As he sat and weighed the argument for and against the sheep business, the calling of flockmaster began to take on the color of romantic attraction which had not been apparent to him before. In his way, every flockmaster was a hero, inflexible against the unreckoned forces which rose continually to discourage him. This was true, as he long had realized, of a man who plants in the soil, risking the large part of his capital of labor year by year. But the sheepman's risks were greater, his courage immensely superior, to that of the tiller of the soil. One storm might take his flock down to the last head, leaving him nothing to start on again but his courage and his hope. It appeared to Mackenzie to be the calling of a proper man. A flockmaster need not be a slave to the range, as most of them were. He might sit in his office, as a few of them did, and do the thing like a gentleman. There were possibilities of dignity in it heretofore overlooked; Joan would think better of it if she could see it done that way. Surely, it was a business that called for a fight to build and a fight to hold, but it was the calling of a proper man. Mackenzie was immensely cheered by his reasoning the sheep business into the romantic and heroic class. Here were allurements of which he had not dreamed, to be equaled only by the calling of the sea, and not by any other pursuit on land at all. A man who appreciated the subtle shadings of life could draw a great deal of enjoyment and self-pride out of the business of flockmaster. It was one of the most ancient pursuits of man. Abraham was a flockmaster; maybe Adam. But for all of the new comfort he had found in the calling he had adopted, Mackenzie was plagued by a restless, broken sleep when he composed himself among the hillside shrubs above the sheep. A vague sense of something impending held him from rest. It was present over his senses like a veil of drifting smoke through his shallow sleep. Twice he moved his bed, with the caution of some haunted beast; many times he started in his sleep, clutching like a falling man, to sit up alert and instantly awake. There was something in the very tension of the night-silence that warned him to be on the watch. It was not until long after midnight that he relaxed his straining, uneasy vigil, and stretched himself to unvexed sleep. He could steal an hour or two from the sheep in the early morning, he told himself, as he felt the sweet restfulness of slumber sweeping over him; the helpless creatures would remain on the bedding-ground long after sunrise if he did not wake, waiting for him to come and set them about the great business of their lives. They hadn't sense enough to range out and feed themselves without the direction of man's guiding hand.