a reply. He looked with a sort of impersonal
curiosity at his hand and forearm, where the dog had bitten him in
several places. That had happened a good while ago, he reasoned; the
blood had dried, the marks of the dog's teeth were bruised-looking
around the edges.

And the sheep were all there, and Reid was laughing at him in
satisfaction of his disgrace. There was no sound of Swan Carlson's
flock, no sight of the sheepman. Reid had come and untangled what
Mackenzie had failed to prevent, and was sitting there, unruffled and
undisturbed, enjoying already the satisfaction of his added
distinction.

Perhaps Reid had saved his life from Carlson's hands, as he had saved
it from Matt Hall's. His debt to Reid was mounting with mocking
swiftness. As if in scorn of his unfitness, Reid had picked up his gun
and put it back in its sheath.

What would Joan say about this affair? What would Tim Sullivan's
verdict be? He had not come off even second best, as in the encounter
with Matt Hall, but defeated, disgraced. And he would have been robbed
in open day, like a baby, if it hadn't been for Reid's interference.
Mackenzie began to think with Dad Frazer that he was not a lucky man.

Too simple and too easy, too trusting and too slow, as they thought of
him in the sheep country. A sort of kindly indictment it was, but more
humiliating because it seemed true. No, he was not cut out for a
sheepman, indeed, nor for anything but that calm and placid woman's
work in the schoolroom, it seemed.

Mackenzie looked again at his hand. There was no pain in it, but its
appearance was sufficient to alarm a man in a normal state of
reasonableness. He had the passing thought that it ought to be
attended to, and got up on weaving legs. He might wash it in the
creek, he considered, and so take out the rough of whatever infection
the dog's teeth had driven into his flesh, but dismissed the notion at
once as altogether foolish. It needed bichloride of mercury, and it
was unlikely there was such a thing within a hundred and fifty miles.

As he argued this matter of antiseptics with himself Mackenzie walked
away from the spot where Reid remained seated, going aimlessly, quite
unconscious of his act. Only when he found himself some distance away
he stopped, considering what to do. His thoughts ran in fragments and
flashes, broken by the throbbing of his shocked brain, yet he knew
that Reid had offered to do something for him which he could not
acc