"I wouldn't want to--to--go as far as Jacob went that first time he saw Rachel," said he in desperation, his grip tightening on her fingers, sweat bursting on his brow. "I wouldn't want to--I'd _want_ to, all right, but I wouldn't even--even----" Joan looked up at him with calm, placid eyes, with pale cheeks, with yearning lips, a flutter in her heart that made her weak. She nodded, anxious to help him to his climax, but not bold, not bolder than himself, indeed, and he was shaking like a sick man in the sun. "Unless I could make it holy, unless you could understand it so, I wouldn't even--I wouldn't so much as----" He took her face between his hands, and bent over her, and a glad little sob trembled between Joan's lips as she rested her hands on his shoulders for the benediction of his kiss. Joan did not stay to help him bring in the sheep that day, for there was nothing left for her to wonder over, or stand wistfully by her saddle waiting to receive. Neither was there any sound of weeping as she rode up the hill, for the male custom of expressing joy in that way had gone out of fashion on the sheep ranges of this world long before John Mackenzie's day. Nothing that he could owe a man could equal what he had gained that hour, Mackenzie thought, standing there with heart as light as the down of cottonwood. With his great debt paid to Earl Reid, even to the measure of his own life, he would still leave the world a rich man. He had come into the fresh pastures of romance at last. Joan waved him good-bye from the hilltop and went on, the understanding of his fortune growing on him as he recalled her eyes in that moment when she closed them to his salute upon her lips. She gave up that first kiss that she ever had yielded to any man as though he had reached down and plucked it out of her heart. Let them go on planning for years of labor, let them go on scheming for inheritances, and piece their broken arrangements together as they might when they found he had swept Joan out of their squalid calculations as a rider stoops and lifts a kerchief from the ground. There would be bitterness and protestations, and rifts in his own bright hopes, as well. But if Tim Sullivan would not give her up to him with the good grace of a man, Mackenzie said, smiling and smiling like a daft musician, he would take her from both of them and ride away with her into the valleys of the world which she was so hungry in her young heart to behold. He rounded his sheep to their hillside, and made his fire, a song in his heart, but his lips sealed, for he was a silent man. And at dusk there came riding into his camp a man, whose coat was at his cantle, who was belted with pistols, who roved his eye with cautious look as he halted and gave the shepherd good evening. Mackenzie invited him down to the hospitality of the camp, which the stranger accepted with hearty grace.