The Flockmaster of Poison Creek

by Ogden, George W

  “I don’t suppose it’s very healthy for any man, Dad.”

  “You said it! I’ve went fifty miles around a range to skip a feller that was lookin’ for my skelp, and I’d go a thousand before I’d crowd a fight. I never was much on the fight, and runnin’ sheep took what little was in me out a long time ago.”

  Dad got out his red box of corn-husk cigarettes, offering it silently to Mackenzie, who shook his head, knowing very well that Dad did it to observe conventions rather than out of a desire to have him help himself. The stock of Mexican smokes was running low; Dad had spoken of it only the day before, and his feet were itching for the road to the border, he said.

  “Well, he’s got a name and a fame in this country he can travel on,” said Dad.

  Which was true enough. Mackenzie’s fight with Swan Carlson had taken second place, his reputation as a fighting man in the sheeplands had paled almost to nothing, after Reid’s swift-handed dealing with Matt Hall. The fame of his exploit ran through the country, fixing his place in it at once, for Matt Hall was known as a man who had the strength of seven in his long, gorilla arms.

  Hector Hall, brother of the slain man, seemed to accept the tragedy with a sorrowful resignation in which no shadow of revenge appeared. He let it be known that Matt had been irresponsible at times, given to night-prowlings and outbreaks of violence of strange and fantastic forms. How much truth there was in this excuse for the dead man, Hector alone knew. But no matter for his passivity, Mackenzie did not trust him. He made a requisition on Tim Sullivan at once for revolvers for himself and Reid, which Tim delegated the young man to go to Four Corners and buy.

  “Well, I come over to see if you’ll lend Reid to me three or four days while I make a trip to town,” said Dad. “I’ve got a little business over there to tend to I’ve been puttin’ off for more than a month.”

  “Yes, if it’s all right with Tim you can have him. What’s up, getting married?”

  “Kind of arrangin’, John, kind of arrangin’. There’s a widow-lady over at Four Corners I used to rush that needs a man to help her with her sheep. A man might as well marry a sheep ranch as work on one, I reckon.”

  “It’s a shorter cut, anyhow. When do you want Reid?”

  “I was aimin’ to rack out this evenin’, John.”

  “I’ll send him over this afternoon. I don’t know where he is, but he’ll be back for dinner.”

  Dad went away well satisfied and full of cheer, Mackenzie marveling over his marital complexities as he watched him go. Together with Rabbit, and the Mexican woman down El Paso way whom John had mentioned, but of whom Dad never had spoken, and no telling how many more scattered around the country, Dad seemed to be laying the groundwork for a lively roundup one of his days. He said he’d been marrying women off and on for forty years. His easy plan seemed to be just to take one that pleased his capricious temper wherever he found her, without regard to former obligations.

  Mackenzie grinned. He did not believe any man was so obscure as to be able to escape many wives. Dad seemed to be a dry-land sailor, with a wife in every town he ever had made in his life. Mackenzie understood about Mexican marriages. If they were priest marriages, they were counted good; if they were merely justice of the peace ones they were subject to wide and elastic infringement on both sides. Probably Indian marriages were similar. Surely Dad was old enough to know what he was about.

  Reid came to camp at noontime, and prepared dinner in his quick and handy way. Mackenzie did not take up the question of his acting as relief for Dad while the old scout went off to push his arrangements for marrying a sheep ranch, seeing that Reid was depressed and down-spirited and in no pleasant mood.

  They were almost independent of the camp-mover, owing to their light equipment, which they could carry with them from day to day as the sheep ranged. Supplies were all they needed from the wagon, which came around to them twice a week. After dinner Reid began packing up for the daily move, moody and silent, cigarette dangling on his lip.

  “It’s a one-hell of a life!” said he, looking up from the last knot in the rope about the bundle of tent.

  “Have you soured on it already, Earl?”

  Reid sat on the bundle of tent, a cloud on his face, hat drawn almost to the bridge of his nose, scowling out over the sheep range as if he would curse it to a greater barrenness.

  “Three years of this, and what’ll I be? Hell! I can’t even find that other Hall.”

  “Have you been out looking for him?”

  “That big Swede over there was tellin’ me he’s put me down in his book for a killin’. I thought I’d give him a chance to get it over with if he meant it.”

  “Has Carlson been over?”

  “No, I rode over there the other evening. Say, is that the woman you found chained up when you struck this country?”

  “She’s the one.”

  Mackenzie looked at Reid curiously as he answered. There was something of quick eagerness in the young man’s inquiry, a sudden light of a new interest in his face, in sharp contrast with the black mood of a moment before.

  “She looks like an Ibsen heroine,” said Reid. “Take that woman out of this country and dress her right, and she’d be a queen.”

  “You’d better keep away from there,” said Mackenzie, dryly.

  “Oh, I guess I can take care of Swan if you could,” Reid returned, with a certain easy insolence, jerking his hip to hitch his gun around in suggestive movement.

  Mackenzie dropped the matter without more words, seeing too plainly the humor of the youth. Maybe Dad had diagnosed his ailment aright, but to Mackenzie it appeared something more than plain lonesomeness. The notoriety attending the killing of Matt Hall had not been good for Reid. He wanted more of it, and a bigger audience, a wider field.

  If this was a taste of the adventure of the West’s past romantic times, Mackenzie felt that he was lucky he had come too late to share it. His own affair with Swan Carlson had been sordid enough, but this unlucky embroilment in which Reid had killed a man was a plain misfortune to the hero of the fight. He told Reid of Dad’s request.

  “You go and run his sheep for him,” Reid suggested. “It’ll take you a little nearer Joan.”

  This he added as with studied sneer, his face flushing darkly, his thin mouth twisted in an ugly grin.

  Mackenzie passed it, but not without the hurt of the unkind stab showing in his face. It was so entirely unjustified as to be cruel, for Mackenzie was not in Reid’s way even to the extent of one lurking, selfish thought. Since Reid had saved his life from Matt Hall’s murderous hands, Mackenzie had withdrawn even his most remote hope in regard to Joan. Before that he had spun his thread of dreams, quite honestly, and with intent that he would not have denied, but since, not at all.

  He owed Reid too much to cross him with Joan; he stepped aside, denying himself a thought of her save only in relation of teacher and pupil, trying to convince himself that it was better in the end for Joan. Reid had all the advantage of him in prospects; he could lift up the curtain on his day and show Joan the splendors of a world that a schoolmaster could point out only from afar. Mackenzie seemed to ignore the youth’s suggestion that he go and tend Dad’s flock.

  “If I had a thousand dollars I’d dust it for Mexico tomorrow,” said Reid. He turned to Mackenzie, pushing his hat back from his forehead, letting the sun on his savagely knotted face. “I haven’t got money to send a telegram, not even a special delivery letter! Look at me! A millionaire’s son and sole heir, up against a proposition like this for three years!”

  Mackenzie let him sweat it out, offering neither water for his thirst nor wood for his fire. Reid sat in surly silence, running his thumb along his cartridge belt.

  “A man’s friends forget him out here,” he complained; “he’s the same to them as dead.”

  “It’s the way everywhere when a man wants to borrow money,” Mackenzie told him, not without the shade of a sneer.

  “I’ve let them have enough in
my time that they could afford to come across with what I asked for!”

  “I think you’d better stick to the sheep business with Tim,” Mackenzie advised, not unkindly, ashamed of his momentary weakness and scorn. “A man’s prospects don’t look very good back home when a bunch of parasites and grafters won’t come over with a little loan.”

  “They can go to the devil! I can live without them.”

  “And get fat on it, kid. Three years here will be little more to you than as many days, if you get––interested.”

  Reid exclaimed impatiently, dismissing such assurance with a testy gesture.

  “How much will you give me for my chances?” he asked.

  “Nobody else can play your hand, kid.”

  “On the square, Mackenzie. Will you give me a thousand dollars?”

  “I’m not sole heir to any millionaire,” Mackenzie reminded him, taking the proposal in the jesting spirit that he supposed it was given.

  “On the dead, Mackenzie––I mean it. Will you give me a thousand dollars for my place in the sheep game, girl and all? If you will, I’ll hit the breeze tonight for Mexico and kick it all over to you, win or lose.”

  “If I could buy you out for a dime we couldn’t trade,” Mackenzie told him, a coldness in tone and manner that was more than a reproof.

  “Joan ought to be worth that much to you!” Reid sneered.

  Mackenzie got up, walked a few steps away, turned back presently, his temper in hand.

  “It’s not a question open to discussion between gentlemen,” he said.

  Reid blinked up at him, an odd leer on his sophisticated face, saying no more. He made a pack on his saddle of the camp outfit, and started off along the ridge, leaving Mackenzie to follow as he pleased. A mile or more along Reid pitched upon a suitable camping place. He had himself established long before Mackenzie came to where he sat smoking amid his gloomy, impatient thoughts.

  “I’m not going over to relieve that old skunk,” Reid announced, “not without orders from Sullivan. If he gets off you’ll have to relieve him yourself. I don’t want that Hall guy to get it into his nut that I’m runnin’ away from him.”

  “All right, Earl,” said Mackenzie, good-naturedly, “I’ll go.”

  “You’ll be half an hour nearer Joan’s camp––she’ll have that much longer to stay,” said Reid, his mean leer creeping into his wide, thin lips again.

  Mackenzie turned slowly to look him squarely in the eyes. He stood so a few seconds, Reid coloring in hot resentment of the silent rebuke.

  “I’ve heard enough of that to last me the rest of your three years,” Mackenzie said, something as hard as stones in a cushion under his calm voice.

  Reid jerked his hip in his peculiar twisting movement to shift his pistol belt, turned, and walked away.

  If it was the lonesomeness, Mackenzie thought, it was taking a mighty peculiar turn in that fellow. He was more like a cub that was beginning to find itself, and bristle and snarl and turn to bite the hand that had fended it through its helpless stage. Perhaps it would pass in a little while, or perhaps it would get worse on him. In the latter case there would be no living on the range with Reid, for on the range Mackenzie believed Reid was destined to remain. He had been trying to borrow money to get away, with what view in his dissatisfied head Mackenzie could not guess. He hadn’t got it; he wouldn’t get it. Those who had fattened on him in his prosperity were strangers to him in his time of penance and disgrace.

  Mackenzie put off his start to Dad’s camp until dusk, knowing the old man would prefer to take the road at night, after his mysterious way. He probably would hoof it over to Sullivan’s and borrow a buckboard to make a figure in before the widow-lady upon whom he had anchored his variable heart.

  Reid was bringing in the sheep when Mackenzie left, too far away for a word. Mackenzie thought of going down to him, for he disliked to part with anything like a shadow between them, feeling that he owed Reid a great debt indeed. More than that, he liked the kid, for there seemed to be a streak of good in him that all his ugly moods could not cover. But he went his way over the hills toward Dad’s camp, the thought persisting in him that he would, indeed, be thirty minutes nearer Joan. And it was a thought that made his heart jump and a gladness burn in his eyes, and his feet move onward with a swift eagerness.

  But only as a teacher with a lively interest in his pupil, he said; only that, and nothing more. On a hilltop a little way beyond his camp he stopped suddenly, his breath held to listen. Over the calm, far-carrying silence of the early night there came the sound of a woman singing, and this was the manner of her song:

  Na-a-fer a-lo-o-one, na-a-fer a-lone.

  He promise na-fer to leafe me,

  Na-fer to leafe me a-lone!

  * * *

  CHAPTER XV

  ONLY ONE JACOB

  Joan came riding over the next morning from Reid’s camp, not having heard of Mackenzie’s shift to oblige Dad Frazer. She was bareheaded, the sun in her warm hair, hat hanging on her saddle-horn.

  “Dad might have come by and told me,” she said, flinging to the ground as lightly as a swallow. “It would have saved us half an hour.”

  “We’ll have to work harder to make it up,” Mackenzie told her, thinking how much more a woman she was growing every day.

  Joan was distrait again that day, her eyes fixed often in dreamy speculation as her teacher explained something that she found hard, against her wonted aptness, to understand. When the rather disjointed lesson came to an end Joan sighed, strapping her books in a way that seemed to tell that she was weary of them.

  “Do you still think you’ll stick to the sheep business, John?” she asked, not lifting her eyes to his face, all out of her frank and earnest way of questioning.

  “I’m only on probation, you know, Joan; something might happen between now and this time next year to change things all around. There’s a chance, anyhow, that I may not make good.”

  “No, nothing will ever happen to change it,” said Joan, shaking her head sadly. “Nothing that ought to happen ever happens here. I don’t know whether I can stand it to carry out my contract with dad or not. Three years between me and what I’m longing for!”

  “It’s not very long when one’s young, Joan. Well, I don’t know of any short cuts to either fame or fortune, or I’d have taken them myself.”

  “Yes, but you’re free to pick up and go whenever you want to. A man don’t have to have money to strike out and see the world––I don’t see why a woman should. I could work my way as well as anybody.”

  “They’re harder masters out there than the range is to you here, Joan. And there’s the insolence of mastery, and the obloquy of poverty and situation that I hope you’ll never feel. Wait a little while longer with the probationers among the sheep.”

  “Earl never will stay it out,” she said, lifting her eyes for a moment to his. “He’s sick of it now––he’d throw everything over if he had the money to get away.”

  “He’d be a very foolish young man, then. But it’s like breaking off smoking, I guess, to quit the things you’ve grown up with on short notice like he had.”

  “Maybe in about a year more my interest will amount to enough to let me out,” said Joan, pursuing her thought of winning to freedom in the way she had elected. She seemed innocent of any knowledge of the arrangement whereby Earl Reid was working for his reward. Mackenzie wondered if it could be so.

  “If dad’ll buy me out then,” she said, speculatively, doubtfully, carrying on her thought in a disjointed way. “It would be like him to turn me down, though, if I want to quit before my time’s up. And he wouldn’t let me divide the sheep and sell my share to anybody else.”

  No, Joan could not yet know of Tim’s arrangement with Earl Reid’s father. It would be like Tim, indeed, to bargain her off without considering her in the matter at all. To a man like Tim his sons and daughters were as much his chattels as his sheep, kind as he was in his way. The apprenticeship of Jo
an to the range was proof of that. Somewhere out in that gray loneliness two younger daughters were running sheep, with little brothers as protectors and companions, beginning their adventures and lessons in the only school they were ever likely to know.

  Tim made a great virtue of the fact that he had taught all of them to read and write. That much would serve most of them satisfactorily for a few years, but Mackenzie grinned his dry grin to himself when he thought of the noise there would be one day in Tim Sullivan’s cote when the young pigeons shook out their wings to fly away. It was in the breed to do that; it looked out of the eyes of every one.

  “I sent and got a Bible from the mail-order house,” said Joan, looking up with lively eyes.

  “Has it come already?”

  “Charley got it yesterday. I found that story about Jacob and Rachel and the weak-eyed girl. It’s awful short.”

  “But it tells a good deal, Joan.”

  Joan seemed thinking over how much the short story really told, her eyes far away on the elusive, ever-receding blue curtain that was down between her and the world.

  “Yes, it tells a lot,” she sighed. “But Jake must not have been very bright. Well, he was a cowman, anyhow; he wasn’t running sheep.”

  “I think he went into the sheep business afterwards,” Mackenzie said, diverted by her original comment on the old tale.

  “Yes, when his girls got big enough to do the work!” The resentment of her hard years was in Joan’s voice, the hardness of unforgiving regret for all that had been taken from her life.

  Mackenzie felt a sweep of depression engulf him like a leaping wave. Joan was in the humor to profit by any arrangement that would break her bondage to sheep; Tim Sullivan had been bringing her up, unconsciously, but none the less effectively, to fit into this scheme for marrying her to his old friend’s rakish son. When the day came for Joan to know of the arrangement, she would leap toward it as toward an open door.