' this range has ever produced in my day," he
said, "too much of it here for that little band you're runnin'. I'll
send Dad over with three thousand more this week. You can camp
together--it'll save me a wagon, and he'll be company. How's Joan
gettin on with the learnin'?"

"She's eating it up."

"I was afraid it'd be that way," said Tim, gloomily; "you can't
discourage that girl."

"She's too sincere and capable to be discouraged. I laid down my hand
long ago."

"And it's a pity to ruin a good sheepwoman with learnin'," Tim said,
shaking his head with the sadness of it.

Tim rode away, leaving Mackenzie to his reflections as he watched his
boss' broad back grow smaller from hill to hill. The sheepherder
smiled as he recalled Tim's puzzled inquiry on the other consideration
of Jacob's contract with the slippery Laban.

_What is this thou hast done unto me? Did not I serve with thee for
Rachel? Wherefore then hast thou beguiled me?_

"Tim would do it, too," Mackenzie said, nodding his grave head; "he'd
work off the wrong girl on a man as sure as he had two."

It was queer, the way Tim had thought, at the last minute, of the
"something else" Jacob had worked for; queer, the way he had turned,
his foot up in the stirrup, that puzzled, suspicious expression in his
mild, shrewd face. Even if he should remember on the way home, or get
out his Bible on his arrival and look the story up, there would be
nothing of a parallel between the case of Jacob and that of John
Mackenzie to worry his sheepman's head. For though Jacob served his
seven years for Rachel, which "seemed to him but a few days, for the
love he had to her," he, John Mackenzie, was not serving Tim Sullivan
for Joan.

"Nothing to that!" said he, but smiling, a dream in his eyes, over the
thought of what might have been a parallel case with Jacob's, here in
the sheeplands of the western world.

Tim was scarcely out of sight when a man came riding over the hills
from the opposite direction. Mackenzie sighted him afar off, watching
him as each hill lifted him to a plainer view. He was a stranger, and
a man unsparing of his horse, pushing it uphill and down with
unaltered speed. He rode as if the object of his journey lay a long
distance ahead, and his time for reaching it was short.

Mackenzie wondered if the fellow had stolen the horse, having it more
than half in mind to challenge his passage until he could give an
account of his haste, when he saw tha