Tim made a great virtue of the fact that he had taught all of them to read and write. That much would serve most of them satisfactorily for a few years, but Mackenzie grinned his dry grin to himself when he thought of the noise there would be one day in Tim Sullivan's cote when the young pigeons shook out their wings to fly away. It was in the breed to do that; it looked out of the eyes of every one. "I sent and got a Bible from the mail-order house," said Joan, looking up with lively eyes. "Has it come already?" "Charley got it yesterday. I found that story about Jacob and Rachel and the weak-eyed girl. It's awful short." "But it tells a good deal, Joan." Joan seemed thinking over how much the short story really told, her eyes far away on the elusive, ever-receding blue curtain that was down between her and the world. "Yes, it tells a lot," she sighed. "But Jake must not have been very bright. Well, he was a cowman, anyhow; he wasn't running sheep." "I think he went into the sheep business afterwards," Mackenzie said, diverted by her original comment on the old tale. "Yes, when his girls got big enough to do the work!" The resentment of her hard years was in Joan's voice, the hardness of unforgiving regret for all that had been taken from her life. Mackenzie felt a sweep of depression engulf him like a leaping wave. Joan was in the humor to profit by any arrangement that would break her bondage to sheep; Tim Sullivan had been bringing her up, unconsciously, but none the less effectively, to fit into this scheme for marrying her to his old friend's rakish son. When the day came for Joan to know of the arrangement, she would leap toward it as toward an open door. Still, it should not concern him. Once he had believed there was a budding blossom on his hitherto dry branch of romance; if he had been so ungenerous as to take advantage of Joan's loneliness and urge the promise to florescence, they might have been riding down out of the sheeplands together that day. It would have been a venture, too, he admitted. For contact with the world of men must prove a woman, even as the hardships of the range must prove a man. Perhaps the unlimited variety displayed before her eyes would have made Joan dissatisfied with her plain choice. At that moment it came to him that perhaps Joan was to be tested and proved here, even as he was being tested in Tim Sullivan's balance for his fitness to become a master over sheep. Here were two fair samples of men out of the world's assorted stock--himself and Reid. One of them, deliberate, calm, assured of his way, but with little in his hand; the other a grig that could reel and spin in the night-lights, and flutter to a merry tune.