mmon
endurance for hardships in the open fields.

Simple, they thought him down in Jasper, in the mild simplicity of a
preacher or any man who would not fight. In their classification he
was a neutral force, an emasculated, mild, harmless creature who held
the child's view of life from much association with children. He often
had heard it said.

A man never could advance to notability in a community that rated him
as mildly simple; he would have a hard time of it even to become
notorious. Only one man there had taken an interest in him as man to
man, a flockmaster who had come into that country twenty years before,
a schoolteacher like himself.

This man had kicked up the golden dust before Mackenzie's eyes with
his tales of the romance of the range, the romance of sheep-riches,
the quick multiplication of a band run on the increase-sharing plan.
This man urged Mackenzie to join him, taking a band of sheep on
shares. But his range was in sight of Jasper; there was no romance on
his hills. So Mackenzie struck out for the headwaters of Poison Creek,
to find Tim Sullivan, notable man among the sheep-rich of his day.

It was a five-days' journey on foot, as he calculated it--nobody in
that country ever had walked it, as far as he could learn--to Tim
Sullivan's ranch on Poison Creek. Now, in the decline of the fifth day
he had come to Poison Creek, a loud, a rapid, and boisterous stream
which a man could cross in two jumps. It made a great amount of noise
in its going over the boulders in its bed, as a little water in a vast
arid land probably was justified by its importance in doing. It was
the first running water Mackenzie had met since leaving the Big Wind,
clear as if it came unpolluted by a hoof or a hand from its mountain
source.

But somewhere along its course Tim Sullivan grazed and watered forty
thousand sheep; and beyond him were others who grazed and watered many
times that number. Poison Creek might well enough merit its name from
the slaver of many flocks, the schoolmaster thought, although he knew
it came from pioneer days, and was as obscure as pioneer names usually
are obscure.

And some day he would be watering his thousands of sheep along its
rushing vein. That was John Mackenzie's intent and purpose as he
trudged the dusty miles of gray hills, with their furze of gray sage,
and their gray twilights which fell with a melancholy silence as
chilling as the breath of death. For John Mackenzie was going