonder of the train of violence that had attended him into the sheeplands.
That was John Mackenzie's intent and purpose as he trudged the dusty miles of gray hills, with their furze of gray sage, and their gray twilights which fell with a melancholy silence as chilling as the breath of death. For John Mackenzie was going into the sheeplands to become a master. He had determined it all by mathematical rule.
Here he had stood foot to foot with the strong man of the sheeplands, the strangler, the fierce, half-insane terror of peaceful men, and had come off the victor. He had fought this man in his own house, where a man will fight valiantly, even though a coward on the road, and had left him senseless on the floor. It was something for a schoolteacher, counted a mild and childlike man.
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