Mrs. Carlson got up at the suggestion, with such readiness that surprised Mackenzie, put the ax back of the open door, stood a moment winding up her fallen hair.
“Yes, he is my man,” she said.
Swan was turning his horse into the barn; Mackenzie could hear him talking to the animal, not unkindly. Mrs. Carlson put fresh fuel in the stove, making a rattling of the lids which must have sounded cheerful to the ears of a hungry man. As she began breaking eggs into a bowl she took up her song again, with an unconscious air of detachment from it, as one unwittingly follows the habit that has been for years the accompaniment to a task.
As before, the refinement of accent was wanting in her words, but the sweet melancholy of her voice thrilled her listener like the rich notes of an ancient violin.
| Na-a-fer a-lo-o-one, na-a-fer a-lone, He promise na-fer to leafe me, Na-fer to leafe me a-lone! |
Mackenzie sat with his elbow on the table, his chair 23 partly turned toward the door, just within the threshold and a little to one side, where the flockmaster would see him the moment he stepped into the light. The traveler’s pack lay on the floor at the door jamb; the smoke from his pipe drifted out to tell of his presence in the honest announcement of a man who had nothing to hide.
So Swan Carlson found him as he came home to his door.
Swan stopped, one foot in the door, the light on his face. Mrs. Carlson did not turn from the stove to greet him by word or look, but stood bending a little over the pan of sputtering eggs, which she shook gently from side to side with a rhythmic, slow movement in cadence with her song. Swan turned his eyes from one to the other, his face clouding for a moment as for a burst of storm, clearing again at once as Mackenzie rose and gave him good evening in cheerful and unshaken voice.
Mrs. Carlson had spoken a true word when she described Swan as a handsome man. Almost seven feet tall, Mackenzie took him to be, so tall that he must stoop to enter the door; lithe and sinewy of limbs, a lightness in them as of an athlete bred; broad in the shoulders, long of arms. His face was stern, his red hair long about the ears, his Viking mustache long-drooping at the corners of his mouth.
“I thought a man was here, or my woman had begun to smoke,” said Swan, coming in, flinging his hat down on the floor. “What do you want, loafin’ around here?”
Mackenzie explained his business in that country in direct words, and his presence in the house in the same breath. Mollified, Swan grunted that he understood 24 and accepted the explanation, turning up his sleeves, unfastening the collar of his flannel shirt, to wash. His woman stood at the stove, her song dead on her lips, sliding the eggs from the pan onto a platter in one piece. Swan gave her no heed, not even a curious or questioning look, but as he crossed the room to the wash bench he saw the broken chain lying free upon the floor.
A breath he paused over it, his eyes fastened on it in a glowering stare. Mackenzie braced himself for the storm of wrath which seemed bursting the doors of Swan Carlson’s gloomy heart. But Swan did not speak. He picked up the chain, examined the cut link, threw it down with a clatter. At the sound of its fall Mackenzie saw Mrs. Carlson start. She turned her head, terror in her eyes, her face blanched. Swan bent over the basin, snorting water like a strangling horse.
There were eight eggs on the platter that Swan Carlson’s woman put before him when he sat down to his supper. One end of the great trencher was heaped with brown bacon; a stack of bread stood at Swan’s left hand, a cup of coffee at his right. Before this provender the flockmaster squared himself, the unwelcome guest across the table from him, the smoke of his pipe drifting languidly out into the tranquil summer night.
Swan had said no word since his first inquiry. Mackenzie had ventured nothing more. Mrs. Carlson sat down in the chair that she had placed near the door before Swan’s arrival, only that she moved it a little to bring her hand within reach of the hidden ax.
Swan had brushed his long, dark-red hair back from his broad, deep forehead, bringing it down across the 25 tips of his ears in a savage fashion admirably suited to his grave, harsh, handsome face. He devoured his food noisily, bending low over his plate.
“You want to learn the sheep business, huh?” said he, throwing up his eyes in quick challenge, pausing a moment in his champing and clatter. Mackenzie nodded, pipe raised toward his lips. “Well, you come to the right country. You ever had any work around a ranch?”
“No.”
“No, I didn’t think you had; you look too soft. How much can you lift?”
“What’s that got to do with sheep?” Mackenzie inquired, frowning in his habitual manner of showing displeasure with frivolous and trifling things.
“I can shoulder a steel rail off of the railroad that weighs seven hundred and fifty pounds,” said Swan. “You couldn’t lift one end.”
“Maybe I couldn’t,” Mackenzie allowed, pretending to gaze out after his drifting smoke, but watching the sheepman, as he mopped the last of the eggs up with a piece of bread, with a furtive turning of his eye. He was considering how to approach the matter which he had remained there to take up with this great, boasting, savage man, and how he could make him understand that it was any of society’s business whether he chained his wife or let her go free, fed her or starved her, caressed her, or knocked her down.
Swan pushed back from the table, wringing the coffee from his mustache.
“Did you cut that chain?” he asked.
“Yes, I cut it. You’ve got no right to keep your 26 wife, or anybody else, chained up. You could be put in jail for it; it’s against the law.”
“A man’s got a right to do what he pleases with his own woman; she’s his property, the same as a horse.”
“Not exactly the same as a horse, either. But you could be put in jail for beating your horse. I’ve waited here to tell you about this, in a friendly way, and warn you to treat this woman right. Maybe you didn’t know you were breaking the law, but I’m telling you it’s so.”
Swan stood, his head within six inches of the ceiling. His wife must have read an intention of violence in his face, although Mackenzie could mark no change in his features, always as immobile as bronze. She sprang to her feet, her bosom agitated, arms lifted, shoulders raised, as if to shrink from the force of a blow. She made no effort to reach the ax behind the door; the thought of it had gone, apparently, out of her mind.
Swan stood within four feet of her, but he gave her no attention.
“When a man comes to my house and monkeys with my woman, him and me we’ve got to have a fight,” he said.
27
CHAPTER III
THE FIGHT
Mackenzie got up, keeping the table between them. He looked at the door, calculating whether he could make a spring for the ax before Carlson could grapple him. Carlson read in the glance an intention to retreat, made a quick stride to the door, closed it sharply, locked it, put the key in his pocket. He stood a moment looking Mackenzie over, as if surprised by the length he unfolded when on his feet, but with no change of anger or resentment in his stony face.
“You didn’t need to lock the door, Carlson; I wasn’t going to run away––I didn’t wait here to see you for that.”
Mackenzie stood in careless, lounging pose, hand on the back of his chair, pipe between his fingers,