NOT CUT OUT FOR A SHEEPMAN
Mackenzie returned to conscious state in nausea and pain. Not on a
surge, but slow-breaking, like the dawn, his senses came to him,
assembling as dispersed birds assemble, with erratic excursions as if
distrustful of the place where they desire to alight. Wherever the
soul may go in such times of suspended animation, it comes back to its
dwelling in trepidation and distrust, and with lingering at the door.
The first connected thought that Mackenzie enjoyed after coming out of
his shock was that somebody was smoking near at hand; the next that
the sun was in his eyes. But these were indifferent things, drowned in
a flood of pain. He put them aside, not to grope after the cause of
his discomfort, for that was apart from him entirely, but to lie,
throbbing in every nerve, indifferent either to life or death.
Presently his timid life came back entirely, settling down in the old
abode with a sigh. Then Mackenzie remembered the poised revolver in
Swan Carlson's hand. He moved, struggling to rise, felt a sweep of
sickness, a flood of pain, but came to a sitting posture in the way of
a man fighting to life from beneath an avalanche. The sun was directly
in his eyes, standing low above the hill. He shifted weakly to relieve
its discomfort. Earl Reid was sitting near at hand, a few feet above
him on the side of the hill.
Reid was smoking a cigarette, his hat pushed back, the shadows of his
late discontent cleared out of his face. Below them the sheep were
grazing. They were all there; Mackenzie had wit enough in him to see
that they were all there.
Reid looked at him with a grin that seemed divided between amusement
and scorn.
"I don't believe you're cut out for a sheepman, Mackenzie," he said.
"It begins to look like it," Mackenzie admitted. He was too sick to
inquire into the matter of Reid's recovery of the sheep; the world
tipped at the horizon, as it tips when one is sick at sea.
"Your hand's chewed up some, Mackenzie," Reid told him. "I think you'd
better go to the ranch and have it looked after; you can take my
horse."
Mackenzie was almost indifferent both to the information of his hurt
and the offer for its relief. He lifted his right hand to look at it,
and in glancing down saw his revolver in the holster at his side. This
was of more importance to him for the moment than his injury. Swan
Carlson was swinging that revolver to strike him when he saw it last.
How did it get back there in his holster? Where was Carlson; what had
happened to him? Mackenzie looked at Reid as for an explanation.
"He batted you over the head with your gun--I guess he used your gun,
I found it out there by you," said Reid, still grinning as if he could
see the point of humor in it that Mackenzie could not be expected to
enjoy.
Mackenzie did not attempt a reply. He looked with a sort of impersonal
curiosity at his hand and forearm, where the dog had bitten him in
several places. That had happened a good while ago, he reasoned; the
blood had dried, the marks of the dog's teeth were bruised-looking
around the edges.
And the sheep were all there, and Reid was laughing at him in
satisfaction of his disgrace. There was no sound of Swan Carlson's
flock, no sight of the sheepman. Reid had come and untangled what
Mackenzie had failed to prevent, and was sitting there, unruffled and
undisturbed, enjoying already the satisfaction of his added
distinction.
Perhaps Reid had saved his life from Carlson's hands, as he had saved
it from Matt Hall's. His debt to Reid was mounting with mocking
swiftness. As if in scorn of his unfitness, Reid had picked up his gun
and put it back in its sheath.
What would Joan say about this affair? What would Tim Sullivan's
verdict be? He had not come off even second best, as in the encounter
with Matt Hall, but defeated, disgraced. And he would have been robbed
in open day, like a baby, if it hadn't been for Reid's interference.
Mackenzie began to think with Dad Frazer that he was not a lucky man.
Too simple and too easy, too trusting and too slow, as they thought of
him in the sheep country. A sort of kindly indictment it was, but more
humiliating because it seemed true. No, he was not cut out for a
sheepman, indeed, nor for anything but that calm and placid woman's
work in the schoolroom, it seemed.
Mackenzie looked again at his hand. There was no pain in it, but its
appearance was sufficient to alarm a man in a normal state of
reasonableness. He had the passing thought that it ought to be
attended to, and got up on weaving legs. He might wash it in the
creek, he considered, and so take out the rough of whatever infection
the dog's teeth had driven into his flesh, but dismissed the notion at
once as altogether foolish. It needed bichloride of mercury, and it
was unlikely there was such a thing within a hundred and fifty miles.
As he argued this matter of antiseptics with himself Mackenzie walked
away from the spot where Reid remained seated, going aimlessly, quite
unconscious of his act. Only when he found himself some distance away
he stopped, considering what to do. His thoughts ran in fragments and
flashes, broken by the throbbing of his shocked brain, yet he knew
that Reid had offered to do something for him which he could not
accept.
No, he could not place himself under additional obligation to Reid.
Live or die, fail or succeed, Reid should not be called upon again to
offer a supporting hand. He could sit there on the hillside and grin
about this encounter with Carlson, and grin about the hurt in
Mackenzie's hand and arm, and the blinding pain in his head. Let him
grin in his high satisfaction of having turned another favor to
Mackenzie's account; let him grin until his face froze in a grin--he
should not have Joan.
Mackenzie went stumbling on again to the tune of that declaration.
Reid should not have Joan, he shouldn't have Joan, shouldn't have
Joan! Blind from pain, sick, dizzy, the earth rising up before him as
he walked, Mackenzie went on. He did not look back to see if Reid
came to help him; he would have resented it if he had come, and cursed
him and driven him away. For he should not have Joan; not have Joan;
Joan, Joan, Joan!
How he found his way to Dad Frazer's camp Mackenzie never could tell.
It was long past dark when he stumbled to the sheep-wagon wherein the
old herder and his squaw lay asleep, arriving without alarm of dogs,
his own collies at his heels. It was the sharp-eared Indian woman who
heard him, and knew by his faltering step that it was somebody in
distress. She ran out and caught him as he fell.