The Flockmaster of Poison Creek. George W. Ogden

in the barn––I do not know. Only there never is anything left in my reach. Will you set me free, kind stranger?”

      “If I can find anything to cut that chain. Let me have the lantern.”

      The woman hesitated, her eyes grown great with fright.

      “My man, he is the one who choked two sheepherders with his hands. You must have read in the paper–––”

      “Maybe it was before my time. Give me down the lantern.”

      Swan Carlson appeared to be a man who got along 12 with very few tools. Mackenzie could not find a cold-chisel among the few broken and rusted odds and ends in the barn, although there was an anvil, such as every rancher in that country had, fastened to a stump in the yard, a hammer rusting beside it on the block. As Mackenzie stood considering what could be done with the material at hand, the woman called to him from the door, her voice vibrant with anxious excitement:

      “My man will come soon,” she said.

      Mackenzie started back to the house, hammer in hand, thinking that he might break the chain near her foot and give her liberty, at least. A pile of logs lay in the dooryard, an ax hacked into the end of one. With this tool added to the hammer, he hurried to the prisoner.

      “I think we can make it now,” he said.

      The poor creature was panting as if the hand of her man hung over her in threat of throttling out her life as he had smothered the sheepherders in the tragedy that gave him his evil fame. Mackenzie urged her to a chair, giving her the lantern to hold and, with the edge of the ax set against a link of her chain, the poll on the floor, he began hammering the soft metal against the bit.

      Once she put her hand on his shoulder, her breath caught in a sharp exclamation of alarm.

      “I thought it was Swan’s step!” she whispered. “Listen––do you hear?”

      “There’s nobody,” he assured her, turning his head to listen, the sweat on his lean cheek glistening in the light.

      “It is my fear that he will come too soon. Strike fast, good young man, strike fast!”

      13

      If Swan Carlson had been within half a mile he would have split the wind to find out the cause of such a clanging in his shunned and proscribed house, and that he did not appear before the chain was severed was evidence that he was nowhere near at hand. When the cut links fell to the floor Mrs. Carlson stood the lantern down with gentle deliberation, as if preparing to enter the chamber of someone in a desperate sickness to whom had come a blessed respite of sleep. Then she stood, her lips apart, her breath suspended, lifting her freed foot with a joyous relief in its lightness.

      Mackenzie remained on his knees at her feet, looking up strangely into her face. Suddenly she bent over him, clasped his forehead between her hands, kissed his brow as if he were her son. A great hot tear splashed down upon his cheek as she rose again, a sob in her throat that ended in a little, moaning cry. She tossed her long arms like an eagle set free from a cramping cage, her head thrown back, her streaming hair far down her shoulders. There was an appealing grace in her tall, spare body, a strange, awakening beauty in her haggard face.

      “God sent you,” she said. “May He keep His hand over you wherever you go.”

      Mackenzie got to his feet; she picked up the ax and leaned it against the table close to her hand.

      “I will give you eggs, you can cook them at a fire,” she said, “and bread I will give you, but butter I cannot give. That I have not tasted since I came to this land, four years ago, a bride.”

      She moved about to get the food, walking with awkwardness 14 on the foot that had dragged the chain so long, laughing a little at her efforts to regain a normal balance.

      “Soon it will pass away, and I will walk like a lady, as I once knew how.”

      “But I don’t want to cook at a fire,” Mackenzie protested; “I want you to make me some coffee and fry me some eggs, and then we’ll see about things.”

      She came close to him, her great gray eyes seeming to draw him until he gazed into her soul.

      “No; you must go,” she said. “It will be better when Swan comes that nobody shall be here but me.”

      “But you! Why, you poor thing, he’ll put that chain on you again, knock you down, for all I know, and fasten you up like a beast. I’m not going; I’ll stay right here till he comes.”

      “No,” shaking her head in sad earnestness, “better it will be for all that I shall be here alone when he comes.”

      “Alone!” said he, impatiently; “what can you do alone?”

      “When he comes,” said she, drawing a great breath, shaking her hair back from her face, her deep grave eyes holding him again in their earnest appeal, “then I will stand by the door and kill him with the ax!”

      15

CHAPTER II

       Table of Contents

SWAN CARLSON

       Table of Contents

      Mackenzie found it hard to bend the woman from this plan of summary vengeance. She had suffered and brooded in her loneliness so long, the cruel hand of Swan Carlson over her, that her thoughts had beaten a path to this desire. This self-administration of justice seemed now her life’s sole aim. She approached it with glowing eyes and flushed cheeks; she had lived for that hour.

      Harshly she met Mackenzie’s efforts at first to dissuade her from this long-planned deed, yielding a little at length, not quite promising to withhold her hand when the step of her savage husband should sound outside the door.

      “If you are here when he comes, then it will do for another night; if you are gone, then I will not say.”

      That was the compromise she made with him at last, turning with no more argument to prepare his supper, carrying the ax with her as she went about the work. Often she stood in rigid concentration, listening for the sound of Swan’s coming, such animation in her eyes as a bride’s might show in a happier hour than hers. She sat opposite her visitor as he made his supper on the simple food she gave him, and told him the story of her adventure into that heartless land, the ax-handle against her knee.

      A minister’s daughter, educated to fit herself for a 16 minister’s wife. She had learned English in the schools of her native land, as the custom is, and could speak it fairly when family reverses carried her like a far-blown seed to America. She had no business training, for what should a minister’s wife know of business beyond the affairs of the parish and the economy of her own home? She found, therefore, nothing open to her hands in America save menial work in the households of others.

      Not being bred to it, nor the intention or thought of it as a future contingency, she suffered in humbling herself to the services of people who were at once her intellectual and social inferiors. The one advantage in it was the improvement of her English speech, through which she hoped for better things in time.

      It was while she was still new to America, its customs and social adjustments, and the shame of her menial situation burned in her soul like a corrosive acid, that she saw the advertisement of Swan Carlson in a Swedish newspaper. Swan Carlson was advertising for a wife. Beneath a handsome picture of himself he stated his desires, frankly, with evident honesty in all his representations. He told of his holdings in sheep and land, of his money in the bank.

      A dream of new consequence in this strange land came to Hertha Jacobsen as she read the advertisement, as she studied the features