right.

"My man, he is the one who choked two sheepherders with his hands. You
must have read in the paper----"

"Maybe it was before my time. Give me down the lantern."

Swan Carlson appeared to be a man who got along with very few tools.
Mackenzie could not find a cold-chisel among the few broken and rusted
odds and ends in the barn, although there was an anvil, such as every
rancher in that country had, fastened to a stump in the yard, a hammer
rusting beside it on the block. As Mackenzie stood considering what
could be done with the material at hand, the woman called to him from
the door, her voice vibrant with anxious excitement:

"My man will come soon," she said.

Mackenzie started back to the house, hammer in hand, thinking that he
might break the chain near her foot and give her liberty, at least. A
pile of logs lay in the dooryard, an ax hacked into the end of one.
With this tool added to the hammer, he hurried to the prisoner.

"I think we can make it now," he said.

The poor creature was panting as if the hand of her man hung over her
in threat of throttling out her life as he had smothered the
sheepherders in the tragedy that gave him his evil fame. Mackenzie
urged her to a chair, giving her the lantern to hold and, with the
edge of the ax set against a link of her chain, the poll on the floor,
he began hammering the soft metal against the bit.

Once she put her hand on his shoulder, her breath caught in a sharp
exclamation of alarm.

"I thought it was Swan's step!" she whispered. "Listen--do you hear?"

"There's nobody," he assured her, turning his head to listen, the
sweat on his lean cheek glistening in the light.

"It is my fear that he will come too soon. Strike fast, good young
man, strike fast!"

If Swan Carlson had been within half a mile he would have split the
wind to find out the cause of such a clanging in his shunned and
proscribed house, and that he did not appear before the chain was
severed was evidence that he was nowhere near at hand. When the cut
links fell to the floor Mrs. Carlson stood the lantern down with
gentle deliberation, as if preparing to enter the chamber of someone
in a desperate sickness to whom had come a blessed respite of sleep.
Then she stood, her lips apart, her breath suspended, lifting her
freed foot with a joyous relief in its lightness.

Mackenzie remained on his knees at her feet, looking up strangely into
her face. Suddenly she bent over him, clasp