empt of their shrewd
senses. They would not obey her shrilled commands.

Very well, said Swan; if she did not have it in her to win even the
respect of a dog, let her do a dog's work. So he took the collies
away, leaving her to range her band of sheep in terrible labor,
mind-wrenching loneliness, over the sage-gray hills. Wolves grew bold;
the lambs suffered. When Swan came again to number her flock, he
cursed her for her carelessness, giving her blows which were kinder
than his words.

With the first snow she abandoned her flock and fled. Disgraceful as
it was for a woman to leave her man, the frenzy of loneliness drove
her on. With his companionship she could have endured Swan's cruelty,
but alone her heart was dead. Three days she wandered. Swan found her
after she had fallen in the snow.

His great laugh woke her, and she was home in this house, the light of
day in her eyes. Swan was sitting beside her, merry in the thought of
how he had cheated her out of her intention to die like an old ewe
among the mountain drifts.

She was good for nothing, he said, but to sit at home like a cat. But
he would make sure that she sat at home, to be there at his coming,
and not running away from the bounty of a man who had taken a beggar
to his bosom. Then he brought the chain and the anvil, and welded the
red-hot iron upon her limb. He laughed when the smoke of her burning
flesh rose hissing; laughed when he mounted his horse and rode away,
leaving her in agony too great to let her die.

This summer now beginning was the fourth since that melancholy day. In
the time that had passed, Swan had come into the ways of trouble,
suffering a great drain upon his hoarded money, growing as a
consequence sullen and somber in his moods. No more he laughed; even
the distress of his chained wife, the sight of her wasting face and
body, the pleading of her tortured eyes, could not move his loud gales
of merriment again.

Swan had killed two of his sheepherders, as she had mentioned before.
It grew out of a dispute over wages, in which the men were right. That
was the winter following her attempt to run away, Swan being alone
with them upon the stormy range. He declared both of them set upon him
at once like wolves, and that he fought only to defend his life. He
strangled them, the throat of each grasped in his broad, thick hand,
and held them from him so, stiff arms against their desperate
struggles, until they sank down in the snow and