A FIGHT ALMOST LOST
Dad Frazer was not overly friendly toward the young man from Omaha who
had come out to learn the sheep business under the threat of penalties
and the promise of high rewards. He growled around about him
continually when he and Mackenzie met, which was not very often, owing
to their being several miles apart. Tim had stationed Dad and his big
band of sheep between Mackenzie and Joan, leaving the schoolmaster to
hold the frontier. No matter for old man Reid's keenness to have his
son suffer some of the dangers which he had faced in his day, Tim
seemed to be holding the youth back out of harm's way, taking no risks
on losing a good thing for the family.
Reid had been on the range about two weeks, but Mackenzie had not seen
a great deal of him, owing to Tim's plan of keeping him out of the
disputed territory, especially at night. That the young man did not
care much for the company or instruction of Dad Frazer was plain.
Twice he had asked Mackenzie to use his influence with Tim to bring
about a change from the old man's camp to his. In Mackenzie's silence
and severity the young man found something that he could not
penetrate, a story that he could not read. Perhaps it was with a view
to finding out what school Mackenzie had been seasoned in that Reid
bent himself to win his friendship.
Dad Frazer came over the hills to Mackenzie's range that afternoon, to
stretch his legs, he said, although Mackenzie knew it was to stretch
his tongue, caring nothing for the miles that lay between. He had left
Reid in charge of his flock, the young man being favored by Tim to the
extent of allowing him a horse, the same as he did Joan.
"I'm glad he takes to you," said Dad. "I don't like him; he's got a
graveyard in his eyes."
"I don't think he ever pulled a gun on anybody in his life, Dad,"
Mackenzie returned, in mild amazement.
"I don't mean that kind of a graveyard; I mean a graveyard where he
buried the boy in him long before his time. He's too sharp for his
years; he's seen too much of the kind of life a young feller's better
off for to hear about from a distance and never touch. I tell you,
John, he ain't no good."
"He's an agreeable kind of a chap, anyhow; he's got a line of talk
like a saddle salesman."
"Yes, and I never did have no use for a talkin' man. Nothin' to 'em;
they don't stand the gaff."
In spite of his friendly defense of young Reid, Mackenzie felt that
Dad had read him aright. There was something of subtle knowledge, an
edge of guile showing through his easy nature and desire to please,
that was like acid on the teeth. Reid had the faculty of making
himself agreeable, and he was an apt and willing hand, but back of
this ingenuous appearance there seemed to be something elusive and
shadowy, a thing which he tried to keep hidden by nimble maneuvers,
but which would show at times for all his care.
Mackenzie did not dislike the youth, but he found it impossible to
warm up to him as one man might to another in a place where human
companionship is a luxury. When Reid sat with a cigarette in his thin
lips--it was a wide mouth, worldly hard--hazy in abstraction and
smoke, there came a glaze over the clearness of his eyes, a look of
dead harshness, a cast of cunning. In such moments his true nature
seemed to express itself unconsciously, and Dad Frazer, simple as he
was in many ways, was worldly man enough to penetrate the smoke, and
sound the apprentice sheepman to his soul.
Reid seemed to draw a good deal of amusement out of his situation
under Tim Sullivan. He was dependent on the flockmaster for his
clothing and keep, even tobacco and papers for his cigarettes. If he
knew anything about the arrangement between his father and Sullivan in
regard to Joan, he did not mention it. That he knew it, Mackenzie
fully believed, for Tim Sullivan was not the man to keep the reward
sequestered.
Whether Reid looked toward Joan as adequate compensation for three
years' exile in the sheeplands, there was no telling. Perhaps he did
not think much of her in comparison with the exotic plants of the
atmosphere he had left; more than likely there was a girl in the
background somewhere, around whom some of the old man's anxiety to
save the lad revolved. Mackenzie hoped to the deepest cranny of his
heart that it was so.
"He seems to get a good deal of humor out of working here for his
board and tobacco," Mackenzie said.
"Yes, he blatters a good deal about it," said Dad. "'I'll take
another biscuit on Tim Sullivan,' he says, and 'here goes another
smoke on Tim.' I don't see where he's got any call to make a joke out
of eatin' another man's bread."
"Maybe he's never eaten any man's bread outside of the family before,
Dad."
"I reckon he wouldn't have to be doin' it now if he'd 'a' been decent.
Oh well, maybe he ain't so bad."
This day Dad was maneuvering around to unload the apprentice on
Mackenzie for good. He worked up to it gradually, as if feeling his
way with his good foot ahead, careful not to be too sudden and plunge
into a hole.
"I don't like a feller around that talks so much," Dad complained.
"When he's around a man ain't got no time to think and plan and lay
his projec's for what he's a goin' to do. All I can do to put a word
in edgeways once in a while."
It appeared plain enough that Dad's sore spot was this very inability
to land as many words as he thought he had a right to. That is the
complaint of any talkative person. If you are a good listener, with a
_yes_ and a _no_ now and then, a talkative man will tell your friends
you are the most interesting conversationalist he ever met.
"I don't mind him," Mackenzie said, knowing very well that Dad would
soon be so hungry for somebody to unload his words upon that he would
be talking to the sheep. "Ship him over to me when you're tired of
him; I'll work some of the wind out of him inside of a week."
"I'll send him this evenin'," said Dad, eager in his relief,
brightening like an uncovered coal. "Them dogs Joan give you's
breakin' in to the sound of your voice wonderful, ain't they?"
"They're getting used to me slowly."
"Funny about dogs a woman's been runnin' sheep with. Mighty unusual
they'll take up with a man after that. I used to be married to a
Indian woman up on the Big Wind that was some hummer trainin'
sheep-dogs. That woman could sell 'em for a hundred dollars apiece as
fast as she could raise 'em and train 'em up, and them dad-splashed
collies they'd purt' near all come back home after she'd sold 'em.
Say, I've knowed them dogs to come back a hundred and eighty mile!"
"That must have been a valuable woman to have around a man's camp.
Where is she now, if I'm not too curious?"
"She was a good woman, one of the best women I ever had." Dad rubbed
his chin, eyes reflectively on the ground, stood silent a spell that
was pretty long for him. "I hated like snakes to lose that woman--her
name was Little Handful Of Rabbit Hair On A Rock. Ye-es. She was a
hummer on sheep-dogs, all right. She took a swig too many out of my
jug one day and tripped over a stick and tumbled into the hog-scaldin'
tank."
"What a miserable end!" said Mackenzie, shocked by the old man's
indifferent way of telling it.
"Oh, it didn't hurt her much," said Dad. "Scalded one side of her till
she peeled off and turned white. I couldn't stand her after that. You
know a man don't want to be goin' around with no pinto woman, John."
Dad looked up with a gesture of depreciation, a queer look of apology
in his weather-beaten face. "She was a Crow," he added, as if that
explained much that he had not told.
"Dark, huh?"
"Black; nearly as black as a nigger."
"Little Handful, and so forth, must have thought you gave her a pretty
hard deal, anyhow, Dad."
"I never called her by her full name," Dad reflected, passing over the
moral question that Mackenzie raised. "I shortened her down to Rabbit.
I sure wish I had a couple of them sheep-dogs of her'n to give you in
place of them you lost. Joan's a good little girl, but she can't train
a dog like Rabbit."
"Rabbit's still up there on the Big Wind waiting for you, is she?"
"She'll wait a long time! I'm done with Indians. Joan comin' over
today?"
"Tomorrow."
"I don't guess you'll have her to bother with much longer--her and
that Reid boy they'll be hitchin' up one of these days from all the
signs. He skirmishes off over that way nearly every day. Looks to me
like Tim laid it out that way, givin' him a horse to ride and leavin'
me and you to hoof it. It'd suit Tim, all right; I've heard old Reid's
a millionaire."
"I guess it would," Mackenzie said, trying to keep his voice from
sounding as cold as his heart felt that moment.
"Yes, I think they'll hitch. Well, I'd like to see Joan land a better
man than him. 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.
"If Joan had a little more meat on her she wouldn't be a bad looker,"
said Dad. "Well, when a man's young he likes 'em slim, and when he's
old he wants 'em fat. It'd be a calamity if a man was to marry a
skinny girl like Joan and she was to stay skinny all his life."
"I don't think she's exactly skinny, Dad."
"No, I don't reckon you could count her ribs. But you put fifty pounds
more on that girl and see how she'd look!"
"I can't imagine it," said Mackenzie, not friendly to the notion at
all.
As Dad went back to unburden himself of his unwelcome companion,
Mackenzie could not suppress the thought that a good many unworthy
notions hatched beneath that dignified white hair. But surely Dad
might be excused by a more stringent moralist than the schoolmaster
for abandoning poor Rabbit after her complexion had suffered in the
hog-scalding vat.
Toward sundown Earl Reid came riding over, his winning smile as easy
on his face as he was in the saddle. The days were doing him good, all
around, toughening his face, taking the poolroom pastiness out of it,
putting a bracer in his back. Mackenzie noted the improvement as
readily as it could be seen in some quick-growing plant.
Mackenzie was living a very primitive and satisfactory life under a
few yards of tent canvas since the loss of his wagon. He stretched it
over such bushes as came handy, storing his food beneath it when he
slept, save on such nights as threatened showers. Reid applauded this
arrangement. He was tired of Dad Frazer's wagon, and the greasy bunk
in it.
"I've been wild to stretch out in a blanket with my feet to a little
fire," he said, with a flash of the eagerness belonging to the boyhood
buried away too soon, as Dad had remarked. "Dad wouldn't let me do
it--fussed at me three days because I sneaked out on him one night and
laid under the wagon."
"Dad didn't want a skunk to bite you, I guess. He felt a heavy
responsibility on your account."
"Old snoozer!" said Reid.
Reid was uncommonly handy as a camp-cook, far better in that respect
than Mackenzie, who gladly turned the kitchen duties over to him and
let him have his way. After supper they sat talking, the lusty moon
lifting a wondering face over the hills in genial placidity as if
sure, after all its ages, of giving the world a surprise at last.
"Joan told me to bring you word she'd be over in the morning instead
of tomorrow afternoon," said Reid.
"Thanks."
Reid smoked in reflective silence, his thin face clear in the
moonlight.
"Some girl," said he. "I don't see why she wants to go to all this
trouble to get a little education. That stuff's all bunk. I wish I had
the coin in my jeans right now the old man spent on me, pourin'
stuff into me that went right on through like smoke through a
handkerchief."
"I don't think it would be that way with Joan," Mackenzie said, hoping
Reid would drop the discussion there, and not go into the arrangement
for the future, which was a matter altogether detestable in the
schoolmaster's thoughts.
Reid did not pursue his speculations on Joan, whether through delicacy
or indifference Mackenzie could not tell. He branched off into talk of
other things, through which the craving for the life he had left came
out in strong expressions of dissatisfaction with the range. He
complained against the penance his father had set, looking ahead with
consternation to the three years he must spend in those solitudes.
"But I'm goin' to stick," he said, an unmistakable determination in
his tone. "I'll show him they're making as good men now as they did
when he was a kid." He laughed, a raucous, short laugh, an old man's
laugh, which choked in a cigarette cough and made a mockery of mirth.
"I'll toughen up out here and have better wind for the big finish when
I sit in on the old man's money."
No, Joan was not cast for any important part in young Reid's future
drama, Mackenzie understood. As if his thoughts had penetrated to the
young man's heart, making fatuous any further attempt at concealment
of his true sentiments, Reid spoke.
"They've sewed me up in a sack with Joan--I guess you know about it?"
"Tim was telling me."
"A guy could do worse."
With this comforting reflection Reid stretched himself on his blanket
and went to sleep. Mackenzie was not slow in following his example,
for it had been a hard day with the sheep, with much leg work on
account of the new dogs showing a wolfish shyness of their new master
most exasperating at times. Mackenzie's last thought was that Reid
would take a great deal of labor off his legs by using the horse in
attending the sheep.
A scream woke Mackenzie. He heaved up out of his sleep with confusion
clouding his senses for the moment, the thought that he was on water,
and the cry was that of one who drowned, persistent above his
struggling reason. It was a choking cry, the utterance of a desperate
soul who sees life fleeing while he lifts his voice in the last
appeal. And between him and his companion Mackenzie saw the bulk of a
giant-shouldered man, who bent with arm outstretched toward him, whose
hand came in contact with his throat as he rose upright with the stare
of confusion in his eyes.
Mackenzie broke through this film of his numbing sleep, reaching for
the rifle that he had laid near his hand. It was gone, and across the
two yards intervening he saw young Reid writhing in the grip of the
monster who was strangling out his life.
Mackenzie wrenched free from the great hand that closed about his
throat, tearing the mighty arm away with the strength of both his own.
A moment, and he was involved in the most desperate struggle that he
had ever faced in his life.
This interference gave Reid a new gulp of life. The three combatants
were on their feet now, not a word spoken, not a sound but the dull
impact of blows and the hard breathings of the two who fought this
monster of the sheeplands for their lives. Swan Carlson, Mackenzie
believed him to be, indulging his insane desire for strangling out the
lives of men. He had approached so stealthily, with such wild cunning,
that the dogs had given no alarm, and had taken the gun to insure
against miscarriage or interruption in his horrible menu of death.
A brief tangle of locked arms, swaying bodies, ribs all but crushed in
the embrace of those bestial arms, and Mackenzie was conscious that he
was fighting the battle alone. In the wild swirl of it he could not
see whether Reid had fallen or torn free. A little while, now in the
pressure of those hairy, bare arms, now free for one gasping breath,
fighting as man never fought in the sheeplands before that hour, and
Mackenzie felt himself snatched up bodily and thrown down from
uplifted arms with a force that must have ended all for him then but
for the interposition of a sage-clump that broke the fall.
Instantly the silent monster was upon him. Mackenzie met him hand to
hand, fighting the best fight that was in him, chilled with the belief
that it was his last. But he could not come up from his knees, and in
this position his assailant bent over him, one hand on his forehead,
the other at the back of his neck, a knee against his breast.
Mackenzie tore at the great, stiff arms with his last desperate might,
perhaps staying a little the pressure that in a moment more must snap
his spine. As the assassin tightened this terrible grip Mackenzie's
face was lifted toward the sky. Overhead was the moon, clear-edged,
bright, in the dusk of the immensities beyond; behind the monster, who
paused that breath as in design to fill his victim's last moment with
a hope that he soon would mock, Mackenzie saw young Reid.
The youth was close upon the midnight strangler, stooping low. As the
terrible pressure on forehead and neck cracked his spine like a
breaking icicle, Mackenzie believed he shouted, putting into his voice
all that he felt of desperate need of help. And he saw young Reid
strike, and felt the breaking wrench of the cruel hands relax, and
fell down upon the ground like a dead man and knew no more.
Reid was there with the lantern, putting water on Mackenzie's head
when he again broke through the mists and followed the thread of his
soul back to his body. Reid was encouraging him to be steady, and to
take it easy, assuring him that he never saw a man put up such a fight
as the schoolmaster had all but lost.
Mackenzie sat up presently, with throbbing head, a feeling of bulging
in his eyeballs, his neck stiff from the wrenching it had received.
The great body of the man whom he had fought lay stretched in the
moonlight, face to the ground. The camp butcher knife was sticking in
his back. Mackenzie got to his feet, a dizziness over him, but a sense
of his obligation as clear as it ever was in any man.
"I owe you one for that; I'll not forget it in a hurry," he said,
giving Reid his hand.
"No, we're even on it," Reid returned. "He'd 'a' broke my neck in
another second if you hadn't made that tackle. Who is he, do you
know?"
"Turn him over," Mackenzie said.
Reid withdrew the knife, sticking it into the ground with as little
concern as if he had taken it from a butcher's block, and heaved the
fellow over on his back. The moonlight revealed his dusty features
clearly, but Mackenzie brought the lantern to make it doubly sure.
"He's not the man I thought he was," said he. "I think this fellow's
name is Matt Hall. He's the sheep-killer you've heard about.
Look--he's all over blood--there's wool on his shirt."
"Matt Hall, huh?" said Reid. He wiped the butcher knife on the dead
sheep-killer's shirt, making a little whistling, reflective sound
through his teeth. "I'll have to scour that knife before we cut bacon
with it in the morning," he said.