ith your hand?"

"It's all right now." Mackenzie was making use of it to shake the
coffeepot, only to find that Reid had drained it to the grounds.

"If I'd recognized you, Jacob, I'd made a double allowance," Reid
said, lifting the corner of his big, unfeeling mouth in a twitching
grin.

"You might cut out that Jacob stuff, wherever you got it," Mackenzie
told him, not much interested in it, apparently.

"Can't you take a joke, Mackenzie?" Reid made the inquiry in surprised
voice, with a well-simulated inflection of injury.

"But I don't want it rubbed in, Reid."

Reid grunted, expressive of derision and contempt, smoking on in
silence while Mackenzie threw himself together a hasty meal.
Frequently Reid coughed, always cupping his hand before his mouth as
if to conceal from himself as well as others the portentous harshness
of the sound.

"Did Sullivan send you over?" Reid inquired at last.

"He said for me to come when I was able, but he didn't set any time. I
concluded I was all right, and came."

"Well, you can go back; I don't need you."

"That's for Sullivan to say."

"On the dead, Mackenzie, I don't see how it's going to be comfortable
with me and you in camp together."

"The road's open, Earl."

"I wish it was open out of this damned country!" Reid complained. In
his voice Mackenzie read the rankling discontent of his soul, wearing
itself out there in the freedom that to him was not free, chafing and
longing and fretting his heart away as though the distant hills were
the walls of a prison, the far horizon its bars.

"Sullivan wants you over at the ranch," Mackenzie told him, moved to
pitying kindness for him, although he knew that it was wasted and
undeserved.

"I'd rather stay over here, I'd rather hear the coyotes howl than that
pack of Sullivan kids. That's one-hell of a family for a man to have
to marry into, Mackenzie."

"I've seen men marry into worse," Mackenzie said.

Reid got up in morose impatience, flinging away his cigarette, went to
the wagon, looked in, slammed the little canvas door with its mica
window shut with a bang, and turned back.

There seemed little of the carelessness, the easy spirit that had made
him so adaptable at first to his surroundings, which Reid had brought
with him into the sheeplands left in him now. He was sullen and
downcast, consumed by the gnawing desire to be away out of his prison.
Mackenzie studied him furtively as he compounded his coffee and