The Flockmaster of Poison Creek. George W. Ogden
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by the month. Or, should he find all avenues to experience at another man’s expense closed to him, he was ready to take the six hundred dollars saved out of his years of book bondage and buy a little flock of his own. Somewhere in that wide expanse of government-owned land he would find water and grazing, and there his prosperity would increase.
Sheep had visited the creek lately at the point where Mackenzie first encountered it, but there were no dusty flocks in sight billowing over the hills. Tim Sullivan’s house was not to be seen any more than sheep, from the highest hill in the vicinity. It must be several miles ahead of him still, Mackenzie concluded, remembering that Poison Creek was long. Yet he hoped he might reach it by nightfall, for his feet were growing weary of the untrodden way they had borne him for a hundred and fifty miles, more or less.
He pushed on, now and again crossing the broad trail left by bands of sheep counting two or three thousand, feeling the lonesomeness of the unpeopled land softened by these domestic signs. Sunset, and no sight of a house; nightfall, and not the gleam of a light to show him either herder’s camp or permanent domicile of man.
Mackenzie lingered beside the clamoring water in a little valley where the uncropped grass was lush about 7 his feet, considering making camp there for the night. It was a pleasant place for a land so bleak, even in summer, as that country of high table-lands and rolling gray hills. As he started to unsling his pack he caught the dim note of somebody’s voice raised in song, and stood so, hand on the strap, listening.
The voice was faint, broken by the distance, yet cheering because it was a voice. Mackenzie pressed up the hill, hoping to be able to thread the voice back to its source from that eminence. As he neared the top the voice came clearer; as he paused to listen, it seemed quite close at hand. It was a woman singing, and this was the manner of her song:
| 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! |
The valley whence came the song was quite dark below him, and darker for the indefinite blotch of something that appeared to be trees. In that grove the house that sheltered the melancholy singer must be hidden, so completely shrouded that not even a gleam of light escaped to lead him to the door. Mackenzie stood listening. There was no other sound rising from that sequestered homestead than the woman’s song, and this was as doleful as any sound that ever issued from human lips.
Over and over again the woman sang the three lines, a silence after the last long, tremulous note which reached to the traveler’s heart, more eloquent in its expression of poignant loneliness than the hopeless repetition 8 of the song. He grinned dustily as he found himself wishing, in all seriousness, that somebody would take a day off and teach her the rest of the hymn.
Mackenzie’s bones were weary of the road, hard as he tried to make himself believe they were not, and that he was a tough man, ready to take and give as it might come to him in the life of the sheeplands. In his heart he longed for a bed that night, and a cup of hot coffee to gladden his gizzard. Coffee he had not carried with him, much less a coffeepot; his load would be heavy enough without them, he rightly anticipated, before he reached Tim Sullivan’s. Nothing more cheering than water out of the holes by the way had passed his lips these five days.
He could forgive the woman her song if she would supply some of the comforts of those who luxuriated in houses for just this one night. He went on, coming soon to barbed wire along the way, and presently to a gap in it that let him in among the trees which concealed the house.
It was a small, low cabin, quite buried among the trees, no light showing as Mackenzie drew near, although the voice of the woman still rose in the plaintive monotony of her song.
Mackenzie put as much noise into his arrival as was possible by walking heavily, knowing very well that a surprise by night is not a good beginning for a claim of hospitality. The woman must have heard, for her song ceased in the middle of a word. At the corner of the house Mackenzie saw a dim light falling through an open door, into which the shadow of the woman came.
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A little way from the door Mackenzie halted, hat in hand, giving the woman good evening. She stood within the threshold a few feet, the light of the lantern hanging in an angle of the wall over her, bending forward in the pose of one who listened. She was wiping a plate, which she held before her breast in the manner of a shield, stiffly in both hands. Her eyes were large and full of a frightened surprise, her pale yellow hair was hanging in slovenly abandon down her cheeks and over her ears.
She was a tall woman, thin of frame, worn and sad, but with a faded comeliness of face, more intelligence apparent in it than is commonly shown by Scandinavian women of the peasant class who share the labors and the loads of their men on the isolated homesteads of the Northwest. She stood so, leaning and staring, her mouth standing open as if the song had been frightened out so quickly that it had no time to shut the door.
“Good evening, madam,” said Mackenzie again.
She came out of her paralysis of fright and surprise at the assuring sound of his voice. He drew nearer, smiling to show his friendly intention, the lantern light on the close, flat curls of his fair hair, which lay damp on temples and forehead.
Tall after his kind was this traveler at her door, spare of flesh, hollow of cheeks, great of nose, a seriousness in his eyes which balanced well the marvelous tenderness of his smile. Not a handsome man, but a man whose simple goodness shone in his features like a friendly lamp. The woman in the door advanced a timid step; the color deepened in her pale and melancholy face.
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“I thought it was my man,” she said, her voice soft and slow, a labored effort in it to speak without the harsh dialect so apparent in her song.
“I am a traveler, Mackenzie is my name, on my way to Tim Sullivan’s sheep ranch. My grub has run low; I’d like to get some supper if you can let me have a bite.”
“There is not much for a gentleman to eat,” said she.
“Anything at all,” Mackenzie returned, unslinging his pack, letting it down wearily at his feet.
“My man would not like it. You have heard of Swan Carlson?”
“No; but I’ll pay for it; he’ll have no right to kick.”
“You have come far if you have not heard of Swan Carlson. His name is on the wind like a curse. Better you would go on, sir; my man would kill you if he found you in this house.”
She moved a step to reach and lay the plate on a table close at hand. As she lifted her foot there was the sharp clink of metal, as of a dragging chain. Mackenzie had heard it before when she stepped nearer the door, and now he bent to look into the shadow that fell over the floor from the flaring bottom of the lantern.
“Madam,” said he, indignantly amazed by the barbarous thing he beheld, “does that man keep you a prisoner here?”
“Like a dog,” she said, nodding her untidy head, lifting her foot to show him the chain.
It was a common trace-chain from plow harness; two of them, in fact, welded together to give her length to go about her household work. She had a freedom of not 11 more than sixteen feet, one end of the chain welded about her ankle, the other set in a staple driven into a log of the wall. She had wrapped the links with cloths to save her flesh, but for all of that protection she walked haltingly, as if the limb were sore.
“I never heard of such inhuman treatment!” Mackenzie declared, hot to the bone in his burning resentment of this barbarity. “How long has he kept you tied up this way?”
“Three years now,” said she, with a weary sigh.
“It’s going to stop, right here. What did you let him treat you this way for? Why didn’t some of your neighbors take a hand in it?”
“Nobody comes,” she sighed, shaking her head sadly. “The name of Swan Carlson is a curse on the wind. Nobody passes; we are far from any road that men travel; your face is the first I