"It never crossed my mind," said Mackenzie, but not with his usual regard for the truth. "I don't like him, and I never did like him, but you've got to hand it to him for grit and nerve." "Has he got over the lonesomeness?" "Well, he's got a right to if he ain't." "Got a right to? What do you mean?" Dad chuckled, put both hands to the back of his head, smoothed his long, bright hair. "I don't reckon you knew when you was teachin' Joan you was goin' to all that trouble for that feller," he said. "Sullivan told me him and old man Reid had made an agreement concerning the young folks," Mackenzie returned, a sickness of dread over him for what he believed he was about to hear. "Oh, Tim told you, did he? Never said nothin' to me about it till this mornin'. He's goin' to send Joan off to the sisters' school down at Cheyenne." Mackenzie sat up, saying nothing for a good while. He sat looking at the ground, buried in his thoughts as deep as a grave. Dad turned curious eyes upon him, but yet not eyes which probed to the secret of his heart or weighed his loss. "I guess I didn't--couldn't teach her enough to keep her here," Mackenzie said. "You could teach her a danged sight more than she could remember. I think Tim and her had a spat, but I'm only guessin' from what Charley said. Reid was at the bottom of it, I'll bet a purty. That feller was afraid you and Joan might git to holdin' hands out here on the range so much together, heads a touchin' over them books." Mackenzie heard the old man as the wind. No, he had not taught Joan enough to keep her in the sheeplands; she had not read deeply enough into that lesson which he once spoke of as the easiest to learn and the hardest to forget. Joan's desire for life in the busy places had overbalanced her affection for him. Spat or no spat, she would have come to see him more than once in his desperate struggle against death if she had cared. He could not blame her. There was not much in a man who had made a failure of even sheepherding to bind a maid to him against the allurements of the world that had been beckoning her so long. "Tim said he'd be around to see you late this evening or tomorrow. He's went over to see how Mary and Charley're makin' out, keepin' his eye on 'em like he suspicioned they might kill a lamb once in a while to go with their canned beans." "All right," said Mackenzie, abstractedly. Dad looked at him with something like scorn for his inattention to such an engrossing subject. Mackenzie was not looking his way; his thoughts seemed to be a thousand leagues from Tim Sullivan's range and the lambs on it, let them be alive or slaughtered to go with canned beans.