Part 29 (2/2)

Mackenzie's hands were clutching Carlson's throat, he was on one knee, swaying the Norseman's body back in the strength of despair, when the heavens seemed to crash above him, the fragments of universal destruction burying him under their weight.

CHAPTER XIX

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, a.s.sembling as dispersed birds a.s.semble, 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 s.h.i.+fted 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 pa.s.sing 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 b.i.+.c.hloride 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.

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