ke of as the easiest to learn and
the hardest to forget. Joan's desire for life in the busy places had
overbalanced her affection for him. Spat or no spat, she would have
come to see him more than once in his desperate struggle against death
if she had cared.

He could not blame her. There was not much in a man who had made a
failure of even sheepherding to bind a maid to him against the
allurements of the world that had been beckoning her so long.

"Tim said he'd be around to see you late this evening or tomorrow.
He's went over to see how Mary and Charley're makin' out, keepin' his
eye on 'em like he suspicioned they might kill a lamb once in a while
to go with their canned beans."

"All right," said Mackenzie, abstractedly.

Dad looked at him with something like scorn for his inattention to
such an engrossing subject. Mackenzie was not looking his way; his
thoughts seemed to be a thousand leagues from Tim Sullivan's range and
the lambs on it, let them be alive or slaughtered to go with canned
beans.

But Joan would come back to the sheeplands, as she said everybody came
back to them who once had lived in their silences and breathed their
wide freedom. She would come back, not lost to him, but regained, her
lesson learned, not to go away with that youth who wore the brand of
old sins on his face. So hope came to lift him and assure him, just
when he felt the somber cloud of the lonesomeness beginning to engulf
his soul.

"I know Tim don't like it, but me and Rabbit butcher lambs right
along, and we'll keep on doin' it as long as we run sheep. A man's got
to have something besides the grub he gits out of tin cans. That ain't
no life."

"You're right, Dad. I'd been in a hole on the side of some hill before
now if it hadn't been for the broth and lamb stew Rabbit fed me.
There's nothing like it."

"You right they ain't!" said Dad, forgetting Mackenzie's lapse of a
little while before. "I save the hides and turn 'em over to him, and
he ain't got no kick. If I was them children I'd butcher me a lamb
once a week, anyhow. But maybe they don't like it--I don't know. I've
known sheepmen that couldn't go mutton, never tasted it from one year
to another. May be the smell of sheep when you git a lot of 'em in a
shearin' pen and let 'em stand around for a day or two."

But what had they told Joan that she would go away without a word,
leaving him in a sickness from which he might never have turned again?
Something had