SWAN CARLSON
Mackenzie found it hard to bend the woman from this plan of summary
vengeance. She had suffered and brooded in her loneliness so long, the
cruel hand of Swan Carlson over her, that her thoughts had beaten a
path to this desire. This self-administration of justice seemed now
her life's sole aim. She approached it with glowing eyes and flushed
cheeks; she had lived for that hour.
Harshly she met Mackenzie's efforts at first to dissuade her from this
long-planned deed, yielding a little at length, not quite promising to
withhold her hand when the step of her savage husband should sound
outside the door.
"If you are here when he comes, then it will do for another night; if
you are gone, then I will not say."
That was the compromise she made with him at last, turning with no
more argument to prepare his supper, carrying the ax with her as she
went about the work. Often she stood in rigid concentration, listening
for the sound of Swan's coming, such animation in her eyes as a
bride's might show in a happier hour than hers. She sat opposite her
visitor as he made his supper on the simple food she gave him, and
told him the story of her adventure into that heartless land, the
ax-handle against her knee.
A minister's daughter, educated to fit herself for a minister's wife.
She had learned English in the schools of her native land, as the
custom is, and could speak it fairly when family reverses carried her
like a far-blown seed to America. She had no business training, for
what should a minister's wife know of business beyond the affairs of
the parish and the economy of her own home? She found, therefore,
nothing open to her hands in America save menial work in the
households of others.
Not being bred to it, nor the intention or thought of it as a future
contingency, she suffered in humbling herself to the services of
people who were at once her intellectual and social inferiors. The one
advantage in it was the improvement of her English speech, through
which she hoped for better things in time.
It was while she was still new to America, its customs and social
adjustments, and the shame of her menial situation burned in her soul
like a corrosive acid, that she saw the advertisement of Swan Carlson
in a Swedish newspaper. Swan Carlson was advertising for a wife.
Beneath a handsome picture of himself he stated his desires, frankly,
with evident honesty in all his representations. He told of his
holdings in sheep and land, of his money in the bank.
A dream of new consequence in this strange land came to Hertha
Jacobsen as she read the advertisement, as she studied the features of
Swan Carlson, his bold face looking at her from the page. She had seen
men, and the women of such men sharing their honors, who had risen
from peasants to governors and senators, to positions of wealth and
consequence in this strange land with all the romance of a tale out of
a book. Perhaps fate had urged her on to this unfriendly shore only
to feed her on the bitter herbs for her purification for a better
life.
The minister of her church investigated Swan Carlson and his claims,
finding him all that he professed to be. Hertha wrote to him; in time
Swan came to visit her, a tall, long-striding man, handsomer than his
picture in the paper, handsome as a Viking lord with his proud foot on
the neck of a fallen foe.
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 the shearing was done, and Swan had gone with his wagons to ship
the clip, returning with his bankbook showing thousands in added
wealth, a change came into her life, so radiant with the blossoms of a
new happiness. Swan's big laugh was not so ready in his throat any
more; his great hand seemed forgetful of its caress. He told her that
the time of idling now was over; she must go with him in a sheep-wagon
to the range and care for her band of sheep, sharing the labors of his
life as she shared its rewards.
No; that was not to her liking. The wife of a rich man should not live
as a peasant woman, dew in her draggled skirts to her knees, the sun
browning her skin and bleaching her hair. It was not for his woman to
give him _no_, said Swan. Be ready at a certain hour in the morning;
they must make an early start, for the way was long.
But no; she refused to take the burden of a peasant woman on her back.
That was the first time Swan knocked her senseless. When she
recovered, the sheep-wagon was rocking her in its uneasy journey to
the distant range. Swan's cruelties multiplied with his impatience at
her slowness to master the shepherd's art. The dogs were sullen
creatures, unused to a woman's voice, unfriendly to a woman's
presence. Swan insisted that she lay aside her woman's attire and
dress as a man to gain the good-will of the dogs.
Again she defied his authority, all her refinement rising against the
degradation of her sex; again Swan laid her senseless with a blow.
When she woke her limbs were clad in overalls, a greasy jumper was
buttoned over her breast. But the dogs were wiser than their master;
no disguise of man's could cover her from the contempt of their shrewd
senses. They would not obey her shrilled commands.
Very well, said Swan; if she did not have it in her to win even the
respect of a dog, let her do a dog's work. So he took the collies
away, leaving her to range her band of sheep in terrible labor,
mind-wrenching loneliness, over the sage-gray hills. Wolves grew bold;
the lambs suffered. When Swan came again to number her flock, he
cursed her for her carelessness, giving her blows which were kinder
than his words.
With the first snow she abandoned her flock and fled. Disgraceful as
it was for a woman to leave her man, the frenzy of loneliness drove
her on. With his companionship she could have endured Swan's cruelty,
but alone her heart was dead. Three days she wandered. Swan found her
after she had fallen in the snow.
His great laugh woke her, and she was home in this house, the light of
day in her eyes. Swan was sitting beside her, merry in the thought of
how he had cheated her out of her intention to die like an old ewe
among the mountain drifts.
She was good for nothing, he said, but to sit at home like a cat. But
he would make sure that she sat at home, to be there at his coming,
and not running away from the bounty of a man who had taken a beggar
to his bosom. Then he brought the chain and the anvil, and welded the
red-hot iron upon her limb. He laughed when the smoke of her burning
flesh rose hissing; laughed when he mounted his horse and rode away,
leaving her in agony too great to let her die.
This summer now beginning was the fourth since that melancholy day. In
the time that had passed, Swan had come into the ways of trouble,
suffering a great drain upon his hoarded money, growing as a
consequence sullen and somber in his moods. No more he laughed; even
the distress of his chained wife, the sight of her wasting face and
body, the pleading of her tortured eyes, could not move his loud gales
of merriment again.
Swan had killed two of his sheepherders, as she had mentioned before.
It grew out of a dispute over wages, in which the men were right. That
was the winter following her attempt to run away, Swan being alone
with them upon the stormy range. He declared both of them set upon him
at once like wolves, and that he fought only to defend his life. He
strangled them, the throat of each grasped in his broad, thick hand,
and held them from him so, stiff arms against their desperate
struggles, until they sank down in the snow and died.
Only a little while ago the lawyers had got him off from the charge of
murder, after long delays. The case had been tried in another county,
for Swan Carlson's neighbors all believed him guilty of a horrible
crime; no man among them could have listened to his story under oath
with unprejudiced ear. The lawyers had brought Swan off, for at the
end it had been his living word against the mute accusations of two
dead men. There was nobody to speak for the herders; so the lawyers
had set him free. But it had cost him thousands of dollars, and Swan's
evil humor had deepened with the drain.
Crazy, he said of his wife; a poor mad thing bent on self-destruction
in wild and mournful ways. In that Swan was believed, at least. Nobody
came to inquire of her, none ever stopped to speak a word. The nearest
neighbor was twelve or fifteen miles distant, a morose man with sour
face, master of a sea of sheep.
All of this Swan himself had told her in the days when he laughed. He
told her also of the lawyers' drain upon his wealth, starving her days
together to make a pebble of saving to fill the ruthless breach.
"Tonight Swan will come," she said. "After what I have told you, are
you not afraid?"
"I suppose I ought to be," Mackenzie returned, leaving her to form her
own conclusion.
She searched his face with steady eyes, her hand on the ax-helve, in
earnest effort to read his heart.
"No, you are not afraid," she said. "But wait; when you hear him
speak, then you will be afraid."
"How do you know he is coming home tonight?"
She did not speak at once. Her eyes were fixed on the open door at
Mackenzie's side, her face was set in the tensity of her mental
concentration as she listened. Mackenzie bent all his faculties to
hear if any foot approached. There was no sound.
"The fishermen of my country can feel the chill of an iceberg through
the fog and the night," she said at last. "Swan Carlson is an iceberg
to my heart."
She listened again, bending forward, her lips open. Mackenzie fancied
he heard the swing of a galloping hoof-beat, and turned toward the
door.
"Have you a pistol?" she inquired.
"No."
"He is coming; in a little while he will be at the door. There is time
yet for you to leave."
"I want to have a word with your man; I'll wait."
Mrs. Carlson got up, keeping the ax in hand, moved her chair to the
other side of the door, where she stationed herself in such position
as Swan must see her first when he looked within. She disposed the ax
to conceal it entirely beneath her long apron, her hand under the
garment grasping the helve.
"For your own sake, not his, I ask you not to strike him," Mackenzie
pleaded, in all the earnestness he could command.
"I have given you the hour of my vengeance," she replied. "But if he
curses me, if he lifts his hand!"
Mackenzie was more than a little uneasy on the probable outcome of
his meeting with the tempestuous Swan. He got out his pipe and lit it,
considering the situation with fast-running thoughts. Still, a man
could not go on and leave that beaten, enslaved woman to the mercies
of her tyrant; Swan Carlson must be given to understand that he would
be held to answer to the law for his future behavior toward her.
"If I were you I'd put the ax behind the door and get his supper
ready," said he.
Mrs. Carlson got up at the suggestion, with such readiness that
surprised Mackenzie, put the ax back of the open door, stood a moment
winding up her fallen hair.
"Yes, he is my man," she said.
Swan was turning his horse into the barn; Mackenzie could hear him
talking to the animal, not unkindly. Mrs. Carlson put fresh fuel in
the stove, making a rattling of the lids which must have sounded
cheerful to the ears of a hungry man. As she began breaking eggs into
a bowl she took up her song again, with an unconscious air of
detachment from it, as one unwittingly follows the habit that has been
for years the accompaniment to a task.
As before, the refinement of accent was wanting in her words, but the
sweet melancholy of her voice thrilled her listener like the rich
notes of an ancient violin.
_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!_
Mackenzie sat with his elbow on the table, his chair partly turned
toward the door, just within the threshold and a little to one side,
where the flockmaster would see him the moment he stepped into the
light. The traveler's pack lay on the floor at the door jamb; the
smoke from his pipe drifted out to tell of his presence in the honest
announcement of a man who had nothing to hide.
So Swan Carlson found him as he came home to his door.
Swan stopped, one foot in the door, the light on his face. Mrs.
Carlson did not turn from the stove to greet him by word or look, but
stood bending a little over the pan of sputtering eggs, which she
shook gently from side to side with a rhythmic, slow movement in
cadence with her song. Swan turned his eyes from one to the other, his
face clouding for a moment as for a burst of storm, clearing again at
once as Mackenzie rose and gave him good evening in cheerful and
unshaken voice.
Mrs. Carlson had spoken a true word when she described Swan as a
handsome man. Almost seven feet tall, Mackenzie took him to be, so
tall that he must stoop to enter the door; lithe and sinewy of limbs,
a lightness in them as of an athlete bred; broad in the shoulders,
long of arms. His face was stern, his red hair long about the ears,
his Viking mustache long-drooping at the corners of his mouth.
"I thought a man was here, or my woman had begun to smoke," said Swan,
coming in, flinging his hat down on the floor. "What do you want,
loafin' around here?"
Mackenzie explained his business in that country in direct words, and
his presence in the house in the same breath. Mollified, Swan grunted
that he understood and accepted the explanation, turning up his
sleeves, unfastening the collar of his flannel shirt, to wash. His
woman stood at the stove, her song dead on her lips, sliding the eggs
from the pan onto a platter in one piece. Swan gave her no heed, not
even a curious or questioning look, but as he crossed the room to the
wash bench he saw the broken chain lying free upon the floor.
A breath he paused over it, his eyes fastened on it in a glowering
stare. Mackenzie braced himself for the storm of wrath which seemed
bursting the doors of Swan Carlson's gloomy heart. But Swan did not
speak. He picked up the chain, examined the cut link, threw it down
with a clatter. At the sound of its fall Mackenzie saw Mrs. Carlson
start. She turned her head, terror in her eyes, her face blanched.
Swan bent over the basin, snorting water like a strangling horse.
There were eight eggs on the platter that Swan Carlson's woman put
before him when he sat down to his supper. One end of the great
trencher was heaped with brown bacon; a stack of bread stood at Swan's
left hand, a cup of coffee at his right. Before this provender the
flockmaster squared himself, the unwelcome guest across the table from
him, the smoke of his pipe drifting languidly out into the tranquil
summer night.
Swan had said no word since his first inquiry. Mackenzie had ventured
nothing more. Mrs. Carlson sat down in the chair that she had placed
near the door before Swan's arrival, only that she moved it a little
to bring her hand within reach of the hidden ax.
Swan had brushed his long, dark-red hair back from his broad, deep
forehead, bringing it down across the tips of his ears in a savage
fashion admirably suited to his grave, harsh, handsome face. He
devoured his food noisily, bending low over his plate.
"You want to learn the sheep business, huh?" said he, throwing up his
eyes in quick challenge, pausing a moment in his champing and clatter.
Mackenzie nodded, pipe raised toward his lips. "Well, you come to the
right country. You ever had any work around a ranch?"
"No."
"No, I didn't think you had; you look too soft. How much can you
lift?"
"What's that got to do with sheep?" Mackenzie inquired, frowning in
his habitual manner of showing displeasure with frivolous and trifling
things.
"I can shoulder a steel rail off of the railroad that weighs seven
hundred and fifty pounds," said Swan. "You couldn't lift one end."
"Maybe I couldn't," Mackenzie allowed, pretending to gaze out after
his drifting smoke, but watching the sheepman, as he mopped the last
of the eggs up with a piece of bread, with a furtive turning of his
eye. He was considering how to approach the matter which he had
remained there to take up with this great, boasting, savage man, and
how he could make him understand that it was any of society's business
whether he chained his wife or let her go free, fed her or starved
her, caressed her, or knocked her down.
Swan pushed back from the table, wringing the coffee from his
mustache.
"Did you cut that chain?" he asked.
"Yes, I cut it. You've got no right to keep your wife, or anybody
else, chained up. You could be put in jail for it; it's against the
law."
"A man's got a right to do what he pleases with his own woman; she's
his property, the same as a horse."
"Not exactly the same as a horse, either. But you could be put in jail
for beating your horse. I've waited here to tell you about this, in a
friendly way, and warn you to treat this woman right. Maybe you didn't
know you were breaking the law, but I'm telling you it's so."
Swan stood, his head within six inches of the ceiling. His wife must
have read an intention of violence in his face, although Mackenzie
could mark no change in his features, always as immobile as bronze.
She sprang to her feet, her bosom agitated, arms lifted, shoulders
raised, as if to shrink from the force of a blow. She made no effort
to reach the ax behind the door; the thought of it had gone,
apparently, out of her mind.
Swan stood within four feet of her, but he gave her no attention.
"When a man comes to my house and monkeys with my woman, him and me
we've got to have a fight," he said.