EYES IN THE FIRELIGHT

“They call it the lonesomeness here,” said Joan, her voice weary as with the weight of the day. “People shoot themselves when they get it bad green sheepherders and farmers that come in here to try to plow up the range.”

“Crazy guys,” said Charley, contemptuously, chin in his hands where he stretched full length on his belly beside the embers of the supper fire.

“Homesick,” said Mackenzie, understandingly. “I’ve heard it’s one of the worst of all diseases. It defeats armies sometimes, so you can’t blame a lone sheepherder if he loses his mind on account of it.”

“Huh!” said Charley, no sympathy in him for such weakness at all.

“I guess not,” Joan admitted, thoughtfully. “I was brought up here, it’s home to me. Maybe I’d get the lonesomeness if I was to go away.”

“You sure would, kid,” said Charley, with comfortable finality.

“But I want to go, just the same,” Joan declared, a certain defiance in her tone, as if in defense of a question often disputed between herself and Charley.

“You think you do,” said Charley, “but you’d hit the high places comin’ back home. Ain’t that right, Mr. Mackenzie?”

“I think there’s something to it,” Mackenzie allowed.

“Maybe I would,” Joan yielded, “but as soon as my share in the sheep figures up enough you’ll see me hittin’ the breeze for Chicago. I want to see the picture galleries and libraries.”

“I’d like to go through the mail-order house we get our things from up there,” Charley said. “The catalogue says it covers seventeen acres!”

Mackenzie was camping with them for the night on his way to Dad Frazer’s range, according to Tim Sullivan’s plan. Long since they had finished supper; the sheep were quiet below them on the hillside. The silence of the sheeplands, almost oppressive in its weight, lay around them so complete and unbroken that Mackenzie fancied he could hear the stars snap as they sparkled. He smiled to himself at the fancy, face turned up to the deep serenity of the heavens. Charley blew the embers, stirring them with a brush of sage.

“The lonesomeness,” said Mackenzie, with a curious dwelling on the word; “I never heard it used in that specific sense before.”

“Well, it sure gets a greenhorn,” said Joan.

Charley held the sage-branch to the embers, blowing them until a little blaze jumped up into the startled dark. The sudden light revealed Joan’s face where she sat across from Mackenzie, and it was so pensively sad that it smote his heart like a pain to see.

Her eyes stood wide open as she had stretched them to roam into the night after her dreams of freedom beyond the land she knew, and so she held them a moment, undazzled by the light of the leaping blaze. They gleamed like glad waters in a morning sun, and the schoolmaster’s heart was quickened by them, and the pain for her longing soothed out of it. The well of her youth was revealed before him, the fountain of her soul.

“I’m goin’ to roll in,” Charley announced, his branch consumed in the eager breath of the little blaze. “Don’t slam your shoes down like you was drivin’ nails when you come in, Joan.”

“It wouldn’t bother you much,” Joan told him, calmly indifferent to his great desire for unbroken repose.

Charley rolled on his back, where he lay a little while in luxurious inaction, sleep coming over him heavily. Joan shook him, sending him stumbling off to the wagon and his bunk.

“You could drive a wagon over him and never wake him once he hits the hay,” she said.

“What kind of a man is Dad Frazer?” Mackenzie asked, his mind running on his business adventure that was to begin on the morrow.

“Oh, he’s a regular old flat-foot,” said Joan. “He’ll talk your leg off before you’ve been around him a week, blowin’ about what he used to do down in Oklahoma.”

“Well, a man couldn’t get the lonesomeness around him, anyhow.”

“You’ll get it, all right, just like I told you; no green hand with all his senses ever escaped it. Maybe you’ll have it light, though,” she added, hopefully, as if to hold him up for the ordeal.

“I hope so. But with you coming over to take lessons, and Dad Frazer talking morning, noon, and night, I’ll forget Egypt and its fleshpots, maybe.”

“Egypt? I thought you came from Jasper?”

“It’s only a saying, used in relation to the place you look back to with regret when you’re hungry.”

“I’m so ignorant I ought to be shot!” said Joan.

And Mackenzie sat silently fronting her, the dead fire between, a long time, thinking of the sparkle of her yearning eyes, smiling in his grim way to himself when there was no chance of being seen as he felt again the flash of them strike deep into his heart. Wise eyes, eyes which held a store of wholesome knowledge gleaned from the years in those silent places where her soul had grown without a shadow to smirch its purity.

“There’s a difference between wisdom and learning,” he said at last, in low and thoughtful voice. “What’s it like over where Dad Frazer grazes his sheep?”

“Close to the range Swan Carlson and the Hall boys use, and you want to keep away from there.”

“Of course; I wouldn’t want to trespass on anybody’s territory. Are they all disagreeable people over that way?”

“There’s nobody there but the Halls and Carlson. You know Swan.”

“He might improve on close acquaintance,” Mackenzie speculated.

“I don’t think he’s as bad as the Halls, wild and crazy as he is. Hector Hall, especially. But you may get on with them, all right I don’t want to throw any scare into you before you meet them.”

“Are they out looking for trouble?”

“I don’t know as they are, but they’re there to make it if anybody lets a sheep get an inch over the line they claim as theirs. Oh, well, pass ’em up till you have to meet them maybe they’ll treat you white, anyway.”

Again a silence stood between them, Mackenzie considering many things, not the least of them being this remarkable girl’s life among the sheep and the rough characters of the range, no wonder in him over her impatience to be away from it. It seemed to him that Tim Sullivan might well spare her the money for schooling, as well as fend her against the dangers and hardships of the range by keeping her at home these summer days.

“It looks to me like a hard life for a girl,” he said; “no diversions, none of the things that youth generally values and craves. Don’t you ever have any dances or anything camp meetings or picnics?”

“They have dances over at Four Corners sometimes Hector Hall wanted me to go to one with him about a year ago. He had his nerve to ask me, the little old sheep-thief!”

“Well, I should think so.”

“He’s been doubly sore at us ever since I turned him down. I looked for him to come over and shoot up my camp some night for a long time, but I guess he isn’t that bad.”

“So much to his credit.”

“But I wish sometimes I’d gone with him. Maybe it would have straightened things out. You know, when you stay here on the range, Mr. Mackenzie, you’re on a level with everybody else, no matter what you think of yourself. You can’t get out of the place they make for you in their estimation of you. Hector Hall never will believe I’m too good to go to a dance with him. He’ll be sore about it all his life.”

“A man naturally would have regrets, Miss Sullivan. Maybe that’s as far as it goes with Hector Hall, maybe he’s only sore at heart for the honor denied.”

“That don’t sound like real talk,” said Joan.

Mackenzie grinned at the rebuke, and the candor and frankness in which it was administered, thinking that Joan would have a frigid time of it out in the world if she applied such outspoken rules to its flatteries and mild humbugs.

“Let’s be natural then,” he suggested, considering as he spoke that candor was Joan’s best defense in her position on the range. Here she sat out under the stars with him, miles from the nearest habitation, miles from her father’s house, her small protector asleep in the wagon, and thought no more of it than a chaperoned daughter of the city in an illuminated drawing-room. A girl had to put men in their places and keep them there under such circumstances, and nobody knew better how to do it than Joan.

“I’ll try your patience and good humor when you start out to teach me,” she told him, “for I’ll want to run before I learn to walk.”

“We’ll see how it goes in a few days; I’ve sent for the books.”

“I’ll make a good many wild breaks,” she said, “and tumble around a lot, I know, but there won’t be anybody to laugh at me but you.” She paused as if considering the figure she would make at the tasks she awaited with such impatience, then added under her breath, almost in a whisper, as if it was not meant for him to hear: “But you’ll never laugh at me for being hungry to learn.”

Mackenzie attempted neither comment nor reply to this, feeling that it was Joan’s heart speaking to herself alone. He looked away over the sleeping sheeplands, vast as the sea, and as mysterious under the starlight, thinking that it would require more than hard lessons and unusual tasks to discourage this girl. She stood at the fountain-edge, leaning with dry lips to drink, her wistful eyes strong to probe the mysteries which lay locked in books yet strange to her, but wiser in her years than many a man who had skimmed a college course. There was a vast difference between knowledge and learning, indeed; it never had been so apparent to him as in the presence of that outspoken girl of the sheep range that summer night.

What would the world do with Joan Sullivan if she ever broke her fetters and went to it? How would it accept her faith and frankness, her high scorn for the deceits upon which it fed? Not kindly, he knew. There would be disillusionment ahead for her, and bitter awakening from long-wrapping dreams. If he could teach her to be content in the wide freedom of that place he would accomplish the greatest service that he could bring her in the days of her untroubled youth. Discourage her, said Tim Sullivan. Mackenzie felt that this was not his job.

“Maybe Charley’s right about it,” she said, her voice low, and soft with that inherited gentleness which must have come from Tim Sullivan’s mother, Mackenzie thought. “He’s a wise kid, maybe I would want to come back faster than I went away. But I get so tired of it sometimes I walk up and down out here by the wagon half the night, and wear myself out making plans that I may never be able to put through.”

“It’s just as well,” he told her, nodding again in his solemn, weighty fashion; “everybody that amounts to anything has this fever of unrest. Back home we used to stack the wheat to let it sweat and harden. You’re going through that. It takes the grossness out of us.”

“Have you gone through it?”

“Years of it; over the worst of it now, I hope.”

“And you came here. Was that the kind of an ambition you had? Was that all your dreams brought you?”

“But I’ve seen more here than I ever projected in my schemes, Miss Joan. I’ve seen the serenity of the stars in this vastness; I’ve felt the wind of freedom on my face.” And to himself: “And I have seen the firelight leap in a maiden’s eyes, and I have looked deep into the inspiring fountain of her soul.” But there was not the boldness in him, nor the desire to risk her rebuke again, to bring it to his lips.

“Do you think you’ll like it after you get over the lonesomeness?”

“Yes, if I take the lonesomeness.”

“You’ll take it, all right. But if you ever do work up to be a sheepman, and of course you will if you stick to the range long enough, you’ll never be able to leave again. Sheep tie a person down like a houseful of children.”

“Maybe I’d never want to go. I’ve had my turn at it out there; I’ve been snubbed and discounted, all but despised, because I had a little learning and no money to go with it. I can hide my little learning here, and nobody seems to care about the money. Yes, I think I’ll stay on the range.”

Joan turned her face away, and he knew the yearning was in her eyes as they strained into the starlit horizon after the things she had never known.

“I don’t see what could ever happen that would make me want to stay here,” she said at last. She got up with the sudden nimbleness of a deer, so quickly that Mackenzie though she must be either startled or offended, but saw in a moment it was only her natural way of moving in the untrammeled freedom of her lithe, strong limbs.

“You’ll find a soft place on the side of the hill somewhere to sleep,” she said, turning toward the wagon. “I’m going to pile in. Good night.”

Mackenzie sat again by the ashes of the little fire after giving her good night. He felt that he had suffered in her estimation because of his lowly ambition to follow her father, and the hundred other obscure heroes of the sheep country, and become a flockmaster, sequestered and safe among the sage-gray hills.

Joan expected more of a man who was able to teach school; expected lofty aims, far-reaching ambitions. But that was because Joan did not know the world that lifted the lure of its flare beyond the rim of her horizon. She must taste it to understand, and come back with a bruised heart to the shelter of her native hills.

And this lonesomeness of which she had been telling him, this dread sickness that fell upon a man in those solitudes, and drained away his courage and hope must he experience it, like a disease of adolescence from which few escape? He did not believe it. Joan had said she was immune to it, having been born in its atmosphere, knowing nothing but solitude and silence, in which there was no strange nor fearful thing.

But she fretted under a discontent that made her miserable, even though it did not strain her reason like the lonesomeness. Something was wanting to fill her life. He cast about him, wondering what it could be, wishing that he might supply it and take away the shadow out of her eyes.

It was his last thought as he fell asleep in a little swale below the wagon where the grass was tall and soft that he might find what was lacking to make Joan content with the peace and plenty of the sheeplands, and supply that want.