his own talking."

"I don't think he'd refuse me."

"It's hard for a stranger to do that. Your father----"

* * * * *

"You'll not do it, you mean?"

"I think I'd rather get a job from your father on my own face than on
any kind of an arrangement or condition, Miss Sullivan. But I pass you
my word that you'll be welcome to anything and all I'm able to teach
you if I become a pupil in the sheep business on this range. Provided,
of course, that I'm in reaching distance."

"Will you?" Joan asked, hope clearing the shadows from her face
again.

"But we might be too far apart for lessons very often," he suggested.

"Not more than ten or twelve miles. I could ride that every day."

"It's a bargain then, if I get on," said he.

"It's a bargain," nodded Joan, giving him her hand to bind it, with
great earnestness in her eyes.

CHAPTER V

TIM SULLIVAN

"Yes, they call us flockmasters in the reports of the Wool Growers'
Association, and in the papers and magazines, but we're nothing but
sheepmen, and that's all you can make out of us."

Tim Sullivan spoke without humor when he made this correction in the
name of his calling, sitting with his back to a haycock, eating his
dinner in the sun. Mackenzie accepted the correction with a nod of
understanding, sparing his words.

"So you want to be a flockmaster?" said Tim. "Well, there's worse
callin's a man, especially a young man, could take up. What put it in
your head to tramp off up here to see me? Couldn't some of them
sheepmen down at Jasper use you?"

"I wanted to get into the heart of the sheep country for one thing,
and several of my friends recommended you as the best sheepman on the
range, for another. I want to learn under a master, if I learn at
all."

"Right," Tim nodded, "right and sound. Do you think you've got the
stuff in you to make a sheepman out of?"

"It will have to be a pretty hard school if I can't stick it
through."

"Summers are all right," said Tim, reflectively, nodding away at the
distant hills, "and falls are all right, but you take it winter and
early spring, and it tries the mettle in a man. Blizzards and
starvation, and losses through pile-ups and stampedes, wolves and what
not, make a man think sometimes he'll never go through it any more.
Then spring comes, with the cold wind, and slush up to your ankles,
and you out day and night lookin' after the ewes and lambs. Lambin'
ti