eep
over the Mesopotamian plain; Jacob had it when he felt his heart
dissolve in tears at the sight of his kinswoman beside the well of
Haran. But Joan was safe from it now; its insidious poison would
corrode in her heart no more.

Poor Hertha Carlson, deserving better than fate had given her with
sheep-mad Swan! She could not reason without violence any longer, so
often she had been subjected to its pain.

"It will be a thousand wonders if she doesn't kill him herself,"
Mackenzie said, sitting down with new thoughts.

The news of Swan's buying Hall out was important and unexpected. Free
to leave the country now, Hall very likely would be coming over to
balance accounts. There was his old score against Mackenzie for his
humiliation at the hands of the apprentice sheepherder, which
doubtless had grown more bitter day by day; and there was his double
account against Reid and Mackenzie for the loss of his sheep-killing
brother. Mackenzie hoped that he would go away and let matters stand
as they were.

And Swan. It had not been all a jest, then, when he proposed trading
his woman for Mackenzie's. What a wild, irresponsible, sheep-mad man
he was! But he hardly would attempt any violence toward Joan, even
though he "spoke of her in the night."

From Carlson, Mackenzie's thoughts ran out after Reid. Contempt rose
in him, and deepened as he thought of the mink-faced youth carrying
his deceptive poison into the wild Norseman's camp. But insane as she
was, racked by the lonesomeness to be away from that unkindly land,
Hertha Carlson remained woman enough to set a barrier up that Reid,
sneak that he was, could not cross.

What a condition she had made, indeed! Nothing would beguile her from
it; only its fulfilment would bend her to yield to his importunities.
It was a shocking mess that Reid had set for himself to drink some
day, for Swan Carlson would come upon them in their hand-holding in
his hour, as certainly as doom.

And there was the picture of the red-haired giant of the sheeplands
and that flat-chested, sharp-faced youth drinking beside the
sheep-wagon in the night. There was Swan, lofty, cold, unbending;
there was Reid, the craft, the knowledge of the world's under places
written on his brow, the deceit that he practiced against his host
hidden away in his breast.

Mackenzie sighed, putting it from him like a nightmare that calls a
man from his sleep by its false peril, wringing sweat from him in its
agony.