The Flockmaster of Poison Creek Part 34

There was the odor of carbolic acid, and he was conscious all along that his head had been shaved around the wound in approved surgical fas.h.i.+on. He reasoned that Rabbit went about prepared with the emergency remedies of civilization, and put it down to her schooling at the Catholic sisters' hands.

"Was there anybody--did anybody else come around?" Mackenzie inquired.

"Tim's been by a couple of times. Oh, well--Joan."

"Oh, Joan," said Mackenzie, trying to make it sound as if he had no concern in Joan at all. But his voice trembled, and life came bounding up in him again with glad, wild spring.

"She was over the day after you got hurt, but she ain't been back,"

said Dad, with such indifference that he must have taken it for granted that Mackenzie held no tenderness for her, indeed. "I met Charley yesterday; he told me Joan was over home. Mary's out here with him--she's the next one to Joan, you know."

Mackenzie's day clouded; his sickness fell over him again, taking the faint new savor out of life. Joan was indifferent; she did not care.

Then hope came on its white wings to excuse her.

"Is she sick?" he inquired.

"Who--Mary?"

"Joan. Is she all right?"

"Well, if I was married to her I'd give up hopes of ever bein' left a widower. That girl's as healthy as a burro--yes, and she'll outlive one, I'll bet money, and I've heard of 'em livin' eighty years down in Mexico."

Dad did not appear to be cognizant of Mackenzie's weakness. According to the old man's pathology a man was safe when he regained his head out of the delirium of fever. All he needed then was cheering up, and Dad did not know of any better way of doing that than by talking. So he let himself go, and Mackenzie shut his eyes to the hum of the old fellow's voice, the sound beating on his ears like wind against closed doors.

Suddenly Dad's chatter ceased. The silence was as welcome as the falling of a gale to a man at sea in an open boat. Mackenzie heard Dad leaving the wagon in cautious haste, and opened his eyes to see.

Rabbit was beside him with a bowl of savory-smelling broth, which she administered to him with such gentle deftness that Mackenzie could not help believing Dad had libeled her in his story of the accident that had left its mark upon her face.

Rabbit would not permit her patient to talk, denying him with uplifted finger and shake of head when he attempted it. She did not say a word during her visit, although her manner was only gentle, neither timid nor shy.

Rabbit was a short woman, turning somewhat to weight, a little gray in her black hair, but rather due to trouble than age, Mackenzie believed. Her skin was dark, her face bright and intelligent, but stamped with the meekness which is the heritage of women of her race.

The burn had left her marked as Dad had said, the scar much lighter than the original skin, but it was not such a serious disfigurement that a man would be justified in leaving her for it as Dad had done.

When Rabbit went out she drew a mosquito netting over the opening in the back of the wagon. Mackenzie was certain that Dad had libeled her after that. There was not a fly in the wagon to pester him, and he knew that the opening in the front end had been similarly screened, although he could not turn to see. Grateful to Rabbit, with the almost tearful tenderness that a sick man feels for those who have ministered kindly to his pain, Mackenzie lay with his thoughts that first day of consciousness after his tempestuous season of delirium.

They were not pleasant thoughts for a man whose blood was not yet cool. As they surged and hammered in his brain his fever flashed again, burning in his eyes like a desert wind. Something had happened to alienate Joan.

That was the burden of it as the sun mounted with his fever, heating the enclosed wagon until it was an oven. Something had happened to alienate Joan. He did not believe her weak enough, fickle enough, to yield to the allurements of Reid's prospects. They must have slandered him and driven her away with lies. Reid must have slandered him; there was the stamp of slander in his wide, thin mouth.

It would be many days, it might be weeks, before he could go abroad on the range again to set right whatever wrong had been done him. Then it would be too late. Surely Joan could not take his blunder into Carlson's trap in the light of an unpardonable weakness; she was not so sheep-blind as that. Something had been done outside any act of his own to turn her face and her sympathies away.

Consumed in impatience to be up, anxiety for the delay, Mackenzie lay the throbbing day through like a disabled engine spending its vain power upon a broken shaft. Kind Rabbit came frequently to give him drink, to bathe his forehead, to place a cool cloth over his burning eyes. But Dad did not come again. How much better for his peace if the garrulous old rascal had not come at all!

And then with the thought of Joan there came mingling the vexing wonder of the train of violence that had attended him into the sheeplands. He had come there to be a master over flocks, not expecting to encounter any unfriendly force save the stern face of nature. He had begun to muddle and meddle at the outset; he had continued to muddle, if not meddle, to the very end.

For this would be the end. No sheepman would countenance a herder who could not take care of his flock in summer weather on a bountiful range. His day was done in that part of the country so far as his plans of becoming a sharing herdsman went. Earl Reid, a thin, anemic lad fresh from city life, had come in and made much more a figure of a man.

So his fever boiled under the fuel of his humiliating thoughts. The wagon was a bake-oven, but there was no sweat in him to cool his parching skin. He begged Rabbit to let him go and lie under the wagon, where the wind could blow over him, but she shook her head in denial and pressed him down on the bunk. Then she gave him a drink that had the bitterness of opium in it, and he threw down his worrying snarl of thoughts, and slept.

CHAPTER XXIII

CONCERNING MARY

"Yes, I've heard tell of sheepmen workin' Swan's dodge on one another, but I never took no stock in it, because I never believed even a sheepman was fool enough to let anybody put a thing like that over on him."

"A sheepman oughtn't to be," Mackenzie said, in the bitterness of defeat.

"Swan knew you was an easy feller, and green to the ways of them tricky sheepmen," said Dad. "You let him off in that first fight with a little crack on the head when you'd ought to 'a' laid him out for good, and you let Hector Hall go that time you took his guns away from him. Folks in here never could understand that; they say it was like a child playin' with a rattlesnake."

"It was," Mackenzie agreed.

"Swan thought he could run them sheep of his over on you and take away five or six hundred more than he brought, and I guess he'd 'a' done it if it hadn't been for Reid."

"It looks that way, Dad. I sure was easy, to fall into his trap the way I did."

Mackenzie was able to get about again, and was gaining strength rapidly. He and Dad were in the shade of some willows along the creek, where Mackenzie stretched in the indolent relaxation of convalescence, Dad smoking his miserable old pipe close at hand.

And miserable is the true word for Dad's pipe, for it was miserable indeed, and miserable the smell that came out of it, going there full steam on a hot afternoon of early autumn. Dad always carefully reamed out the first speck of carbon that formed in his pipe, and kept it reamed out with boring blade of his pocket knife. He wanted no insulation against nicotine, and the strength thereof; he was not satisfied unless the fire burned into the wood, and drew the infiltrations of strong juice therefrom. When his charge of tobacco burned out, and the fire came down to this frying, sizzling abomination of smells at last, Dad beamed, enjoying it as a sort of dessert to a delightful repast of strong smoke.

Dad was enjoying his domestic felicity to the full these days of Mackenzie's convalescence. Rabbit was out with the sheep, being needed no longer to attend the patient, leaving Dad to idle as he pleased.

His regret for the one-eyed widow seemed to have pa.s.sed, leaving no scar behind.

"Tim don't take no stock in it that Swan planned before to do you out of a lot of your sheep. He was by here this morning while you was wanderin' around somewhere."

"He was by, was he?"

"Yeah; he was over to see Reid--he's sent him a new wagon over there.

Tim says you and Swan must both 'a' been asleep and let the two bands stray together, and of course it was human for Swan to want to take away more than he brought. Well, it was sheepman, anyhow, if it wasn't human."

"Did Sullivan say that?"

"No, that's what I say. I know 'em; I know 'em to the bone. Reid knew how many sheep him and you had, and he stuck out for 'em like a little man. More to that feller than I ever thought he had in him."

"Yes," Mackenzie agreed. He lay stretched on his back, squinting at the calm-weather clouds.

"Yeah; Tim says both of you fellers must 'a' been asleep."

"I suppose he'll fire me when he sees me."

"No, I don't reckon he will. Tim takes it as a kind of a joke, and he's as proud as all git-out of the way Reid stacked up. If that boy hadn't happened up when he did, Swan he'd 'a' soaked you another one with that gun of yourn and put you out for good. They say that kid waltzed Swan around there and made him step like he was standin' on a red-hot stove."

"Did anybody see him doing it?"

"No, I don't reckon anybody did. But he must 'a' done it, all right, Swan didn't git a head of sheep that didn't belong to him."

"It's funny how Reid arrived on the second," Mackenzie said, reflecting over it as a thing he had pondered before.