ge how the
craft of Laban had come down to Tim Sullivan across that mighty flight
of time. It would serve Tim the right turn, in truth, if something
should come of it between him and Joan. He smiled in anticipatory
pleasure at Tim's discomfiture and surprise.

But that was not in store for him, he sighed. Joan would shake her
wings out in a little while, and fly away, leaving him there, a dusty
sheepman, among the husks of his dream. Still, a man might dream on a
sunny afternoon. There was no interdiction against it; Hector Hall,
with his big guns, could not ride in and order a man off that domain.
A shepherd had the ancient privilege of dreams; he might drink himself
drunk on them, insane on them in the end, as so many of them were said
to do in that land of lonesomeness, where there was scarcely an echo
to give a man back his own faint voice in mockery of his solitude.

Evening, with the sheep homing to the bedding-ground, brought
reflections of a different hue. Since the raid on his flock Mackenzie
had given up his bunk in the wagon for a bed under a bush on the
hillside nearer the sheep. Night after night he lay with the rifle at
his hand, waiting the return of the grisly monster who had spent his
fury on the innocent simpletons in his care.

Whether it was Swan Carlson, with the strength of his great arms,
driven to madness by the blow he had received, or whether it was
another whom the vast solitudes of that country had unhinged,
Mackenzie did not know. But that it was man, he had no doubt.

Dad Frazer had gone away unconvinced, unshaken in his belief that it
was a grizzly. Tim Sullivan had come over with the same opinion, no
word of doubt in his mouth. But Mackenzie knew that when he should
meet that wild night-prowler he would face a thing more savage than a
bear, a thing as terrible to grapple with as the saber-tooth whose
bones lay deep under the hills of that vast pasture-land.

CHAPTER X

WILD RIDERS OF THE RANGE

Joan missed her lessons for three days running, a lapse so unusual as
to cause Mackenzie the liveliest concern. He feared that the mad
creature who spent his fury tearing sheep limb from limb might have
visited her camp, and that she had fallen into his bloody hands.

A matter of eight or nine miles lay between their camps; Mackenzie had
no horse to cover it. More than once he was on the point of leaving
the sheep to shift for themselves and striking out on foot; many times
he wal