195
XIX Not Cut out for a Sheepman 207
XX A Million Gallops Off 212
XXI Tim Sullivan Breaks a Contract 222
XXII Phantoms of Fever 233
XXIII Concerning Mary 239
XXIV More About Mary 252
XXV One Man's Joke 262
XXVI Payment on Account 270
XXVII A Summons in the Night 287
XXVIII Swan Carlson Laughs 296
XXIX Sheepman--And More 308

THE FLOCKMASTER OF POISON CREEK

CHAPTER I

THE SHEEP COUNTRY

So John Mackenzie had put his foot upon the road. This after he had
reasoned it out as a mathematical problem, considering it as a matter
of quantities alone. There was nothing in school-teaching at sixty
dollars a month when men who had to carry a rubber stamp to sign their
names to their checks were making fortunes all around him in sheep.

That was the way it looked to John Mackenzie the morning he set out
for Poison Creek to hunt up Tim Sullivan and strike him for a job.
Against the conventions of the country, he had struck out on foot.
That also had been reasoned out in a cool and calculative way. A
sheepherder had no use for a horse, in the first place. Secondly and
finally, the money a horse would represent would buy at least twelve
head of ewes. With questioning eyes upon him when he left Jasper, and
contemptuous eyes upon him when he met riders in his dusty journey,
John Mackenzie had pushed on, his pack on his back.

There was not a book in that pack. John Mackenzie, schoolmaster, had
been a bondslave of books in that country for four obscure, well-nigh
profitless years, and he was done with them for a while. The less a
sheepman knew about books, the more he was bound to know about sheep,
for sheep would be the object and aim of his existence. Mackenzie knew
plenty of sheepmen who never had looked into any kind of a book but a
bank-deposit book in their lives. That seemed to be education enough
to carry them very nicely along, even to boost them to the state
legislature, and lift one of them to the United States senate. So,
what was the use of