Part 6 (1/2)
”You're afraid I haven't got it in me to learn--you don't want to waste time on me!” Joan spoke with a sad bitterness, as one who saw another illusion fading before her eyes.
”Not that,” he hastened to a.s.sure her, putting out his hand as if to add the comfort of his touch to the salve of his words. ”I'm only afraid your father wouldn't have anything to do with me if you were to approach him with any such proposal. From what I've heard of him he's a man who likes a fellow to do his own talking.”
”I don't think he'd refuse me.”
”It's hard for a stranger to do that. Your father----”
”You'll not do it, you mean?”
”I think I'd rather get a job from your father on my own face than on any kind of an arrangement or condition, Miss Sullivan. But I pa.s.s you my word that you'll be welcome to anything and all I'm able to teach you if I become a pupil in the sheep business on this range. Provided, of course, that I'm in reaching distance.”
”Will you?” Joan asked, hope clearing the shadows from her face again.
”But we might be too far apart for lessons very often,” he suggested.
”Not more than ten or twelve miles. I could ride that every day.”
”It's a bargain then, if I get on,” said he.
”It's a bargain,” nodded Joan, giving him her hand to bind it, with great earnestness in her eyes.
CHAPTER V
TIM SULLIVAN
”Yes, they call us flockmasters in the reports of the Wool Growers'
a.s.sociation, and in the papers and magazines, but we're nothing but sheepmen, and that's all you can make out of us.”
Tim Sullivan spoke without humor when he made this correction in the name of his calling, sitting with his back to a hayc.o.c.k, eating his dinner in the sun. Mackenzie accepted the correction with a nod of understanding, sparing his words.
”So you want to be a flockmaster?” said Tim. ”Well, there's worse callin's a man, especially a young man, could take up. What put it in your head to tramp off up here to see me? Couldn't some of them sheepmen down at Jasper use you?”
”I wanted to get into the heart of the sheep country for one thing, and several of my friends recommended you as the best sheepman on the range, for another. I want to learn under a master, if I learn at all.”
”Right,” Tim nodded, ”right and sound. Do you think you've got the stuff in you to make a sheepman out of?”
”It will have to be a pretty hard school if I can't stick it through.”
”Summers are all right,” said Tim, reflectively, nodding away at the distant hills, ”and falls are all right, but you take it winter and early spring, and it tries the mettle in a man. Blizzards and starvation, and losses through pile-ups and stampedes, wolves and what not, make a man think sometimes he'll never go through it any more.
Then spring comes, with the cold wind, and slush up to your ankles, and you out day and night lookin' after the ewes and lambs. Lambin'
time is the hard time, and it's the time when a man makes it or loses, accordin' to what's in him to face hards.h.i.+p and work.”
”I've heard about it; I know what I'm asking to go up against, Mr.
Sullivan.”
”You want to buy in, or take a band on shares?”