Mackenzie looked again at his hand. There was no pain in it, but its appearance was sufficient to alarm a man in a normal state of reasonableness. He had the passing thought that it ought to be attended to, and got up on weaving legs. He might wash it in the creek, he considered, and so take out the rough of whatever infection the dog's teeth had driven into his flesh, but dismissed the notion at once as altogether foolish. It needed bichloride of mercury, and it was unlikely there was such a thing within a hundred and fifty miles. As he argued this matter of antiseptics with himself Mackenzie walked away from the spot where Reid remained seated, going aimlessly, quite unconscious of his act. Only when he found himself some distance away he stopped, considering what to do. His thoughts ran in fragments and flashes, broken by the throbbing of his shocked brain, yet he knew that Reid had offered to do something for him which he could not accept. No, he could not place himself under additional obligation to Reid. Live or die, fail or succeed, Reid should not be called upon again to offer a supporting hand. He could sit there on the hillside and grin about this encounter with Carlson, and grin about the hurt in Mackenzie's hand and arm, and the blinding pain in his head. Let him grin in his high satisfaction of having turned another favor to Mackenzie's account; let him grin until his face froze in a grin--he should not have Joan. Mackenzie went stumbling on again to the tune of that declaration. Reid should not have Joan, he shouldn't have Joan, shouldn't have Joan! Blind from pain, sick, dizzy, the earth rising up before him as he walked, Mackenzie went on. He did not look back to see if Reid came to help him; he would have resented it if he had come, and cursed him and driven him away. For he should not have Joan; not have Joan; Joan, Joan, Joan! How he found his way to Dad Frazer's camp Mackenzie never could tell. It was long past dark when he stumbled to the sheep-wagon wherein the old herder and his squaw lay asleep, arriving without alarm of dogs, his own collies at his heels. It was the sharp-eared Indian woman who heard him, and knew by his faltering step that it was somebody in distress. She ran out and caught him as he fell. CHAPTER XX A MILLION GALLOPS OFF Joan was returning to camp, weighed down by a somber cloud. Dad Frazer had carried word to her early that morning of Mackenzie's condition, the old man divided in his opinion as to whether man or beast had mauled the shepherd and left him in such melancholy plight. "Both man and beast," Rabbit had told Joan, having no division of mind in the case at all. And so Joan believed it to be, also, after sitting for hours in the hot sheep-wagon beside the mangled, unconscious schoolmaster, who did not move in pain, nor murmur in delirium, nor drop one word from his clenched, still lips to tell whose hand had inflicted this terrible punishment.