The Flockmaster of Poison Creek

by Ogden, George W

  “It’s that stubborn you are!” said Tim, his softness freezing over in a breath.

  “Let’s not talk about it, Dad,” she pleaded, turning to him, the tears undried on her cheeks, the sorrow of the years he had made slow and heavy for her in her eyes.

  “It must be talked about, it must be settled, now and for good, Joan. I have plans for you, I have great plans, Joan.”

  “I don’t want to change it now, I’m satisfied with the arrangement we’ve made on the sheep, Dad. Let me go on like I have been, studying my lessons and looking after the sheep with Charley. I’m satisfied the way it is.”

  “I’ve planned better things for you, Joan, better from this day forward, and more to your heart. Mackenzie is all well enough for teachin’ a little school of childer, but he’s not deep enough to be over the likes of you, Joan. I’m thinkin’ I’ll send you to Cheyenne to the sisters’ college at the openin’ of the term; very soon now, you’ll be makin’ ready for leavin’ at once.”

  “I don’t want to go,” said Joan, coldly.

  “There you’d be taught the true speech of a lady, and the twist of the tongue on French, and the nice little things you’ve missed here among the sheep, Joan darlin’, and that neither me nor your mother nor John Mackenzie––good lad that he is, though mistaken at times, woeful mistaken in his judgment of men––can’t give you, gerrel.”

  “No, I’ll stay here and work my way out with the sheep,” said she.

  Tim was standing at her side, a bit behind her, and she turned a little more as she denied him, her head so high she might have been listening to the stars. He looked at her with a deep flush coming into his brown face, a frown narrowing his shrewd eyes.

  “Ain’t you that stubborn, now!” he said.

  “Yes, I am,” said Joan.

  “Then,” said Tim, firing up, the ashes of deceit blowing from the fire of his purpose at once, “you’ll take what I offer or leave what you’ve got! I’ll have no more shyin’ and shillyin’ out of you, and me with my word passed to old Malcolm Reid.”

  Joan wheeled round, her face white, fright in her eyes.

  “You mean the sheep?” she asked.

  “I mean the sheep––just that an’ no less. Do as I’ll have you do, and go on to school to be put in polish for the wife of a gentleman, or give up the flock and the interest I allowed you in the increase, and go home and scrape the pots and pans!”

  “You’d never do that, Dad––you’d never break your word with me, after all I’ve gone through for you, and take my lambs away from me!”

  “I would, just so,” said Tim. But he did not have the courage to look her in the face as he said it, turning away like a stubborn man who had no cause beneath his feet, but who meant to be stubborn and unjust against it all.

  “I don’t believe it!” she said.

  “I will so, Joan.”

  “Your word to Malcolm Reid means a whole lot to you, but your word to me means nothing!” Joan spoke in bitterness, her voice vibrating with passion.

  “It isn’t the same,” he defended weakly.

  “No, you can rob your daughter–––”

  “Silence! I’ll not have it!” Tim could look at her now, having a reason, as he saw it. There was a solid footing to his pretense at last.

  “It’s a cheap way to get a thousand lambs,” said she.

  “Then I’ve got ’em cheap!” said Tim, red in his fury. “You’ll flout me and mock me and throw my offers for your good in my face, and speak disrespectful–––”

  “I spoke the truth, no word but the–––”

  “I’ll have no more out o’ ye! It’s home you go, and it’s there you’ll stay till you can trim your tongue and bend your mind to obey my word!”

  “You’ve got no right to take my sheep; you went into a contract with me, you ought to respect it as much as your word to anybody!”

  “You have no sheep, you had none. Home you’ll go, this minute, and leave the sheep.”

  “I hope they’ll die, every one of them!”

  “Silence, ye! Get on that horse and go home, and I’ll be there after you to tend to your case, my lady! I’ll have none of this chargin’ me to thievery out of the mouth of one of my childer––I’ll have none of it!”

  “Maybe you’ve got a better name for it––you and old man Reid!” Joan scorned, her face still white with the cold, deep anger of her wrong.

  “I’ll tame you, or I’ll break your heart!” said Tim, doubly angry because the charge she made struck deep. He glowered at her, mumbling and growling as if considering immediate chastisement.

  Joan said no more, but her hand trembled, her limbs were weak under her weight with the collapse of all her hopes, as she untied and mounted her horse. The ruin of her foundations left her in a daze, to which the surging, throbbing of a sense of deep, humiliating, shameful wrong, added the obscuration of senses, the confusion of understanding. She rode to the top of the hill, and there the recollection of Mackenzie came to her like the sharp concern for a treasure left behind.

  She reined in after crossing the hilltop, and debated a little while on what course to pursue. But only for a little while. Always she had obeyed her father, under injunctions feeling and unfeeling, just and unjust. He was not watching to see that she obeyed him now, knowing well that she would do as he had commanded.

  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. 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.

  * * *

  CHAPTER XXII

  PHANTOMS OF FEVER

  “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 closed his eyes and lay thinking back over those days of delirium through which a gleam of understanding fell only once in a while. Dad evidently believed that he was well now, from his manner and speech, although Mackenzie knew that if his life depended on rising and walking from the wagon he would not be able to redeem it at the price.

  “I seem to remember a woman around me a good deal,” he said, not trusting himself to look at Dad. “It wasn’t––was it–––?”

  Mackenzie felt his face flush, and cursed his weakness, but he could not pronounce the name that filled his heart.

  “Yes, it was Rabbit,” said Dad, catching him up without the slightest understanding of his stammering. “She’s been stickin’ to you night and day. I tell you, John, them Indians can’t be beat doctorin’ a man up when he’s been chawed up by a animal.”

  “I want to thank her,” Mackenzie said, feeling his heart swing very low indeed.

  “You won’t see much of her now since you’ve come to your head, I reckon she’ll be passin’ you over to me to look after. She’s shy that way. Yes, sir, any time I git bit up by man or beast, or shot up or knifed, I’ll take Rabbit ahead of any doctor you can find. Them Indians they know the secrets of it. I wouldn’t be afraid to stand and let a rattlesnake bite me till it fainted if Rabbit was around. She can cure it.”

  But Mackenzie knew from the odor of his bandages that Rabbit was not depending on her Indian knowledge in his case, or not entirely so. There was the odor of carbolic acid, and he was conscious all along that his head had been shaved around the wound in approved surgical fashion. He reasoned that Rabbit went about pr
epared with the emergency remedies of civilization, and put it down to her schooling at the Catholic sisters’ hands.

  “Was there anybody––did anybody else come around?” Mackenzie inquired.

  “Tim’s been by a couple of times. Oh, well––Joan.”

  “Oh, Joan,” said Mackenzie, trying to make it sound as if he had no concern in Joan at all. But his voice trembled, and life came bounding up in him again with glad, wild spring.

  “She was over the day after you got hurt, but she ain’t been back,” said Dad, with such indifference that he must have taken it for granted that Mackenzie held no tenderness for her, indeed. “I met Charley yesterday; he told me Joan was over home. Mary’s out here with him––she’s the next one to Joan, you know.”

  Mackenzie’s day clouded; his sickness fell over him again, taking the faint new savor out of life. Joan was indifferent; she did not care. Then hope came on its white wings to excuse her.

  “Is she sick?” he inquired.

  “Who––Mary?”

  “Joan. Is she all right?”

  “Well, if I was married to her I’d give up hopes of ever bein’ left a widower. That girl’s as healthy as a burro––yes, and she’ll outlive one, I’ll bet money, and I’ve heard of ’em livin’ eighty years down in Mexico.”

  Dad did not appear to be cognizant of Mackenzie’s weakness. According to the old man’s pathology a man was safe when he regained his head out of the delirium of fever. All he needed then was cheering up, and Dad did not know of any better way of doing that than by talking. So he let himself go, and Mackenzie shut his eyes to the hum of the old fellow’s voice, the sound beating on his ears like wind against closed doors.

  Suddenly Dad’s chatter ceased. The silence was as welcome as the falling of a gale to a man at sea in an open boat. Mackenzie heard Dad leaving the wagon in cautious haste, and opened his eyes to see. Rabbit was beside him with a bowl of savory-smelling broth, which she administered to him with such gentle deftness that Mackenzie could not help believing Dad had libeled her in his story of the accident that had left its mark upon her face.

  Rabbit would not permit her patient to talk, denying him with uplifted finger and shake of head when he attempted it. She did not say a word during her visit, although her manner was only gentle, neither timid nor shy.

  Rabbit was a short woman, turning somewhat to weight, a little gray in her black hair, but rather due to trouble than age, Mackenzie believed. Her skin was dark, her face bright and intelligent, but stamped with the meekness which is the heritage of women of her race. The burn had left her marked as Dad had said, the scar much lighter than the original skin, but it was not such a serious disfigurement that a man would be justified in leaving her for it as Dad had done.

  When Rabbit went out she drew a mosquito netting over the opening in the back of the wagon. Mackenzie was certain that Dad had libeled her after that. There was not a fly in the wagon to pester him, and he knew that the opening in the front end had been similarly screened, although he could not turn to see. Grateful to Rabbit, with the almost tearful tenderness that a sick man feels for those who have ministered kindly to his pain, Mackenzie lay with his thoughts that first day of consciousness after his tempestuous season of delirium.

  They were not pleasant thoughts for a man whose blood was not yet cool. As they surged and hammered in his brain his fever flashed again, burning in his eyes like a desert wind. Something had happened to alienate Joan.

  That was the burden of it as the sun mounted with his fever, heating the enclosed wagon until it was an oven. Something had happened to alienate Joan. He did not believe her weak enough, fickle enough, to yield to the allurements of Reid’s prospects. They must have slandered him and driven her away with lies. Reid must have slandered him; there was the stamp of slander in his wide, thin mouth.

  It would be many days, it might be weeks, before he could go abroad on the range again to set right whatever wrong had been done him. Then it would be too late. Surely Joan could not take his blunder into Carlson’s trap in the light of an unpardonable weakness; she was not so sheep-blind as that. Something had been done outside any act of his own to turn her face and her sympathies away.

  Consumed in impatience to be up, anxiety for the delay, Mackenzie lay the throbbing day through like a disabled engine spending its vain power upon a broken shaft. 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. He had come there to be a master over flocks, not expecting to encounter any unfriendly force save the stern face of nature. He had begun to muddle and meddle at the outset; he had continued to muddle, if not meddle, to the very end.

  For this would be the end. No sheepman would countenance a herder who could not take care of his flock in summer weather on a bountiful range. His day was done in that part of the country so far as his plans of becoming a sharing herdsman went. Earl Reid, a thin, anemic lad fresh from city life, had come in and made much more a figure of a man.

  So his fever boiled under the fuel of his humiliating thoughts. The wagon was a bake-oven, but there was no sweat in him to cool his parching skin. He begged Rabbit to let him go and lie under the wagon, where the wind could blow over him, but she shook her head in denial and pressed him down on the bunk. Then she gave him a drink that had the bitterness of opium in it, and he threw down his worrying snarl of thoughts, and slept.

  * * *

  CHAPTER XXIII

  CONCERNING MARY

  “Yes, I’ve heard tell of sheepmen workin’ Swan’s dodge on one another, but I never took no stock in it, because I never believed even a sheepman was fool enough to let anybody put a thing like that over on him.”

  “A sheepman oughtn’t to be,” Mackenzie said, in the bitterness of defeat.

  “Swan knew you was an easy feller, and green to the ways of them tricky sheepmen,” said Dad. “You let him off in that first fight with a little crack on the head when you’d ought to ’a’ laid him out for good, and you let Hector Hall go that time you took his guns away from him. Folks in here never could understand that; they say it was like a child playin’ with a rattlesnake.”

  “It was,” Mackenzie agreed.

  “Swan thought he could run them sheep of his over on you and take away five or six hundred more than he brought, and I guess he’d ’a’ done it if it hadn’t been for Reid.”

  “It looks that way, Dad. I sure was easy, to fall into his trap the way I did.”

  Mackenzie was able to get about again, and was gaining strength rapidly. He and Dad were in the shade of some willows along the creek, where Mackenzie stretched in the indolent relaxation of convalescence, Dad smoking his miserable old pipe close at hand.

  And miserable is the true word for Dad’s pipe, for it was miserable indeed, and miserable the smell that came out of it, going there full steam on a hot afternoon of early autumn. Dad always carefully reamed out the first speck of carbon that formed in his pipe, and kept it reamed out with boring blade of his pocket knife. He wanted no insulation against nicotine, and the strength thereof; he was not satisfied unless the fire burned into the wood, and drew the infiltrations of strong juice therefrom. When his charge of tobacco burned out, and the fire came down to this frying, sizzling abomination of smells at last, Dad beamed, enjoying it as a sort of dessert to a delightful repast of strong smoke.

  Dad was enjoying his domestic felicity to the full these days of Mackenzie’s convalescence. Rabbit was out with the sheep, being needed no longer to attend the patient, leaving Dad to idle as he pleased. His regret for the one-eyed widow seemed to have passed, leaving no scar behind.

  “Tim don’t take no stock in it that Swan planned before to do you out of a lot of your sheep. He was by here thi
s morning while you was wanderin’ around somewhere.”

  “He was by, was he?”

  “Yeah; he was over to see Reid––he’s sent him a new wagon over there. Tim says you and Swan must both ’a’ been asleep and let the two bands stray together, and of course it was human for Swan to want to take away more than he brought. Well, it was sheepman, anyhow, if it wasn’t human.”

  “Did Sullivan say that?”

  “No, that’s what I say. I know ’em; I know ’em to the bone. Reid knew how many sheep him and you had, and he stuck out for ’em like a little man. More to that feller than I ever thought he had in him.”

  “Yes,” Mackenzie agreed. He lay stretched on his back, squinting at the calm-weather clouds.

  “Yeah; Tim says both of you fellers must ’a’ been asleep.”

  “I suppose he’ll fire me when he sees me.”

  “No, I don’t reckon he will. Tim takes it as a kind of a joke, and he’s as proud as all git-out of the way Reid stacked up. If that boy hadn’t happened up when he did, Swan he’d ’a’ soaked you another one with that gun of yourn and put you out for good. They say that kid waltzed Swan around there and made him step like he was standin’ on a red-hot stove.”

  “Did anybody see him doing it?”

  “No, I don’t reckon anybody did. But he must ’a’ done it, all right, Swan didn’t git a head of sheep that didn’t belong to him.”

  “It’s funny how Reid arrived on the second,” Mackenzie said, reflecting over it as a thing he had pondered before.

  “Well, it’s natural you’d feel a little jealous of him, John––most any feller would. But I don’t think he had any hand in it with Swan to run him in on you, if that’s what you’re drivin’ at.”

  “It never crossed my mind,” said Mackenzie, but not with his usual regard for the truth.

  “I don’t like him, and I never did like him, but you’ve got to hand it to him for grit and nerve.”