The Flockmaster of Poison Creek. George W. Ogden

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 have seen since Swan put the chain on me like a wolf.”

      “Where does he keep his tools?”

      “Maybe in the barn––I do not know. Only there never is anything left in my reach. Will you set me free, kind stranger?”

      “If I can find anything to cut that chain. Let me have the lantern.”

      The woman hesitated, her eyes grown great with fright.

      “My man, he is the one who choked two sheepherders with his hands. You must have read in the paper–––”

      “Maybe it was before my time. Give me down the lantern.”

      Swan Carlson appeared to be a man who got along 12 with very few tools. Mackenzie could not find a cold-chisel among the few broken and rusted odds and ends in the barn, although there was an anvil, such as every rancher in that country had, fastened to a stump in the yard, a hammer rusting beside it on the block. As Mackenzie stood considering what could be done with the material at hand, the woman called to him from the door, her voice vibrant with anxious excitement:

      “My man will come soon,” she said.

      Mackenzie started back to the house, hammer in hand, thinking that he might break the chain near her foot and give her liberty, at least. A pile of logs lay in the dooryard, an ax hacked into the end of one. With this tool added to the hammer, he hurried to the prisoner.

      “I think we can make it now,” he said.

      The poor creature was panting as if the hand of her man hung over her in threat of throttling out her life as he had smothered the sheepherders in the tragedy that gave him his evil fame. Mackenzie urged her to a chair, giving her the lantern to hold and, with the edge of the ax set against a link of her chain, the poll on the floor, he began hammering the soft metal against the bit.

      Once she put her hand on his shoulder, her breath caught in a sharp exclamation of alarm.

      “I thought it was Swan’s step!” she whispered. “Listen––do you hear?”

      “There’s nobody,” he assured her, turning his head to listen, the sweat on his lean cheek glistening in the light.

      “It is my fear that he will come too soon. Strike fast, good young man, strike fast!”

      13

      If Swan Carlson had been within half a mile he would have split the wind to find out the cause of such a clanging in his shunned and proscribed house, and that he did not appear before the chain was severed was evidence that he was nowhere near at hand. When the cut links fell to the floor Mrs. Carlson stood the lantern down with gentle deliberation, as if preparing to enter the chamber of someone in a desperate sickness to whom had come a blessed respite of sleep. Then she stood, her lips apart, her breath suspended, lifting her freed foot with a joyous relief in its lightness.

      Mackenzie remained on his knees at her feet, looking up strangely into her face. Suddenly she bent over him, clasped his forehead between her hands, kissed his brow as if he were her son. A great hot tear splashed down upon his cheek as she rose again, a sob in her throat that ended in a little, moaning cry. She tossed her long arms like an eagle set free from a cramping cage, her head thrown back, her streaming hair far down her shoulders. There was an appealing grace in her tall, spare body, a strange, awakening beauty in her haggard face.

      “God sent you,” she said. “May He keep His hand over you wherever you go.”

      Mackenzie got to his feet; she picked up the ax and leaned it against the table close to her hand.

      “I will give you eggs, you can cook them at a fire,” she said, “and bread I will give you, but butter I cannot give. That I have not tasted since I came to this land, four years ago, a bride.”

      She moved about to get the food, walking with awkwardness 14 on the foot that had dragged the chain so long, laughing a little at her efforts to regain a normal balance.

      “Soon it will pass away, and I will walk like a lady, as I once knew how.”

      “But I don’t want to cook at a fire,” Mackenzie protested; “I want you to make me some coffee and fry me some eggs, and then we’ll see about things.”

      She came close to him, her great gray eyes seeming to draw him until he gazed into her soul.

      “No; you must go,” she said. “It will be better when Swan comes that nobody shall be here but me.”

      “But you! Why, you poor thing, he’ll put that chain on you again, knock you down, for all I know, and fasten you up like a beast. I’m not going; I’ll stay right here till he comes.”

      “No,” shaking her head in sad earnestness, “better it will be for all that I shall be here alone when he comes.”

      “Alone!” said he, impatiently; “what can you do alone?”

      “When he comes,” said she, drawing a great breath, shaking her hair back from her face, her deep grave eyes holding him again in their earnest appeal, “then I will stand by the door and kill him with the ax!”

      15

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