.

Dad Frazer was a man of sixty or sixty-five, who had been an army
teamster in the days of frontier posts. He was slender and sinewy,
with beautiful, glimmering, silvery hair which he wore in long curls
and kept as carefully combed as any dandy that ever pranced at the
court of a king. It was his one vanity, his dusty, greasy raiment
being his last thought.

Dad's somber face was brown and weathered, marked with deep lines,
covered over with an ashy, short growth of beard which he clipped once
in two weeks with sheep-shears when he didn't lose count of the days.

Frazer always wore an ancient military hat with a leather thong at the
back of his head drawn tight across his flowing hair. The brim of this
hat turned up in the back as if he had slept in it many years, which
was indeed the case, and down in the front so low over his brows that
it gave him a sullen and clouded cast, which the redundancy of his
spirits and words at once denied.

For Dad Frazer was a loquacious sheepherder, an exception among the
morose and silent men who follow that isolated calling upon the lonely
range. He talked to the dogs when there was nobody by, to the sheep as
he scattered them for an even chance between weak and strong over the
grazing lands, and to himself when no other object presented. He swore
with force and piquancy, and original embellishments for old-time
oaths which was like a sharp sauce to an unsavory dish.

Frazer was peculiar in another way. He liked a soft bed to pound the
ground on after his long days after the sheep, and to that end kept a
roll of sheepskins under the wagon. More than that, he always washed
before eating, even if he had to divide the last water in the keg.

Now as he was employed with his ablutions, after a running fire of
talk from the time he came within hearing to the moment the water
smothered his voice over the basin, Mackenzie saw him turn an eye in
his direction every little while between the soaping and the washing
of his bearded face. The old fellow seemed bursting with restraint of
something that he had not told or asked about. Mackenzie could read
him like a thermometer.

"What's the matter, Dad--rattlesnakes?" he asked.

"Rattlesnakes nothin'!" returned the old man.

"I thought another one had been crawling up your leg."

"Nearer boey constructors! Anybody been here but Joan?"

"No."

Dad came over to the tail of the wagon, where Mackenzie had supper
spread on a board, a box