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That feller was afraid you and Joan might git to holdin' hands out here on the range so much together, heads a touchin' over them books." Mackenzie heard the old man as the wind. No, he had not taught Joan enough to keep her in the sheeplands; she had not read deeply enough into that lesson which he once spoke of as the easiest to learn and the hardest to forget.
I don't like a man that can draw a blinder over his eyes like a frog." Mackenzie smiled at the aptness of Dad's comparison. It was, indeed, as if Reid interposed a film like a frog when he plunged from one element into another, so to speak; when he left the sheeplands in his thoughts and went back to the haunts and the companions lately known.
He turned to the open door, stifled by remorse for what he had done, although he had done it in a fight that had been pushed upon him, as all his fights in the sheeplands had been pushed. He might have taken Swan at his manly offer to fight hand-to-hand to see who should open the door; or he might have allowed him to open it, and saved all violence between them.
Dusk was thickening into darkness over the sheeplands; the dogs were driving the straggling sheep back to the bedding-ground, where many of them already lay in contentment, quickly over the flurry of Swan Carlson's passing. Joan stood at her stirrup, her face lifted to the heavens, and it was white as an evening primrose under the shadow of her hat.
The horse was seen descending the hill, and the wearisome series had to be repeated in reverse order: Whitepits, Springmead, Cappel's Piece, The Flats, Middle Field, Sheeplands, Sixteen Acres. She hoped Tall had had presence of mind enough to give the mare up to Gabriel, and return himself on foot. The rider neared them. It was Tall. "O, what folly!" said Bathsheba.
Reid got up in morose impatience, flinging away his cigarette, went to the wagon, looked in, slammed the little canvas door with its mica window shut with a bang, and turned back. There seemed little of the carelessness, the easy spirit that had made him so adaptable at first to his surroundings, which Reid had brought with him into the sheeplands left in him now.
Maybe he would find it too late even to glimpse them when he arrived in the heart of the sheeplands; perhaps times had shifted since the heavy-jowled illiterates whom he had met in Jasper began their careers with a few pounds of dried apples and uncommon endurance for hardships in the open fields.
Now Swan and he were quits, a blow on each side, nobody debtor any more, and Reid was away ahead of anybody who had figured in the violence that Mackenzie had brought into the sheeplands with him as an unwelcome stranger lets in a gust of wind on a winter night. In spite of all this, the vocation of sheepman never appeared so full of attractive possibilities to Mackenzie as it looked that hour.
Tim laughed, swung into the saddle, where he sat roving his eyes over the range, and back to the little band of sheep that seemed only a handful of dust in the unbounded pastures where they fed. The hillsides were green in that favored section, greener than anywhere Mackenzie had been in the sheeplands, the grass already long for the lack of mouths to feed. Tim's face glowed at the sight.
Tim beamed at this declaration, but the fires of his satisfaction he was crafty enough to hide from even Mackenzie's penetrating eyes. Perhaps the glow was due to a thought that this schoolmaster, who owed his notoriety in the sheeplands to a lucky blow, would fail, leaving him far ahead on the deal.
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