ther
violence between them. Wild and unfeeling as he seemed, there must be
a sense of justice in him, reading him by his stern, immobile face.

As he sat and weighed the argument for and against the sheep business,
the calling of flockmaster began to take on the color of romantic
attraction which had not been apparent to him before. In his way,
every flockmaster was a hero, inflexible against the unreckoned forces
which rose continually to discourage him. This was true, as he long
had realized, of a man who plants in the soil, risking the large part
of his capital of labor year by year. But the sheepman's risks were
greater, his courage immensely superior, to that of the tiller of the
soil. One storm might take his flock down to the last head, leaving
him nothing to start on again but his courage and his hope.

It appeared to Mackenzie to be the calling of a proper man. A
flockmaster need not be a slave to the range, as most of them were. He
might sit in his office, as a few of them did, and do the thing like a
gentleman. There were possibilities of dignity in it heretofore
overlooked; Joan would think better of it if she could see it done
that way. Surely, it was a business that called for a fight to build
and a fight to hold, but it was the calling of a proper man.

Mackenzie was immensely cheered by his reasoning the sheep business
into the romantic and heroic class. Here were allurements of which he
had not dreamed, to be equaled only by the calling of the sea, and not
by any other pursuit on land at all. A man who appreciated the subtle
shadings of life could draw a great deal of enjoyment and self-pride
out of the business of flockmaster. It was one of the most ancient
pursuits of man. Abraham was a flockmaster; maybe Adam.

But for all of the new comfort he had found in the calling he had
adopted, Mackenzie was plagued by a restless, broken sleep when he
composed himself among the hillside shrubs above the sheep. A vague
sense of something impending held him from rest. It was present over
his senses like a veil of drifting smoke through his shallow sleep.
Twice he moved his bed, with the caution of some haunted beast; many
times he started in his sleep, clutching like a falling man, to sit up
alert and instantly awake.

There was something in the very tension of the night-silence that
warned him to be on the watch. It was not until long after midnight
that he relaxed his straining, uneasy vigil, and stretche