tasks in a week. The thirsty traveler in the desert places had
come to the oasis of her dreams.

Daily Joan rode to the sheep-camp where Mackenzie was learning the
business of running sheep under Dad Frazer. There were no holidays in
the term Joan had set for herself, no unbending, no relaxation from
her books. Perhaps she did not expect her teacher to remain there in
the sheeplands, shut away from the life that he had breathed so long
and put aside for what seemed to her an unaccountable whim.

"You'll be reading Caesar by winter," Mackenzie told her as she
prepared to ride back to her camp. "You'll have to take it slower
then; we can't have lessons every day."

"Why not?" She was standing beside her horse, hat in hand, her rich
hair lifting in the wind from her wise, placid brow. Her books she had
strapped to the saddle-horn; there was a yellow slicker at the
cantle.

"You'll be at home, I'll be out here with the sheep. I expect about
once a week will be as often as we can make it then."

"I'll be out here on the range," she said, shaking her determined
head, "a sheepman's got to stick with his flock through all kinds of
weather. If I run home for the winter I'll have to hire a herder, and
that would eat my profits up; I'd never get away from here."

"Maybe by the time you've got enough money to carry out your plans,
Joan, you'll not want to leave."

"You've got to have education to be able to enjoy money. Some of the
sheepmen in this country--yes, most of them--would be better men if
they were poor. Wealth is nothing to them but a dim consciousness of a
new power. It makes them arrogant and unbearable. Did you ever see
Matt Hall?"

"I still have that pleasure in reserve. But I think you'll find it's
refinement, rather than learning, that a person needs to enjoy wealth.
That comes more from within than without."

"The curtain's down between me and everything I want," Joan said, a
wistful note of loneliness in her low, soft voice. "I'm going to ride
away some day and push it aside, and see what it's been keeping from
me all the years of my longing. Then, maybe, when I'm satisfied I'll
come back and make money. I've got sense enough to see it's here to be
made if a person's got the sheep to start with and the range to run
them on."

"Yes, you'll have to go," said he, in what seemed sad thoughtfulness,
"to learn it all; I can't teach you the things your heart desires most
to know. Well, there are bitter wate