A TWO-GUN MAN
"You know, John, if a man's goin' to be a sheepman, John, he's got to
keep awake day and night. He ain't goin' to set gabbin' and let a
grizzly come right up under his nose and kill his sheep. It's the
difference between the man that wouldn't do it and the man that would
that makes the difference between a master and a man. That's the
difference that stands against Dad Frazer. He'd never work up to
partnership in a band of sheep if he lived seven hundred years."
So Tim Sullivan, a few days after the raid on John Mackenzie's flock.
He had come over on hearing of it from Dad Frazer, who had gone to
take charge of another band. Tim was out of humor over the loss, small
as it was out of the thousands he numbered in his flocks. He concealed
his feelings as well as he could under a friendly face, but his words
were hard, the accusation and rebuke in them sharp.
Mackenzie flared up at the raking-over Tim gave him, and turned his
face away to hold down a hot reply. Only after a struggle he composed
himself to speak.
"I suppose it was because you saw the same difference in me that you
welched on your agreement to put me in a partner on the increase of
this flock as soon as Dad taught me how to work the sheep and handle
the dogs," he said. "That's an easy way for a man to slide out from
under his obligations; it would apply anywhere in life as well as in
the sheep business. I tell you now I don't think it was square."
"Now, lad, I don't want you to look at it that way, not at all, not at
all, lad." Tim was as gentle as oil in his front now, afraid that he
was in the way of losing a good herder whom he had tricked into
working at a bargain price. "I don't think you understand the lay of
it, if you've got the impression I intended to take you in at the
jump-off, John. It's never done; it's never heard of. A man's got to
prove himself, like David of old. There's a lot of Goliaths here on
the range he's got to meet and show he's able to handle before any man
would trust him full shares on the increase of two thousand sheep."
"You didn't talk that way at first," Mackenzie charged, rather
sulkily.
"I took to you when I heard how you laid Swan out in that fight you
had with him, John. That was a recommendation. But it wasn't enough,
for it was nothing but a chance lucky blow you got in on him that give
you the decision. If you'd 'a' missed him, where would you 'a' been
at?"
"That's got nothing to do with your making a compact and breaking it.
You've got no right to come here beefing around about the loss of a
few sheep with a breach of contract on your side of the fence. You've
put it up to me now like you should have done in the beginning. All
right; I'll prove myself, like David. But remember there was another
fellow by the name of Jacob that went in on a livestock deal with a
slippery man, and stick to your agreement this time."
"I don't want you to feel that I'm takin' advantage of you, John; I
don't want you to feel that way."
"I don't just feel it; I know it. I'll pay you for the seven sheep the
grizzly killed, and take it out of his hide when I catch him."
This offer mollified Tim, melting him down to smiles. He shook hands
with Mackenzie, all the heartiness on his side, refusing the offer
with voluble protestations that he neither expected nor required it.
"You've got the makin' of a sheepman in you, John; I always thought
you had. But----"
* * * * *
"You want to be shown. All right; I'm game, even at forty dollars and
found."
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. He tightened his girths and set his foot in
the stirrup, ready to mount and ride home; paused so, hand on the
saddle-horn, with a queer, half-puzzled, half-suspicious look in his
sheep-wise eyes.
"Wasn't there something else that feller Jacob was workin' for besides
the interest in the stock?" he asked.
"Seems to me like there was," Mackenzie returned, carelessly. "The
main thing I remember in the transaction was the stone he set up
between the old man and himself on the range. 'The Lord watch between
thee and me,' you know, it had on it. That's a mighty good motto yet
for a sheepherder to front around where his boss can read it. A man's
got to have somebody to keep an eye on a sheepman when his back's
turned, even today."
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.
"This is the best grazin' this range has ever produced in my day," he
said, "too much of it here for that little band you're runnin'. I'll
send Dad over with three thousand more this week. You can camp
together--it'll save me a wagon, and he'll be company. How's Joan
gettin on with the learnin'?"
"She's eating it up."
"I was afraid it'd be that way," said Tim, gloomily; "you can't
discourage that girl."
"She's too sincere and capable to be discouraged. I laid down my hand
long ago."
"And it's a pity to ruin a good sheepwoman with learnin'," Tim said,
shaking his head with the sadness of it.
Tim rode away, leaving Mackenzie to his reflections as he watched his
boss' broad back grow smaller from hill to hill. The sheepherder
smiled as he recalled Tim's puzzled inquiry on the other consideration
of Jacob's contract with the slippery Laban.
_What is this thou hast done unto me? Did not I serve with thee for
Rachel? Wherefore then hast thou beguiled me?_
"Tim would do it, too," Mackenzie said, nodding his grave head; "he'd
work off the wrong girl on a man as sure as he had two."
It was queer, the way Tim had thought, at the last minute, of the
"something else" Jacob had worked for; queer, the way he had turned,
his foot up in the stirrup, that puzzled, suspicious expression in his
mild, shrewd face. Even if he should remember on the way home, or get
out his Bible on his arrival and look the story up, there would be
nothing of a parallel between the case of Jacob and that of John
Mackenzie to worry his sheepman's head. For though Jacob served his
seven years for Rachel, which "seemed to him but a few days, for the
love he had to her," he, John Mackenzie, was not serving Tim Sullivan
for Joan.
"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 was a stranger, and
a man unsparing of his horse, pushing it uphill and down with
unaltered speed. He rode as if the object of his journey lay a long
distance ahead, and his time for reaching it was short.
Mackenzie wondered if the fellow had stolen the horse, having it more
than half in mind to challenge his passage until he could give an
account of his haste, when he saw that the rider had no intention of
going by without speech. As he mounted the crest of the hill above the
flock, he swung straight for the spot where Mackenzie stood.
The stranger drew up with a short grunt of greeting, turning his gaze
over the range as if in search of strayed stock. He was a short, spare
man, a frowning cast in his eyes, a face darkly handsome, but
unsympathetic as a cougar's. He looked down at Mackenzie presently, as
if he had put aside the recognition of his presence as a secondary
matter, a cold insolence in his challenging, sneering eyes.
"What are you doing over here east of Horsethief?" he inquired,
bending his black brows in a frown, his small mustache twitching in
catlike threat of a snarl.
"I'm grazing that little band of sheep you see down yonder," Mackenzie
returned, evenly, running his eyes over the fellow's gear.
This was rather remarkable for a land out of which strife and
contention, murder and sudden death were believed to have passed long
ago. The man wore two revolvers, slung about his slender frame on a
broad belt looped around for cartridges. These loops were empty, but
the weight of the weapons themselves sagged the belt far down on the
wearer's hips. His leather cuffs were garnitured with silver stars in
the Mexican style; he wore a red stone in his black necktie, which was
tied with care, the flowing ends of it tucked into the bosom of his
dark-gray flannel shirt.
"If you're tryin' to be funny, cut it out; I'm not a funny man," he
said. "I asked you what you're doing over here east of Horsethief
Canyon?"
"I don't know that it's any of your business where I run my sheep,"
Mackenzie told him, resentful of the man's insolence.
"Tim Sullivan knows this is our winter grazing land, and this grass is
in reserve. If he didn't tell you it was because he wanted to run you
into trouble, I guess. You'll have to get them sheep out of here, and
do it right now."
The stranger left it to Mackenzie's imagination to fix his identity,
not bending to reveal his name. Hector Hall, Mackenzie knew him to be,
on account of his pistols, on account of the cold meanness of his eyes
which Dad Frazer had described as holding such a throat-cutting look.
But armed as he was, severe and flash-tempered as he seemed, Mackenzie
was not in any sort of a flurry to give ground before him. He looked
up at him coolly, felt in his pocket for his pipe, filled it with
deliberation, and smoked.
"Have you got a lease on this land?" he asked.
"I carry my papers right here," Hall replied, touching his belt.
Mackenzie looked about the range as if considering which way to go.
Then, turning again to Hall:
"I don't know any bounds but the horizon when I'm grazing on
government land that's as much mine as the next man's. I don't like to
refuse a neighbor a request, but my sheep are going to stay right
here."
Hall leaned over a little, putting out his hand in a warning gesture,
drawing his dark brows in a scowl.
"Your head's swelled, young feller," he said, "on account of that
lucky thump you landed on Swan Carlson. You've got about as much
chance with that man as you have with a grizzly bear, and you've got
less chance with me. You've got till this time tomorrow to be six
miles west of here with that band of sheep."
Hall rode off with that word, leaving a pretty good impression that he
meant it, and that it was final. Mackenzie hadn't a doubt that he
would come back to see how well the mandate had been obeyed next day.
If there was anything to Hall's claim on that territory, by agreement
or right of priority which sheepmen were supposed to respect between
themselves, Tim Sullivan knew it, Mackenzie reflected. For a month
past Tim had been sending him eastward every time the wagon was moved,
a scheme to widen the distance between him and Joan and make it an
obstacle in her road, he believed at the time. Now it began to show
another purpose. Perhaps this was the winter pasture claimed by the
Hall brothers, and Tim had sent him in where he was afraid to come
himself.
It seemed a foolish thing to squabble over a piece of grazing land
where all the world lay out of doors, but Hector Hall's way of coming
up to it was unpleasant. It was decidedly offensive, bullying,
oppressive. If he should give way before it he'd just as well leave
the range, Mackenzie knew; his force would be spent there, his day
closed before it had fairly begun. If he designed seriously to remain
there and become a flockmaster, and that he intended to do, with all
the sincerity in him, he'd have to meet Hall's bluff with a stronger
one, and stand his ground, whether right or wrong. If wrong, a
gentleman's adjustment could be made, his honor saved.
So deciding, he settled that matter, and put it out of his head until
its hour. There was something more pleasant to cogitate--the parallel
of Jacob and Laban, Tim Sullivan and himself. It was strange how the
craft of Laban had come down to Tim Sullivan across that mighty flight
of time. It would serve Tim the right turn, in truth, if something
should come of it between him and Joan. He smiled in anticipatory
pleasure at Tim's discomfiture and surprise.
But that was not in store for him, he sighed. Joan would shake her
wings out in a little while, and fly away, leaving him there, a dusty
sheepman, among the husks of his dream. Still, a man might dream on a
sunny afternoon. There was no interdiction against it; Hector Hall,
with his big guns, could not ride in and order a man off that domain.
A shepherd had the ancient privilege of dreams; he might drink himself
drunk on them, insane on them in the end, as so many of them were said
to do in that land of lonesomeness, where there was scarcely an echo
to give a man back his own faint voice in mockery of his solitude.
Evening, with the sheep homing to the bedding-ground, brought
reflections of a different hue. Since the raid on his flock Mackenzie
had given up his bunk in the wagon for a bed under a bush on the
hillside nearer the sheep. Night after night he lay with the rifle at
his hand, waiting the return of the grisly monster who had spent his
fury on the innocent simpletons in his care.
Whether it was Swan Carlson, with the strength of his great arms,
driven to madness by the blow he had received, or whether it was
another whom the vast solitudes of that country had unhinged,
Mackenzie did not know. But that it was man, he had no doubt.
Dad Frazer had gone away unconvinced, unshaken in his belief that it
was a grizzly. Tim Sullivan had come over with the same opinion, no
word of doubt in his mouth. But Mackenzie knew that when he should
meet that wild night-prowler he would face a thing more savage than a
bear, a thing as terrible to grapple with as the saber-tooth whose
bones lay deep under the hills of that vast pasture-land.