worrying along on a mission of enlightenment at
sixty dollars a month?

Mackenzie had not come into the West in a missionary spirit at the
beginning. He had not believed the youth of that section to be in any
greater depths of ignorance than elsewhere in this more or less
favored land. But from his earliest years he had entertained romantic
notions, adventurous desires. With his normal-school certificate in
his breast pocket, tight trousers on his rather long legs, a short
vest scarcely meeting them at the waistband, he had traveled into the
West, seeking romance, alert for adventure.

When he arrived at Jasper, which was only the inter-mountain West, and
far from the golden coast of his most fervid dreams, he found that
adventure and romance apparently had packed up and gone elsewhere
years ahead of him. There was nothing nearer either of them in Jasper
than a tame gambling-joint in the back end of a saloon, where greasy,
morose sheepherders came to stake quarters on roulette and faro, where
railroaders squandered away their wages, leaving the grocerymen
unpaid. And there was no romance for John Mackenzie in any such
proceeding as that.

Simple, you will see he was; open-faced and guileless as the day.
Farm-bred, raw-boned, slow of speech, clear of eye, no vices, no
habits that pulled a man down, unless a fondness for his briar-root
pipe might be so classed. But in the way Mackenzie smoked the pipe it
was more in the nature of a sacrifice to his gods of romance than even
a mild dissipation.

In the four years of his school-teaching at Jasper Mackenzie slowly
grew out of his extreme rawness of appearance. His legs hardened from
long rambles over the hills, his face browned like an outdoor man's,
his rustic appearance, his clabber-days shyness, all slowly dissolved
away. But the school board was not cognizant of any physical or mental
strengthening in him. He was worth sixty dollars a month to that
slow-thinking body when he came to Jasper; he was worth no more than
sixty dollars when he threw up the job and left.

Romance and adventure had called him away to the road at last, but the
romance of sheep-riches, the adventure of following a flock over the
sage-gray hills. Maybe he would find it too late even to glimpse them
when he arrived in the heart of the sheeplands; perhaps times had
shifted since the heavy-jowled illiterates whom he had met in Jasper
began their careers with a few pounds of dried apples and unco