complaint,
or pain. Now their quavering, pathetic voices were as still as the
wind. There was not a shuffle of hoof, not a sigh.

Mackenzie thought of Joan, and the influence this solitary life, these
night silences, had borne in shading her character with the melancholy
which was so plainly apparent in her longing to be away. She yearned
for the sound of life, for the warmth of youth's eager fire beyond the
dusty gray loneliness of this sequestered place. Still, this was what
men and women in the crowded places thought of and longed toward as
freedom. Loose-footed here upon the hills, one might pass as free as
the wind, indeed, but there was something like the pain of prison
isolation in these night silences which bore down upon a man and made
him old.

A sudden commotion among the sheep, terrified bleating, quick
scurrying of feet, shook Mackenzie out of his reflections. The dogs
charged down the hill and stood baying the disturber of the flock with
savage alarm, in which there was a note of fear. Dad stood a moment
listening, then reached into the wagon for the rifle.

"Don't go down there!" he warned Mackenzie, who was running toward the
center of disturbance. "That's a grizzly--don't you hear them dogs?"

Mackenzie stopped. The advance stampede of the terrified flock rushed
past him, dim in the deeper darkness near the ground. Below on the
hillside where the sheep bedded he could see nothing. Dad came up with
the gun.

The sheep were making no outcry now, and scarcely any sound of
movement. After their first startled break they had bunched, and were
standing in their way of pathetic, paralyzing fear, waiting what
might befall. Dad fired several quick shots toward the spot where the
dogs were charging and retreating, voices thick in their throats from
their bristling terror of the thing that had come to lay tribute upon
the flock.

"Don't go down there!" Dad cautioned again. "Git the lantern and light
it--maybe when he sees it he'll run. It's a grizzly. I didn't think
there was one in forty miles."

Mackenzie took hold of the gun.

"Give it to me--hand me another clip."

Dad yielded it, warning Mackenzie again against any rash movement. But
his words were unheeded if not unheard. Mackenzie was running down the
hillside toward the dogs. Encouraged by his coming, they dashed
forward, Mackenzie halting to peer into the darkness ahead. There was
a sound of trampling, a crunching as of the rending of bones. H