. But you're not dead yet, Dad--you may
outlive Rabbit and marry the widow at last."

"I never was no lucky man," said Dad, smoothing his gleaming hair. "A
man that's married and nailed down to one place is the same as dead;
he might as well be in his grave. If I'd 'a' got that widow-lady I'd
'a' had the means and the money to go ridin' around and seein' the
sights from the end of one of them cars with a brass fence around it.
But I'm nailed down now, John; I'm cinched."

Dad was so melancholy over his situation that he went off without more
words, a thing unheard of for him. He gave Rabbit a wide fairway as he
passed. When he was a respectable distance ahead the squaw rose from
her bush and followed, such determination in her silent movements as
to make Dad's hope for future freedom hollow indeed. The old man was
cinched at last; Mackenzie was glad that it was so.

The sound of Carlson's sheep was still near that morning, and coming
nearer, as whoever attended them ranged them slowly along. Mackenzie
went a little way across the hill in that direction, but could not see
the shepherd, although the sheep were spread on the slope just before
him. It was a small flock, numbering not above seven hundred.
Mackenzie was puzzled why Swan wanted to employ his own or his wife's
time in grazing so small a number, when four times as many could be
handled as easily.

This question was to be answered for him very soon, and in a way which
he never had imagined. Yet there was no foreboding of it in the calm
noonday as he prepared his dinner in the shade of some welcome
willows, the heat glimmering over the peaceful hills.

It was while Mackenzie sat dozing in the fringe of shade such as a
hedge would cast at noonday that the snarl of fighting dogs brought
him up to a realization of what was going forward among the sheep. His
own flock had drifted like a slow cloud to the point of the long
ridge, and there Swan Carlson's band had joined it. The two flocks
were mingling now, and on the edge of the confused mass his own dogs
and Carlson's were fighting.

Swan was not in sight; nobody seemed to be looking after the sheep; it
appeared as if they had been left to drift as they might to this
conjunction with Mackenzie's flock. Mackenzie believed Mrs. Carlson
had abandoned her charge and fled Swan's cruelty, but he did not
excuse himself for his own stupidity in allowing the flocks to come
together as he ran to the place where his dogs