into
the sheeplands to become a master. He had determined it all by
mathematical rule.

There was the experience to be gained first, and it was cheaper to do
that at another man's expense than his own. He knew how the right kind
of a man could form a partnership with a flockmaster sometimes; he had
heard stories of such small beginnings leading to large ownership and
oily prosperity. Jasper had examples of its own; he was familiar with
them all.

Some of them began as herders on the basis of half the increase from a
stated number of sheep not more than ten years past. Now they looked
upon a sixty-dollars-a-month schoolteacher with the eyes of
superiority, as money always despises brains which it is obliged to
hire, probably because brains cannot devise any better method of
finding the necessary calories than that of letting themselves out by
the month.

Tim Sullivan needed herders; he had advertised for them in the Jasper
paper. Besides, Tim had the name of a man who could see the
possibilities in another. He had put more than one young fellow on the
way of success in the twenty years he had been running sheep on the
Poison Creek range. But failing to land a partnership deal with
Sullivan, Mackenzie was prepared to take a job running sheep by the
month. Or, should he find all avenues to experience at another man's
expense closed to him, he was ready to take the six hundred dollars
saved out of his years of book bondage and buy a little flock of his
own. Somewhere in that wide expanse of government-owned land he would
find water and grazing, and there his prosperity would increase.

Sheep had visited the creek lately at the point where Mackenzie first
encountered it, but there were no dusty flocks in sight billowing over
the hills. Tim Sullivan's house was not to be seen any more than
sheep, from the highest hill in the vicinity. It must be several miles
ahead of him still, Mackenzie concluded, remembering that Poison Creek
was long. Yet he hoped he might reach it by nightfall, for his feet
were growing weary of the untrodden way they had borne him for a
hundred and fifty miles, more or less.

He pushed on, now and again crossing the broad trail left by bands of
sheep counting two or three thousand, feeling the lonesomeness of the
unpeopled land softened by these domestic signs. Sunset, and no sight
of a house; nightfall, and not the gleam of a light to show him either
herder's camp or permanent domicile of man.