ept.

No, he could not place himself under additional obligation to Reid.
Live or die, fail or succeed, Reid should not be called upon again to
offer a supporting hand. He could sit there on the hillside and grin
about this encounter with Carlson, and grin about the hurt in
Mackenzie's hand and arm, and the blinding pain in his head. Let him
grin in his high satisfaction of having turned another favor to
Mackenzie's account; let him grin until his face froze in a grin--he
should not have Joan.

Mackenzie went stumbling on again to the tune of that declaration.
Reid should not have Joan, he shouldn't have Joan, shouldn't have
Joan! Blind from pain, sick, dizzy, the earth rising up before him as
he walked, Mackenzie went on. He did not look back to see if Reid
came to help him; he would have resented it if he had come, and cursed
him and driven him away. For he should not have Joan; not have Joan;
Joan, Joan, Joan!

How he found his way to Dad Frazer's camp Mackenzie never could tell.
It was long past dark when he stumbled to the sheep-wagon wherein the
old herder and his squaw lay asleep, arriving without alarm of dogs,
his own collies at his heels. It was the sharp-eared Indian woman who
heard him, and knew by his faltering step that it was somebody in
distress. She ran out and caught him as he fell.

CHAPTER XX

A MILLION GALLOPS OFF

Joan was returning to camp, weighed down by a somber cloud. Dad Frazer
had carried word to her early that morning of Mackenzie's condition,
the old man divided in his opinion as to whether man or beast had
mauled the shepherd and left him in such melancholy plight.

"Both man and beast," Rabbit had told Joan, having no division of mind
in the case at all. And so Joan believed it to be, also, after sitting
for hours in the hot sheep-wagon beside the mangled, unconscious
schoolmaster, who did not move in pain, nor murmur in delirium, nor
drop one word from his clenched, still lips to tell whose hand had
inflicted this terrible punishment.

And the range seemed bent on making a secret of it, also. Dad had gone
hot-foot on Joan's horse to seek Earl Reid and learn the truth of it,
only to ride in vain over the range where Mackenzie's flock grazed.
Reid was not in camp; the sheep were running unshepherded upon the
hills. Now, Joan, heading back to her camp at dusk of the longest,
heaviest, darkest day she ever had known, met Reid as she rode away
from Dad Frazer's wagon, and