untry a long time;
Mackenzie had come to Jasper, even, long after the feuds between the
flockmasters and cattlemen had worn themselves out save for an
outbreak of little consequence in the far places now and then. But the
peace of this place had been a coward's peace, paid for in money and
humiliation. A thing like that was not to be expected of Tim Sullivan,
although from a business reasoning he doubtless was right about it.

It was Mackenzie's work now to clean up the camp of the Hall brothers,
along with Swan Carlson, and put an end to their bullying and edging
over on Tim Sullivan's range, or take up his pack and trudge out of
the sheep country as he had come. By staying there and fighting for
Tim Sullivan's interests he might arrive in time at a dusty
consequence, his fame, measured in thousands of sheep, reaching even
to Jasper and Cheyenne, and perhaps to the stock-yards commission
offices in Omaha and Chicago.

"John Mackenzie, worth twenty thousand, or fifty thousand sheep."

That would be the way they would know him; that would be the measure
of his fame. By what sacrifice, through what adventure, how much
striving and hard living he might come to the fame of twenty thousand
sheep, no man would know or care. There in the dusty silences of that
gray-green land he would bury the man and the soul that reached upward
in him with pleasant ambitions, to become a creature over sheep. Just
a step higher than the sheep themselves, wind-buffeted, cold-cursed,
seared and blistered and hardened like a callous through which the
urging call of a man's duty among men could pierce no more.

But it had its compensations, on the other hand. There must be a vast
satisfaction in looking back over the small triumphs won against
tremendous forces, the successful contest with wild winter storm,
ravaging disease, night-prowling beasts. Nature was the big force
arrayed against a flockmaster, and it was unkind and menacing seven
months out of the year. That must be the secret of a flockmaster's
satisfaction with himself and his lot, Mackenzie thought; he could
count himself a fit companion for the old gods, if he knew anything
about them, after his victory over every wild force that could be bent
against him among those unsheltered hills.

The Hall brothers were a small pest to be stamped out and forgotten in
the prosperity of multiplying flocks. As for Swan Carlson, poor
savage, there might be some way of reaching him without fur