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Rim o' the World

by B. M. Bower · English · Gutenberg #29580 · 485,063 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Rim o' the World

Author: B. M. Bower

Illustrator: Anton Otto Fischer


        
Release date: August 3, 2009 [eBook #29580]
                Most recently updated: January 5, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29580

Credits: Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
        Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RIM O' THE WORLD ***




Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net





[Illustration: "Put up your hands a little higher, Mr. Man!"]




RIM O' THE WORLD

BY

B. M. BOWER

AUTHOR OF

CHIP OF THE FLYING U, THE THUNDER BIRD, SKYRIDER, ETC.

FRONTISPIECE BY

ANTON OTTO FISCHER

GROSSET & DUNLAP

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

Made in the United States of America




Copyright, 1919,

By Little, Brown, and Company.

All rights reserved




CONTENTS

      I THE RIM AND WHAT LAY BENEATH IT                              1
     II THE LORRIGAN TREE GROWS THRIFTILY                           16
    III MARY HOPE DOUGLAS APPEARS                                   30
     IV A MATTER OF BRANDS                                          44
      V THEY RIDE AND THEY DO NOT TELL WHERE                        57
     VI BELLE MEETS AN EMERGENCY IN HER OWN WAY                     67
    VII THE NAME                                                    82
   VIII THE GAME                                                    90
     IX A LITTLE SCOTCH                                            102
      X THE LORRIGAN WAY                                           118
     XI LANCE RIDES AHEAD                                          133
    XII SHE WILL, AND SHE WON'T                                    145
   XIII A WAY HE HAD WITH HIM                                      156
    XIV IN WHICH LANCE FINISHES ONE JOB                            172
     XV HE TACKLES ANOTHER                                         180
    XVI ABOUT A PIANO                                              192
   XVII THE LORRIGAN VIEWPOINT                                     204
  XVIII PEDDLED RUMORS                                             219
    XIX MARY HOPE HAS MUCH TROUBLE                                 232
     XX AS HE LIVED, SO HE DIED                                    250
    XXI LANCE TRAILS A MYSTERY                                     258
   XXII LANCE RIDES ANOTHER TRAIL                                  272
  XXIII LANCE PLAYS THE GAME                                       283
   XXIV WHEN A LORRIGAN LOVES                                      297
    XXV BELLE LORRIGAN WINS                                        312
    XVI THE DOPE                                                   323
  XXVII HOW ONE TRAIL ENDED                                        336
 XXVIII THE MAKING OF NEW TRAILS                                   345




RIM O' THE WORLD




CHAPTER ONE

THE RIM AND WHAT LAY BENEATH IT


Not all of the West is tamed and trained to run smoothly on pneumatic
tires and to talk more enthusiastically of the different "makes" of
cars than of bits and saddles. There are still wide stretches unknown
of tourists and movie men hunting locations for Western melodrama
where men live in the full flavor of adventure and romance and never
know it, because they have never known any other way to live.

In the Black Rim country there is such a place,--a wide, rough,
sage-grown expanse where cattle and horses and sheep scarce know the
look of barbed wire, and where brands are still the sole mark of
ownership. Set down between high mountain ranges, remote, sufficient
unto itself, rudely prosperous, the Black Rim country has yet to be
tamed.

Black Rim country is called bad. The men from Black Rim are eyed
askance when they burr their spur rowels down the plank sidewalks of
whatever little town they may choose to visit. A town dweller will not
quarrel with one of them. He will treat him politely, straightway seek
some acquaintance whom he wishes to impress, and jerk a thumb toward
the departing Black Rim man, and say importantly: "See that feller I
was talking with just now? That's one of them boys from the Black Rim.
Man, he'd kill yuh quick as look at yuh! He's bad. Yep. You want to
walk 'way round them birds from the Rim country. They're a hard-boiled
bunch up that way." And he would be as nearly correct in his estimate
as such men usually are.

Tom Lorrigan's father used to carry a rifle across his thighs when he
rode up the trail past Devil's Tooth Ridge to the benchland beyond,
where his cattle fed on the sweet bunch grass. He never would sit
close to a camp-fire at night save when his back was against a huge
boulder and he could keep the glare of the fire from his eyes. Indians
he killed as he killed rattlers, on the range theory that if they did
not get him then they might some other time, and that every dead
Indian counted one less to beware of. Tom Lorrigan's father was called
a bad man even in Black Rim country,--which meant a good deal.
Hard-bitted men of the Black Rim chose their words wisely when they
spoke to Tom's father; chose wisely their words when they spoke of
him, unless they had full faith in the listener's loyalty and
discretion.

Tom Lorrigan's father lived to be sixty,--chiefly because he was
"quick on the draw" and because he never missed anything that he shot
at. But at sixty, when he was still hated by many, loved by a very few
and feared by every one, he died,--crushed under his horse when it
fell on the Devil's Tooth trail one sleety day in midwinter.

Young Tom Lorrigan learned to shoot when he learned to ride, and he
was riding pitching horses before he could be certain which was p and
which was q in his dad's old spelling book. Which does not by any
means prove that young Tom was an ignoramus. Tom once had three
brothers, but these were somehow unlucky and one by one they dropped
out of the game of life. The oldest brother died with the smell of
burnt black powder in his nostrils, and Tom's father stood over the
body and called his dead son a fool for wearing his gun so it could
stick in the holster. "If I ever ketch yuh doin' a trick like that,
I'll thrash yuh till yuh can't stand," he admonished young Tom
sternly. Young Tom always remembered how his dad had looked when
brother Bill was shot.

The second brother was overtaken while riding a big sorrel horse that
did not happen to carry the Lorrigan brand. So he too died with the
smell of powder smoke in his nostrils, taking three of his pursuers
with him into the Dark Land. Him Tom's father cursed for being
caught.

So young Tom learned early two lessons of the Black Rim book of
wisdom: His gun must never stick in the holster; he must never get
caught by the law.

He was twenty when Brother Jim was drowned while trying to swim his
horse across the Snake in flood time on a dare. Young Tom raced along
the bank, frantically trying to cast his forty-foot rope across sixty
feet of rushing current that rolled Jim and his horse along to the
boil of rapids below. Young Tom was a long, long while forgetting the
terror in Jim's eyes, the helplessness of Jim's gloved hand which he
threw up to catch at the rope that never came within twenty feet of
him, and at the last, the hopeless good-by wave he sent Tom when he
whirled into the moil that pulled him under and never let him go. Tom
learned on the bank of the Snake another lesson: He must never be so
weak as to let another man badger him into doing something against his
own desires or judgment.

Jim's pitiful going left Tom in full possession of the Devil's Tooth
ranch and the cattle and horses that fed on the open range of the
Black Rim country,--and they were many. Young Tom was lonely, but his
loneliness was smothered under a consuming desire to add to his
possessions and to avoid the mistakes of his brothers and of his
father who had carelessly ridden where he should have walked.

Men of the Rim country frequently predicted that young Tom Lorrigan
would die with his boots on; preferably in mid-air. They said he was
going to be like his dad in more than looks, and that times were
changing and a man couldn't steal cattle and kill off anybody that
argued with him, and get away with it as Tom's father had done. They
complained that the country was getting too damn Sunday school, and
young Tom had better tame down a little before he got into trouble.

As Black Rim defines the word, Tom was quite as bad as they called
him. A handsome young dare-devil he was, slanting his glance
downward when he looked into the eyes of a six-foot man,--and
every inch of him good healthy bone and muscle. Women eyed him
pleasantly, wistful for his smile. Men spoke to him friendlywise
and consciously side-stepped his wrath. On the Black Rim range his
word was law, his law was made for himself and the wealth he hankered
for. That wealth he named a million dollars, and he named it often
because he liked the sound of the word. Without any ifs he declared
it. There was a million to be had in Idaho, was there not? Very well,
he would have his million, and he would have it in cattle and horses
and land. He would not go mucking in the gold mines for it; his
million should graze on the bunch grass. He wanted, he said, to see a
million dollars walking around. And since old Tom Lorrigan had
left him a mere forty thousand--according to the appraisers of the
Devil's Tooth estate--young Tom had a long way to go to see his dream
a reality.

Men of the Black Rim hinted that young Tom rode with a long rope;
meaning that his rope would reach the cattle of his neighbor cowmen if
they came in his way. But they only hinted, for unless they could
prove beyond the doubt of any twelve men in the county that his brand
was burned on any cattle save his own, they had no wish to offend. For
young Tom had learned well his three lessons from the fate of his
three brothers; his gun never stuck in its holster; he was wily and
not to be caught; he could neither be harried nor coaxed into setting
aside his own judgment while it seemed to him good.

You would think that young Tom would speedily find himself a mate
amongst the girls of the Black Rim country,--though they were as
scarce as princesses of the royal blood and choice was of necessity
restricted to a half-dozen or so. None of the girls he knew pleased
his fancy, untrained though that fancy might be. Instinct told him
that they were too tame, too commonplace to hold his interest for
long. A breathless dance or two, a kiss stolen in a shadowy corner,
and blushes and giggles and inane remonstrances that bored him
because he knew they would come. Tom had reached the sere age of
twenty-two when he began to wonder if he must go beyond the Black Rim
world for his wife, or resign himself to the fate of an old bachelor.
None of the Black Rim girls, he told himself grimly, should ever have
a share in that million.

Then that purple-lidded, putty-face jade we call Fate whimsically sent
him a mate; curious, I suppose, to see what would happen when the two
whose trails had lain so far apart should meet.

A girl from some far city she was; a small star that had twinkled
behind the footlights and had fled--or had fallen--to the Black Rim
country. Like many another, she had gone as far as her money would
take her. That it took her to the end of the little branch railroad
that stopped abruptly with its nose against a mountain twenty miles
from the Devil's Tooth ranch was a coincidence,--or the whim of Fate.
There she was, as strange to the outland as young Tom would have been
to the city whence she had come; thinking perhaps to start life afresh
in some little Western town; with no money to carry her back to the
outskirts of civilization, and no town wherein she might win fresh
successes. The train that had brought her panted upon a siding,
deserted, its boiler cooling, its engineer, fireman, conductor and
brakeman leaning over a bar in the shack that called itself a saloon.
To-morrow it would rattle back to the junction, if all went well and
the rails held fast to the ties, which was not certain.

The station's name was Jumpoff. The train's conductor, who had the
misfortune to be considered a humorist, liked to say that Jumpoff was
a knot at the end of the road to keep the track from unraveling. He
had told the girl that, on the long, jolty ride from the junction. The
girl replied that at any rate she liked the name.

What really held Jumpoff on the time-table in those days before it
became a real town were the stockyards, where the Black Rim cattle
came to start their journey to market. The trail over the mountains to
the main line was rough, with a two-day drive without water. Yet the
Black Rim country had many cattle, and a matter of a few tunnels and a
trestle or two let the railroad in by a short cut which minimized the
distance to the main line. The branch line paid a fair interest on the
investment,--but not with its passenger service.

The girl found herself stranded in a settlement whose business was
represented by one saloon, one section house, one stable, one
twelve-by-twelve depot and a store that was no more than an addition
to the saloon, with the bartender officiating in both places as
customers required his services. Times when cattle were being shipped,
the store was closed and the saloon had no rival.

It was while the girl was hesitating half-way between the store-saloon
and the section house, wondering which she would choose, that young
Tom Lorrigan galloped up to the hitch rail, stopped his horse in two
stiff-legged jumps, swung down and came toward her. Like a picture on
a wall calendar she looked to young Tom, who had never seen her like
in flesh and blood. He lifted his big, range hat, and she smiled at
him,--though it must have been a stage smile, she had so little heart
for smiling then.

Tom blinked as though he had looked at the sun. Such a smile he had
never seen in his life; nor such hair, like real, gold-colored silk
all in curls around her face; nor such eyes, which were blue as the
sky at twilight when the stars first begin to show.

"Jumpoff is not much of a town," said the girl and laughed to hide how
close she was to tears.

Young Tom caught his breath. He had thought that women had only two
forms of laughter, the giggle of youth or the cackle of age. He had
never dreamed that a woman could laugh like a mountain stream gurgling
down over the rocks. Immediately he visioned young ferns dripping
diamonds into a shadowed pool, though he did not attempt to formulate
the vision in words. His answer was obvious and had nothing to do with
gurgling brooks, or with ferns and shadowed pools.

"It sure ain't, Miss. Might you be looking for somebody in particular?"

"No-o--I'm just here. It would be a poor place to look for anybody,
wouldn't it?"

"Sure would." Young Tom found his courage and smiled, and the girl
looked at him again, as though she liked that white-toothed smile of
Tom's.

"Well, I started out to find the jumping-off place, and this sounded
like it on the railroad map. I guess it's It, all right; there's
nothing to do but jump."

Young Tom pulled his black eyebrows together, studying her. By her
speech she was human; therefore, in spite of her beauty that dazzled
him, she was not to be feared.

"You mean you ain't got any particular place to go from here?"

The girl tilted her head and stared up the mountain's steep,
pine-covered slope. She swung her head a little and looked at Tom. She
smiled bravely still, but he thought her eyes looked sorry for
something.

"Is there any particular place to go from here?" she asked him
wistfully, keeping the smile on her lips as the world had taught her
to do.

"Not unless you went back."

She shook her head. "No," she said, firmly, "I'll climb that mountain
and jump off the top before I'll go back."

Young Tom felt that she spoke in sober earnest in spite of her smile;
which was strange. He had seen men smile in deadly earnest,--his dad
had smiled when he reached for his gun to kill Buck Sanderson. But
women cried.

"Don't you know anybody at all, around here?"

"Not a soul--except you, and I don't know whether your name is Tom or
Bill."

"My name's Tom--Tom Lorrigan. Say! If you ain't got any place to
go--why--I've got a ranch and about twenty-five hundred head of cattle
and some horses. If you didn't mind marrying me, I could take you out
there and give yuh a home. I'd be plumb good to you, if you're willing
to take a chance."

The girl stood back and looked him over. Tall as Tom was she came
almost to his chin. He saw her eyes darken like the sky at dusk, and
it seemed to him quite possible that stars could shine in them.

"You'd be taking as great a chance as I would. I haven't any ranch or
any cattle, or anything at all but myself and two trunks full of
clothes and some things in my life I want to forget. And I have
sixty cents in my purse. I can't cook anything except to toast
marshmallows--"

"I've got a cook," put in young Tom quickly.

"And the clothes I've got would be a joke out here. And the things I
came out here to forget I shall never tell you--"

"I ain't interested enough to ask, or to listen if you told me," said
Tom.

"And myself can sing to you and dance to you, and I'm twenty years old
by the family Bible--"

"I'm twenty-two--makes it about right," said Tom.

"And if you should count fifty and ask me again--"

"Ten, twenty, thirty, forty-fifty, will you marry me?" obeyed Tom with
much alacrity.

"You might call me Belle. Belle Delavan. Well, I came to Jumpoff
because--I meant to jump. Yes, I'll marry you--and the Lord have mercy
on you, Tom Lorrigan, if I live to regret it."

"Amen. Same to you," grinned Tom. "It's an even break, anyway. They
don't claim I'm sprouting wings. They say I've got split hoofs in my
boots instead of feet, and wear my ears pointed at the top. But--but
no girl has got any loop on me. I've been straight, as far as women
goes. That's my record up to the present. If you can stand for a
little drinkin' and gamblin' and shootin'--"

Belle waved aside his self-depreciation. Young Tom was a handsome
devil, and his eyes were keen and clear and looked right into her own,
which was sufficient evidence of good faith for any woman with warm
blood in her body.

"Tom Lorrigan, I've eaten just three soda crackers, six marshmallows
and one orange since yesterday noon," said she irrelevantly. "I can't
be emotional when I'm half starved. Is there any place where I can get
a piece of bread or something?"

"My Lord! Think of me standing here and not thinkin' whether you'd had
dinner or not! Sure, you can have something to eat."

He took her by the arm, too penitent to be diffident over the
unaccustomed gallantry, and hustled her toward the section house. His
mind registered the fact that the bartender, the fireman, the brakeman
and the conductor would shortly apologize abjectly for standing
outside the saloon gawping at a lady, or they would need the immediate
ministrations of a doctor. He hoped the girl had not noticed them.

"They'll throw some grub together quick, over here," he explained to
the girl. "Everybody eats at the section house. It ain't much of a
place, but there ain't any other place. And while you're having dinner
I'll have the operator wire down to Lava for a marriage license to be
sent up on the next train. The saloon man is a justice of the peace,
and he'll marry us right away, soon as you eat. And--"

"Without a license? I know it's always done that way on the stage,
but--but this isn't going to be any stage marriage."

"Well, but the license will be all made out and on the way, and he'll
take my word for it and go ahead with the ceremony. If I tell him to,
he will. It will be all right; I'll _make_ it all right. And then I
can get a team from a ranch back here a ways, and take you right out
to Devil's Tooth. It's the best way. This ain't any place for a lady
to stay. You'll be comfortable out at the Devil's Tooth--it's clean,
anyway." He looked at her honest-eyed, and smiled again. "Yuh needn't
be afraid uh me. We're rough enough and tough enough, and we maybe
shoot up each other now and again, but we ain't like city folks; we
don't double-cross women. Not ever."

She said nothing, and when they had walked four steps farther he added
with a sincere wish to set her at ease: "I could take you to some
ranch and leave you till the license comes, if you think it wouldn't
be all right to get married now. But the womenfolks would talk your
arm off, and you wouldn't like it. And they'd talk about you when your
back was turned. But if Scotty goes ahead and married us, I don't see
why--"

"Oh, I'm not worrying about that. It's just cutting a corner instead
of walking around. I was thinking," said Belle Delavan, while she
dabbed at her lashes as though they were beaded with paint instead of
tears and she must be careful not to smear them, "I was just thinking
how--how _good_ you are. My God, I never knew they grew men like you,
outside of plays and poetry."

"Good!" echoed young Tom Lorrigan, feared of his kind for his badness.
His tone was hushed with amazement, all aglow with pleasure.
"_Good!_--my Lord!"




CHAPTER TWO

THE LORRIGAN TREE GROWS THRIFTILY


Young Tom Lorrigan had found his mate. Had he known more about life in
the big world beyond the Rim, he must have been amazed at his luck.
Once a man dropped dead in a poker game when he had staked his last
blue chip and drawn a royal flush. In the great game of hearts Tom had
drawn a royal flush, but he did not drop dead. Instead, he went right
on living, more determined than ever to own a million dollars' worth
of cattle and horses before he died, considerably before he died,
because he wanted to enjoy that million with Belle. And because of her
he wanted that million to be honest money.

Everything he did now, he did for Belle more than for himself. As a
matter of course she became his real reason for living. She was like
the sun. He took her for granted, never questioning the blessed warmth
of her presence, never stopping to wonder what life would be like if
he lost her. She was beautiful, with a beauty that never palled and
never paled. She laughed a great deal, and he never could keep
laughter from his own lips while he listened. When she sang she put
the meadow larks to shame, and afterwards when he rode the range alone
Tom would whistle strange, new melodies that the Black Rim country
never had heard before,--melodies which Belle had taught him
unconsciously with her singing. He did not know that it would have
astonished a city dweller to hear the bad man of Black Rim Country
whistling Schubert's "Serenade" while he rode after cattle, or
Wagner's "Prize Song," or "Creole Sue," perhaps, since Belle, with
absolute impartiality, sang everything that she had ever heard sung.
On billboards before eastern theatres Belle Delavan had been called
"The Girl with a Thousand Songs." Audiences had been invited by the
stage manager to name any selection they might choose, assured that
Belle would sing it from memory. No wonder that her singing never grew
stale to Tom Lorrigan!

But mostly she busied herself with little domesticities that somehow
never included cooking, and with driving helter-skelter over the range
with two horses hitched to a buckboard, following Tom when he rode
after cattle. Do you think she should logically have learned to ride?
She did try it once on the gentlest horse that Tom owned, which was
not too gentle to run away with Belle. She rode that horse just two
hundred yards before she jolted so far from the saddle that she could
not find it again until some time after, when they had caught the
horse and led him to the corral.

"Not any more for me, Tom Lorrigan!" she gasped, flapping her two
pretty hands in eloquent disgust when Tom rode up to her. "I wouldn't
get on a horse's back again to star for the Queen of England! I'll
take that team of he-devils you've been breaking to drive, and I'll
drive 'em or break every bone in their bodies. I'm willing to get
behind any horse you've got; but to get on their backs--excuse me!"
She limped painfully to the house with her yellow hair blowing around
her shoulders and across her lips that would smile in spite of her
mishap.

After that Belle drove the "he-devils" and others quite as devilish,
and risked her bones with perfect equanimity. She drove horses that
had to be thrown before the collar could be buckled on, and
"forefooted" before they would submit to the harness. Indeed, Belle
seemed to prefer that kind of horses. She wanted a team that could
keep pace with Tom,--and she had it. Her buckboard lasted a year,
with luck. She strewed the Devil's Tooth range with wheels and
doubletrees and splinters and hairpins, and scattered sunshiny
smiles and cuss-words and snatches of song wherever she went. And
since she went wherever eight bronco feet could take her, Black
Rim country came to know Belle Lorrigan as it knew Tom. Came to fear
Belle Lorrigan's wrath, which bettered the lightning for searing,
lashing sword-thrusts of venom; came to know her songs well enough
to hum snatches of them; came to laugh when she laughed,--and to
hope that the next laugh would not be aimed at them; came to
recognize her as a better shot than any one save Tom, who taught her.

At the country dances on the various ranches, Belle never missed
quadrille, two-step, waltz or schottische, and she danced by herself
or sang songs during the intervals, while the women of the range sat
stiffly along the walls on benches, stared at Belle and whispered
behind their weather-reddened hands, and tittered. She taught
big-jointed, bashful boys how to waltz, and she slapped a half-drunken
miner who squeezed her too tightly in a square dance. Slapped Tom also
when he came hurrying up to kill the miner, and told him to keep to
his own quarrels and save his powder for something worth while. She
didn't need help to step on a worm, she added, and took a youth by the
arm and led him off to dance. The miner, I may say to the curious, was
next seen in Hailey, heading south. He left a very good prospect up in
the hills and never went back to work out his assessments.

As you have probably guessed, Belle Lorrigan and the women of the
Black Rim country did not get on very well together. Black Rim women
thought that a woman who wore her hair in curls down her back--yellow
hair at that!--could not be any too good if the truth were known. They
declared to one another that a woman who did not talk about her past
life, who never so much as mentioned past illnesses, even, must have a
great deal to cover up. How did Tom Lorrigan get acquainted with her,
anyway? Through some marriage agency, they were willing to bet. And
how did a decent woman happen to have all the fancy clothes which
Belle Lorrigan possessed? And jewelry enough to stock a store with!
Three rings on one finger at one time and the same time was going it
pretty strong, in the opinion of the Black Rim ladies. They also
believed that she used paint and powder, which damned her beyond all
hope of redemption.

Poor Belle Lorrigan (Black Rim country spoke of her always as Belle
Lorrigan without in the least understanding why she remained an
individual personality to them instead of becoming merely Mrs.
Lorrigan--Mrs. Tom, even, since many of the Black Rim women were
designated by the nicknames of their husbands)! She would have been
glad to be friendly, simply because friendliness was in her blood and
would out. She would have been glad to receive them at the Devil's
Tooth ranch for one of those all-day visits which were the custom of
the country. But for a long while they did not come. Sometimes she
would meet a family bundled to the eyes against the chill winds of
Idaho, bumping over the rough roads on their way to visit some near
neighbor who lived only ten or fifteen miles away. She would flash
them a smile while she pulled up her bronco team out of the trail to
make a generous room for their passing, and she would shout something
pleasant as they went by. And after they had gone on she would shrug
her fine, broad shoulders and call them cats, going out to a
scratching, with all the kittens mewing along. She would flap a
hand--providing the bronco team left her a hand free to flap--and
shake her head, and say, "Not for mine, thank you!" And would be hurt
down deep in her heart where it did not show, because they never
stopped at her door.

But when the boys began to come, then came the neighbor women, making
formal two-hour calls upon the new mother, eager to see and to hear
and to go away and compare notes afterward. They talked much of the
names that Belle Lorrigan called her children. The first one she named
for the hero in her first play; wanting, I suppose, a souvenir of the
time when she was fifteen and had her first speaking part on the
stage. She called her first-born Algernon Adelbert. Algernon Adelbert
Lorrigan, grandson of old Tom Lorrigan! Think of that!

But Algernon Adelbert no sooner outgrew his cradle than he was known
to all and sundry as Al Lorrigan, so that no harm was done him in
giving him such a name. He grew up lusty and arrogant, a good deal of
a bully, six feet tall, a good rider--though, not so good a rider as
his dad--a good shot, willing to help gather that million together on
the chance that he might have a share in the spending.

Al was a youth who hunted trouble for the thrill of meeting it more
than half-way, but since Tom Lorrigan happened to be his father, Al
rode off the Devil's Tooth ranch before he became the rampant young
trouble-hunter. Belle had some anxious hours during the time Al was
gone, but she never once betrayed her anxiety; which is doing pretty
well for a mother.

The second was Marmaduke LeRoy, and the third and last she recklessly
christened Lancelot Montgomery. Marmaduke never learned to spell his
name correctly, and sometimes complained that Belle had gone and named
him after a mess of preserves,--meaning marmalade, I suppose. But as
he grew older he forgot his grievance. Belle was the only person who
could remember offhand his full name, and she never called him by it
except when she was very angry; when she usually attached so many
adjectives that Marmaduke LeRoy was quite submerged. Commonly he was
called Duke, which did well enough.

Tom used to study Duke through half-closed lids and the smoke of a
cigarette, and wonder which side of the family had a yellow streak;
not the Lorrigan side, so far as Tom could judge. Nor the Delavan
side either, if Belle lived true to type. To be sure, Belle refused to
ride a horse; but then Belle was a woman and women had whims. There
was no yellow about Belle, except her hair which was pure golden.

Duke would invariably lie to dodge punishment. According to his own
theory, Duke was always blameless, always the injured party, the boy
who does right and never is given credit for his virtues. Even Belle,
who would fight for her boys as a tigress fights for its young, looked
askance at Duke while she tried, motherlike, to cover his faults from
the keen eyes of Tom.

"I'd just like to know how you come by it," she once exclaimed
exasperatedly, when Duke was ten and Lance eight. "I'd sure chop one
limb off the family tree, if I knew which one gave you the gall to lie
to me and Tom. Duke, for heaven's sake take a licking just once
without trying to lay the blame on Al or Lance--and see how proud
you'll feel afterwards!"

"Aw--lickins hur-rt!" Duke had protested, rubbing the arm Belle had
gripped none too gently, and sidled away from her.

With her hands to her hips--gracefully posed there, as became an
actress--Belle regarded him fixedly. "My Gawd!" she whispered, owning
defeat before that invulnerable selfishness of Duke's.

Her tone stung even his young crocodile-hided sensibility. "You're
always blamin' me. You'n Tom think I do everything mean on this ranch!
You think Lance is an angel! He's your pet and you let him pick on me
an' you never say a word. Lance can do any darn thing he pleases, an'
so can Al. I'm goin' to run away, first thing you know. You can have
your sweet little angel pet of a doggone ole cowardly-calf Lance!"
Then he whined, "Aw--you lemme go! I never done it, I tell yuh! It was
Lance!"

Belle gritted her teeth while she shook him. "You yellow-hearted
little whelp. I _saw you_ chasing that colt around the corral till he
broke the fence! If Tom was to know about it he'd lick you good! Duke,
why _can't_ you be a man and take the blame yourself, just once? I'd
be--I'd be so proud o' you if you only told the truth about things.
Don't you know--it's only a coward that will lie to save his own
skin?"

"Lance is a bigger coward than I am, an' you never say a word to him.
You think Lance is perfect."

"I guess you're hopeless all right," Belle retorted. "It's just a
yellow streak in you somewhere. Living with the Lorrigans, I'm hoping
you'll outgrow it. The Lorrigans sure ain't yellow!"

"I chased Blackie some, Belle," Lance volunteered, peering down over
the stable eave at his irate mother. "Duke started in and got him
going good, and when he come fogging over to this side I flopped my
arms at him. Gee, but he did stop quick! I guess if you're going to
lick Duke, you better give me about four good licks for that, Belle.
And take 'em off Duke's licking. No use licking us both for the same
thing."

Belle tilted her yellow head and looked up at her beloved youngest,
grinning down at her cheerfully from the hay roof where he sprawled
head downward, flat on his stomach.

"Well, thank the Lord one Lorrigan has got the nerve to own up to a
thing. Come on down and get your four licks, then. I can be as square
as the next one. But Duke's got it coming to him for lying to me. Tell
me, Lance, did Duke chase Blackie through the fence?"

"Aw go on, Belle! What's matter with you, asking me what Duke done?
He's the feller to ask about that. I chased Blackie about four licks'
worth. Hurry up and let's get it over with. You know it ain't pleasant
for either of us!"

"Smarty!" yelled Duke, quick to read in Belle's face what softening
effect Lance had on her temper. "Tryin' to be smart--tryin' to be
George Wash'nton! You little liar, you know you chased Blackie more'n
what I done. Sneak out of it--yeah, that's you, every time. Own up
just enough to make Belle think you're an angel. Doggone the whole
doggone outfit!"

"_Now_ what?" Tom's voice broke in upon Duke's shrill tirade. From
the back of his horse Tom looked down quizzically upon them. "Duke,
what you been up to?"

"Aw, you always think it's me! Why don't you ask Lance what he's been
up to? Why don't you lick Lance for being on the stable? If I was to
get up there and tromp around in the hay and make it leak, I know what
_I'd_ git!"

Tom sent a glance up to where Lance was hastily scrambling down a
corner. "You'd better!" he commented sternly. Then he looked at Belle,
his eyes twinkling under his scowl.

"If you can't handle these young devils, Belle, turn 'em over to me.
I'll mighty quick settle their hash for 'em."

Belle gripped tighter the squirming Duke. "I'm not a cripple yet, Tom
Lorrigan. They've both got a licking coming to 'em, and if you'll
kindly walk off stage R. C. I'll go on with the scene. You weren't
cued to come on here."

"It's your show, Belle," Tom assented, and very obligingly rode to
the other side of the stable to unsaddle his horse, and grinned to
himself when the sound of wailing and pleading and promises of the
"I'll-never-do-it-again" variety came to his ears. Belle's lickings
were distinguished chiefly by their uproar.

"Belle wallops 'em like brandin' calves," Tom used to chuckle. "They
beller a plenty while it's going on, and kick up their heels when it's
all over. I wish't my dad had licked me like that when I was a kid.
You can gamble, when I was thrashed, I knowed it!"

Duke grew up to be a very good cowpuncher, however. He knew every draw
and dry wash, every creek bottom and every canyon on the Black Rim
range; knew almost as well as the owner how many cattle carried every
brand. In the Devil's Tooth round-ups Duke held his place alongside Al
as a top hand,--disputing now and then the right of young Lance to
compete with him, but never quite daring to bring his dispute to the
point where action would take the place of words.

"Duke's sure enough a bad man--with his face," Tom once snarled to
Belle. "Make it a talking match, and Duke could lick any old woman, in
the Black Rim country."

"There's been enough fighting Lorrigans, don't you think?" Belle
smiled back at him. "Duke's dad can fight hard enough for the whole
family. I didn't think you wanted your boys to be fighters."

"I don't. But I sure do want 'em to have the fightin' stuff in 'em,
whether it ever comes out or not. Take Lance, there. Lance ain't a
fighter, either; but by the Lord John, it's there! Once get Lance
started, and I'd back him against any three men in the Black Rim. It's
in him, if the play ever come up. And it's in Al. The Lorrigan is
strong in Al. But that Duke--"

"Honey, I think maybe it's the Delavan in Duke. I remember an old maid
aunt of mine that used to bolt the door and quarrel with my mother
through the keyhole. I guess maybe Duke has got a little touch of Aunt
Jane."

"Oh, sure! First I ever heard of Aunt Jane, Belle. Takes you to think
up a reason."

"And the Lorrigan will come out, honey. He's got the look, now and
then. It's in him, you'll see."

So that is how the Lorrigan boys grew up. They thought Belle the most
beautiful, the most wonderful woman in the world,--though they never
called her mother. Belle would not have it. She refused to become a
motherly, middle-aged person, and her boys were growing altogether too
big and too masterful to look upon a golden-curled, pink-cheeked,
honey-throated Amazon as other Black Rim sons looked upon their faded,
too often shrewish maternal parent. She was just Belle. They knew no
other like her, no one with whom they might compare her. We do not
compare the sun and the moon with other suns and moons. Like Tom, they
worshipped her in their hearts, and chummed with her even before they
had outgrown her stormy chastisements. They mended her buckboards and
her harness; they galloped alongside while she drove careening across
the range, her hair flying in the wind, her mouth smiling and showing
her white teeth. They danced with her,--and having Belle for a
teacher from the time they could toddle, you may guess how the
Lorrigan boys could dance. They sang the songs she taught them; they
tried to better her record at target practice and never did it; they
quarreled with her when her temper was up and dodged her when it
became too cyclonic.

They grew up without ever having ridden on the cars, save once or
twice to Lava. Black Rim was the rim of the world to them, and their
world held all that they yearned for. Belle sheltered them from too
much knowledge of that other world, which held the past she hated and
tried to forget. Much she taught them of city manners and the little
courtesies of life. She would box the ears of the boy who neglected to
rise and offer her a chair when she entered a room, and would smoke a
cigarette with him afterward. Once she whipped her six-shooter out of
its holster and shot a hole through the crown of Al's hat, as a
tactful reminder that gentlemen always remove their hats when they
come into a house. Al remembered, after that. At fourteen even the
hardiest youth feels a slight shock when a bullet jars through his hat
crown two inches above his hair.




CHAPTER THREE

MARY HOPE DOUGLAS APPEARS


Devil's Tooth ridge, which gave the Lorrigan ranch its name, was
really a narrow hogback with a huge rock spire at one end. Crudely it
resembled a lower jaw bone with one lone tooth remaining. Three
hundred feet and more the ridge upthrust its barren crest, and the
wagon road from the ranch crawled up over it in many switchbacks and
sharp turns, using a mile and a half in the climbing. They called it
the "dug road." Which meant that teams and scrapers and dynamite and
much toil had been necessary in the making, distinguishing it from
most Black Rim roads, which followed the line of least resistance
until many passings had worn a definite trail; whereupon that trail
became an established thoroughfare legalized by custom and not to be
lightly changed for another.

Over in the next valley, beyond Devil's Tooth ridge, Alexander
Douglas had made a ranch for himself and his family. Aleck Douglas was
as Scotch as his name. He shaved his long upper lip, so that it
looked longer and more uncompromising than was necessary even to
match the Aleck Douglas disposition. His hair was wiry and stood up
from a forehead that might be called beetling. His eyebrows were heavy
and came so near to meeting that Mary Hope used to wish that she
dared lay one small finger between father's eyebrows, just to see if
there would be room. His eyes were as close together as his thin
beak of a nose would permit, and his ears were long and narrow and set
flat against his head. He was tall and he was lank and he was honest
to his last bristling hair. He did not swear--though he could wither
one with vituperative epithets--and he did not smoke and he did not
drink--er--save a wee nip of Scotch "whusky" to break up a cold,
which frequently threatened his hardy frame. He was harshly
religious, and had there been a church in the Black Rim country you
would have seen Aleck Douglas drive early to its door every Sunday
morn, and sit straight-backed in a front pew and stare hard at the
minister through the longest of sermons,--providing, of course, that
church and minister were good Presbyterian.

He loved the dollars, how he did love his dollars! He loved his
cattle, because they represented dollars. He nursed them, dollars and
animals alike, and to lose one wrung the heart of him.

His wife was a meek little thing in his presence, as the wives of such
men as Aleck Douglas usually are. She also was rigidly honest,
dogmatically religious and frugal and hard-working and intolerant of
the sins of others.

Early she taught Mary Hope that beyond Devil's Tooth ridge lived those
wicked Lorrigans, whose souls were bartered to the devil and whose
evil ways were a stench in the nostrils of God. Mary Hope used to
wonder if God turned up his nose when there was a stench in his
nostrils,--for instance, when Belle Lorrigan hurtled past with her
bronks and her buckboard and her yellow hair flying. Mary Hope
wondered, too, what the Lorrigan boys had got from the devil in
exchange for their souls. Some magic, perhaps, that would protect them
from death and accident. Yet that seemed not true, for Al Lorrigan
broke his leg, one spring round-up. The devil ought to have saved his
horse from falling down with him, if the devil had Al Lorrigan's
soul.

That had happened when Mary Hope was twelve and Al Lorrigan was
eighteen. She heard her father tell her mother about it; and her
father had set his whiskered lip against his long, shaven upper lip
almost with a smack.

"They'll come to a bad end, all of them," he declared sententiously.
"Violent deaths had all the Lorrigans before them--all save Tom, and
the Lord but stays his hand for a time from that man. The wicked shall
flourish as a green bay tree."

"Father, how can a tree be green and then bay too!" Mary Hope
ventured to inquire. "Is it just a Bible tree, or does it flourish
somewhere really?"

Aleck Douglas hid his month behind his palm and coughed. "'Tis not bay
like a horse, child. 'Tis not the color that I'm speaking of."

"That painted Jezebel, Belle Lorrigan, drove past the house to-day
within a stone's throw," Mrs. Douglas informed her husband. "I wush,
Aleck, that ye would fence me a yard to keep the huzzy from driving
over my very doorstep. She had that youngest brat of hers in the seat
with her--that Lance. And as they went past on the keen gallop--and
the horses both in a lather of sweat--the boy impudently shook his
fist at me where I was glancing from my window. And his mother lookit
and laughed, the Jezebel!"

"Mother, Lance only waved his hand."

"And why should Lance be waving his hand when he should pass the
house? Did he think that a Douglas would come so low as to wave at a
Lorrigan?"

Mary Hope ducked her sleek little pig-tailed head outside the door and
shooed vehemently at a dingy black hen that happened to be passing.
Mary Hope knew that a Douglas had stooped so low as to wave back at
Lance Lorrigan, but it seemed unwise to tell her mother so.

When Mary Hope was permitted to have a gentle old cow-pony of her own,
she rode as often as she dared to Devil's Tooth ridge. By short cuts
down certain washes which the trail avoided with many winding detours,
she could lope to the foot of the ridge in forty minutes by the old
alarm clock which she carried one day in her arms to time the trip.
She could climb by another shortcut trail, to the Devil's Tooth in
twenty minutes. She could come down in fifteen, she discovered. In a
three-hour ride she could reach the-Devil's Tooth, spend a whole hour
looking down upon the ranch house of the wicked Lorrigans, and ride
home again. And by choosing the short cuts she practically eliminated
the chance of being observed.

If she could see Belle go tearing down the trail with her bronks and
her buckboard she would be horrifiedly happy. The painted Jezebel
fascinated Mary Hope, who had read all about that wicked woman in the
Bible, and had shivered in secret at her terrible fate. Belle Lorrigan
might never be eaten by dogs, since dogs are few in cattleland and are
kept strictly at home, but if Mary Hope's mother was any true
prophetess, the painted Jezebel's final doom would be quite as
horrible.

At the infrequent parties which the Douglas household countenanced,--such
as Christmas trees and Fourth of July picnics, Mary Hope would sit and
stare fixedly at Belle Lorrigan and wonder if all painted Jezebels
were beautiful and happy and smiling. If so, why was unadorned virtue
to be commended? Mary tried not to wish that her hair was yellow and hung
in curls, and that she had even white teeth and could sing and dance so
wonderfully that everything stopped and every one looked and listened
from the minute she began until she stopped.

More than anything else in her starved young life, Mary Hope wanted to
see the inside of the Lorrigan house. The painted Jezebel had a real
piano, and she could play it, people said. She played ungodly songs,
but Mary Hope had a venturesome spirit. She wanted to see an
instrument of the devil, hear the painted Jezebel play on it and sing
her ungodly songs.

One day when she had ridden to the top of the Devil's Tooth a great,
daring plan came to her. She wanted to ride down there--a half mile
down the bluff, a mile and a half by the road--but she would never
dare take that trail deliberately. Her father might hear of it, or her
mother. Nor could she ask the Lorrigans not to tell of her visit. But
if her horse ran away with her and took her down the ridge, she could
ask them to please not tell her father, because if he knew that her
horse ran away he would not let her ride again. It seemed to Mary Hope
that all the Lorrigans would sympathize with her dilemma. They would
probably ask her into the house. She would see the piano, and she
could ask the painted Jezebel to play on it. That would be only
polite. It did seem a shame that a girl thirteen years old, going on
fourteen, should never have seen or heard a piano. Mary Hope looked at
the sun and made breathless calculation. Having just arrived at the
Devil's Tooth, she had an hour to spend. And if she took the steep,
winding trail that the Lorrigans rode, the trail where old man
Lorrigan's horse had fallen down with him, she could be at the house
in a very few minutes.

"Ye look little enough like a runaway horse, ye wind-broken, spavined
old crow-bait, you!" she criticized Rab as he stood half asleep in the
sun. "I shall have to tell a lee about you, and for that God may
wither the tongue of me. I shall say that a rattler buzzed beneath
your nose--though perhaps I should say it was behind ye, Rab, else
they will wonder that ye didna run away home. If ye could but lift an
ear and roll the eye of you, wild-like, perhaps they will believe me.
But I dinna ken--I wouldna believe it mesel!"

Rab waggled an ear when she mounted, switched his tail pettishly when
she struck him with the quirt, reluctantly obeyed the rein, and set
his feet on the first steep pitch of the Devil's Tooth trail. Old as
he was, Rab had never gone down that trail and he chose his footing
circumspectly. It was no place for a runaway, as Mary Hope speedily
discovered when she had descended the first dip and entered the cleft
which the Lorrigans called the Slide.

A slide it was, and down it Rab slid on his rump. An old watercourse,
with sheer rock walls that formed the base of the Tooth itself. Had
there been room Mary Hope would have turned back. But the cleft was so
narrow that a pack horse must be adept at squeezing past protuberances
and gauging the width of its pack if it would travel the trail. A
sharp turn presently showed her the end of the cleft, and they emerged
thankfully upon a sage-grown shelf along which the trail proceeded
more gently.

Then came another cleft, with great boulders at the end, which a horse
must negotiate carefully if he would not break a leg or two. It was
here that old Tom Lorrigan had died under his horse before help came
that way. But Rab had covered many rough trails, and he picked his way
over the boulders safely,--though not as a runaway horse should have
traveled.

After that there came a treacherous bit of shale, across which Mary
Hope thought it best to lead her runaway steed which refused for a
time to venture farther. Being a Douglas she was obstinate. Being
obstinate, she would not turn back, especially since the trail would
be even worse in the climbing than it was in the descent. Rab, she
realized worriedly, could not slide up that narrow, rock-bottomed
cleft down which he had coasted so readily.

"They must be devil horses that ride this way, Rab," she sighed when
she had remounted on the lower margin of the shale. "And the Lorrigans
na doot have magic. But I dinna think that even they could run away
down it."

She struck Rab sharply with the quirt and dug in her heels. If Rab was
to run it must be immediately, for the level valley lay just below and
the Lorrigan house was around the next point of the hill.

Rab would not run. He stopped abruptly and kicked with both feet. Mary
Hope struck him again, a little harder, and Rab kicked again, more
viciously. The trail was much better for kicking than for running, but
Mary Hope would not accept the compromise, and at last Rab yielded to
the extent of loping cautiously down the last steep declivity. When he
reached level ground he laid back his ears and galloped as fast as his
stiffened shoulders would let him. So Mary Hope very nearly achieved a
dashing pace as she neared the corrals of the wicked Lorrigans.

"Well! Yuh traveling, or just goin' somewhere?" A young voice yelled
at her as she went past the stable.

"My horse--is--he rinned away wi' me!" screamed Mary Hope, her
pigtails snapping as Rab slowed up and stopped.

"He rinned away wi' you? When? You musta been purty young for riding
when _that_ horse rinned away!" Lance came toward her, grinning and
slapping his hat against his fringed chaps before he set it upon his
head; an uncommonly handsome head, by the way, with the Lorrigan's
dark eyes and hair and his mother's provocative mouth. "Well, seeing
your horse ain't going to rin no further, you might as well git down
and stay awhile."

"I will not. I didna come to visit, if you please."

Mary Hope's cheeks were hot but confusion could not break her Scotch
spirit.

"Want to borrow something?" Lance stood looking at her with much
enjoyment. A girl in short skirts was fair game for any one's teasing,
especially when she blushed as easily as did Mary Hope. "Want to
borrow a horse that will rin away wi' you."

"Lance, you devil, get out and leave the girl alone. I'm ashamed of
you! Haven't you got any manners at all?--after all the willows and
the good powder I've wasted on you! Get back to that pasture fence
before I take a club to you for such acting!"

Before Belle's wrath Lance retreated, and Mary Hope found the courage
to wrinkle her nose at him when he glanced her way. "He rinned away to
save himself a whupping," she commented, and made sure that he heard
it, and hoped that he would realize that she spoke "Scotchy" just for
his special benefit.

"All right for you, Belle Lorrigan!" Lance called back, retaliating
for Mary Hope's grimace by a kiss thrown brazenly in the expectation
of seeing her face grow redder; which it did immediately. "Careful of
that horse--he might rinned away again!"

"That'll do for you, young man!" Whereupon Belle picked up a small
stone and threw it with such accurate aim that Lance's hat went off.
"Good thing for you that I haven't got a gun on me, or I'd dust your
heels for you!" Then she turned to Mary Hope, who was listening with
titillating horror to the painted Jezebel's unorthodox method of
reproving her offspring. "Get right down, honey, and come in and rest.
And don't mind Lance; he's an awful tease, especially when he likes a
person. Tie your horse to the fence--or turn him in the corral, if
he'll let you catch him again."

"I--I don't believe I could stop. I--I only came by because I--my
horse--" Mary Hope stammered and blushed so red that her freckles were
invisible. After all, it was very hard to tell a lie, she discovered.

"There's something I like about this horse," said Belle, running her
plump white hand down the nose of Rab. "He's neighborly, anyway. He
brought you here against your will, I can see that. And now he's here
he sort of takes it for granted you'll be friendly and stop a while.
Don't you think you ought to be as friendly as your horse, honey?"

"I--I am friendly. I--I always wished I could come and see you. But
mother--mother doesna visit much among the neighbors; she--she's
always busy."

"I don't visit much, myself," said Belle dryly. "But that ain't saying
I can't be friendly. Come on in, and we'll have some lemonade."

Sheer astonishment brought Mary Hope down from her horse. All her life
she had taken it for granted that lemonade was sacred to the Fourth of
July picnics, just as oranges grew for Christmas trees only. She
followed Belle dumbly into the house, and once inside she remained
dumb with awe at what seemed to her to be the highest pinnacle of
grandeur.

There was the piano with a fringed scarf draped upon its top, and
pictures in frames standing upon the scarf in orderly rows. There were
many sheets of music,--and never a hymn book. There were great chairs
with deep upholstery which Mary observed with amazement was not red
plush, nor even blue plush, yet which appealed to her instincts for
beauty. There was no center table with fringed spread and family album
and a Bible and a conch shell. Instead there was a long table before a
window--a table littered with all sorts of things: a box of revolver
cartridges, a rifle laid down in the middle of scattered newspapers,
a bottle of oil, more music, a banjo, a fruit jar that did duty as a
vase for wild flowers, a half-finished, braided quirt and four silver
dollars lying where they had been carelessly flung down. To Mary Hope,
reared in a household where dollars were precious things, that last
item was the most amazing of all. The Lorrigans must be rich,--as rich
as they were wicked. She thrilled anew at her own daring.

Belle brought lemonade, wonderful lemonade, with an egg beaten to
yellow froth and added the last minute. Mary Hope sipped and marveled.
After that, Belle played on the piano and sang songs which Mary Hope
had never heard before and which she thought must be the songs the
angels sang in Heaven, although there was nothing to suggest harps or
hallelujahs. Love songs they were, mostly. The sun slipped around and
shone through a window on Belle's head, so that her yellow hair
glistened like fine threads of gold. Mary Hope watched it dreamily and
wondered how a Jezebel could be so beautiful and so good.

"You'd better run along home now, honey," Belle said at last when she
had finished her eighth song. "I'd love to have you stay all
night--but I reckon there'd be trouble. Your dad ain't any too mild,
I've heard. But I hope you won't wait until your horse runs away with
you again. I want you to come real soon. And come early so you can
stay longer. I'll teach you to play the piano, honey. You ought to
learn, seeing you love it so."

That night Mary Hope dreamed of playing strange, complex compositions
on a piano which Lance Lorrigan had given her. The next morning and
for many days after she still dreamed of playing entrancing strains
upon a piano, and of Lance Lorrigan who had thrown her a kiss. Belle
had said that Lance always teased a person he liked, and in that one
remark lay the stuff of many dreams.




CHAPTER FOUR

A MATTER OF BRANDS


On the grassy expanse known locally as Injun Creek, fifteen hundred
head of cattle were milling restlessly in a close-held herd over which
gray dust hovered and settled and rose again. Toward it other cattle
came lowing, trotting now and then when the riders pressed close,
essaying a retreat when the way seemed clear. From Devil's Tooth they
came, and from Lava Bed way, and from the rough sandstone ridges of
Mill Creek. Two by two the riders, mere moving dots at first against a
monotone of the rangeland, took form as they neared the common center.
Red cattle, black cattle, spotted and dingy white, with bandy-legged,
flat-bodied calves keeping close to their mothers, kicking up their
heels in sheer joy of their new life when the pace slowed a little,
seeking a light lunch whenever the cows stopped to cast a wary glance
back at their pursuer. A dozen brands were represented in that
foregathering: The NL brand of Tom Lorrigan on most, with its various
amendments which differentiated the property of other members of the
family, since all of the Lorrigans owned cattle. There was the NL
Block of Belle Lorrigan, the ANL which was Al's brand, the DNL of Duke
and the LNL which belonged to Lance; monograms all of them, deftly
constructed with the fewest possible lines. There was that invitation
to the unlawful artistry of brand-working, the Eleven which Sleek
Douglas thought quite sufficient to mark his cattle. It was merciful
to the calves, he maintained, and as to thieves, the dishonest would
be punished by law and the Douglas wrath. The Miller brand, a plain
Block, showed now and then upon the rump of some animal. The AJ fled
occasionally before a rider, and there were brands alien to the Black
Rim; brands on cattle that had drifted down from the Snake through the
Lava Creek pass, or over the sage-grown ridges farther north.

His rifle sheathed in a saddle holster under his thigh, his black eyes
roving here and there and letting no small movement of men or animals
escape their seeing glances, Tom Lorrigan rode to the round-up, lord
of the range, steadfast upon the trail of his "million on the hoof" of
which he dreamed. Beside him rode Al, and the two of them were talking
while they rode.

"He ain't safe, I tell you," Al was saying in the tone of reiteration.
"And you needn't ask me how I know. I know it, that's all. Maybe he's
too damn' agreeable or something. Anyway, I know I don't like the way
his eyes set in his head."

"A man that wasn't safe wouldn't dare come into the Black Rim and make
the play he's makin'," Tom contended. "I've had my eye on him ever
since he come. I've checked up what he says at different times--they
tally like the truth. I can't find nothing wrong."

"I've got him set down for a spotter," said Al.

"If he ain't on the level it'll show up sooner or later," Tom
contended. "I've got my eye on him. I dunno what you pin your argument
on, Al, I'll be darned if I do."

"Well, watch out for Cheyenne. That's all. You're pretty keen, all
right, but all a man's got to do to get on your blind side is to blow
in here with his chin on his shoulder and his horse rode to a whisper
and claim to you he's hidin' out. Cheyenne ain't right, I tell yuh.
You take a tip from me and watch him."

"Takes a kid to tell his dad where to head in at!" growled Tom. "How
do you reckon I ever got along before your time. Ever figure that out,
Al?"

"Now, what's eatin' on old Scotty Douglas, do yuh reckon? That's him,
all right. I could tell him on horseback ten mile off. He rides like a
Mormon."

Tom grunted. His boys, he had long ago discovered, were very apt to
find some excuse for changing the subject whenever he mentioned the
past which had not held their arrogant young selves. Tom resented the
attitude of superior wisdom which they were prone to assume. They were
pretty smart kids, but if they thought they were smarter than their
dad they sure had a change of heart coming to them.

"Supposin' it is old Scotty. Do you reckon, Al, I've got you along for
a guide, to point out what my eyes is getting too poor to see? As for
Cheyenne," he reverted angrily to the argument, "as for Cheyenne, when
you've growed to be a man, you'll find it's just as much the mark of a
fool to go along suspecting everybody as it is to bank on everybody.
You think now it's funny to put the Judas brand on every man you don't
know. It ain't. It's a kid's trick. Boys git that way when they begin
to sprout hair under their noses. I been pretty patient with yuh, Al.
You're growing up fast, and you're feeling your oats. I make
allowances, all kinds. But by the humpin' hyenas, don't you start in
telling me where to head in at with my own outfit! If you do, I'll
jest about wear out a willer switch on yuh!"

This to a youth almost old enough to vote was dire insult. Al pulled
up his horse. "Run your own outfit and be darned to yuh!" he cried
hotly, and spurred off in the direction of the ranch.

Tom laughed shortly and rolled a cigarette. "Thinks now it'll bust up
the round-up if he goes," he opined. "Lucky for my kids I ain't as
strict as my old dad was; they wouldn't have any hide left, I
reckon."

Up loped Aleck Douglas then, riding stiff-legged, his bony elbows
jerking awkwardly with the motion of his horse, a rusty black vest
dangling open under his coat which flapped in the wind. That the
Douglas wrath rode with him Tom saw from the corner of his eye and
gave no sign.

"Hello," said Tom casually and drew a match along the stamped fork of
his saddle. "You're quite a stranger." He lighted his cigarette,
holding his reins lightly in one hand while he did so; gave the reins
a gentle flip to one side and sent his horse after a cow and calf that
showed symptoms of "breaking back."

"Mister Lorrigan, 'tis aboot a spotted yearlin' that I've come to
speak with ye. I've found the hide of her in the brush beneath yon
hill, and the brand is cut from it. But I wad swear to the hide wi'out
the brand. 'Twas a yearlin' I ken weel, Mister Lorrigan." He rode
alongside, and his close-set little eyes regarded keenly Tom's face.

"A spotted yearling with the brand cut out, hey? That looks kinda bad.
Have you got the hide with you?"

"I have no got the hide wi' me, but I ken weel whaur it lies, Mister
Lorrigan, and I thinkit so do you."

"Hm-m. You'd ought to of brought it along." Tom's glance went out
toward the herd and the cattle lumbering toward it far and near. "The
range is plumb lousy with spotted yearlings, Scotty. What do you
expect me to do about it?"

The Douglas face worked spasmodically before he spoke. "I expect ye,
Mr. Lorrigan, to pay for yon beastie. I ken weel ye could name the mon
that stickit the knife in her throat. An' she made fine eatin', I have
na doot. But 'tis the law, Mister Lorrigan, that a mon should pay for
the meat he consumes."

"Meaning, of course, that you think I'm feeding Douglas meat to my
outfit. Don't you think you're kinda hasty? I kill a beef about every
three or four days in round-up time. The boys work hard and they eat
hard. And they eat NL beef, Scotty; don't overlook that fact. Hides
ain't worth anything much, but salt's cheap, too. I ain't throwin'
away a dollar when it's no trouble to save it. If you're any curious
at all, you ride over to ranch and count all the green hides you can
find. Belle, she'll show 'em to you. Take a look at the brands, and
figure it out yourself, I don't know how many you'll find, but I'll
gamble you a dozen cows against one that you'll wonder what went with
all the beef that was in them hides. Humpin' hyenas! Ain't I got
cattle enough of my own, without rustlin' off my neighbors?"

"Aye. Ye ha' cattle, Mister Lorrigan; I ken weel ye should no' be put
to it for a wee bit meat--but I ken weel yon spotty yearlin' was
mine. I ken ye've been campin' thereabout--and it wad seem, Mister
Lorrigan, that the salt was no sa plentifu' when the spotty yearlin'
was kilt."

The downright foolhardiness of the Douglas wrath held Tom's
hand,--though of a truth that hand trembled and crept backward. Nor
was Aleck Douglas nearsighted; he saw the movement and his bearded
underlip met his shaven underlip in a straight line.

"Ye do weel to be reachin' for the gun, Mister Lorrigan. I dinna carry
aye weapon save the truth."

Tom flushed. "Blame your oatmeal soul, if I reached for my gun, you
wouldn't be telling me about it!" he exploded. "Carry the truth, do
yuh? You've got to show me where you keep it, then. If you wasn't an
old man--and a darn fool on top of that."

"'Tis no brave to cover shame wi' bitter words, Tam Lorrigan. 'Tis the
way of ye to bluster and bully until the neighbors all are affrighted
to face ye and yere ill deeds."

Toward them clattered two riders hotly pursuing a lean, long-legged
steer with a wide spread of horns and a gift of speed that carried him
forging past the disputants. Tom wheeled mechanically and gave chase,
leaving the Douglas wrath to wax hotter or to cool if it would. It was
a harsh accusation that Aleck Douglas had made, and that he did make
it seemed to prove that he had what he considered very good evidence
that he was right. Tom was well schooled in troubles of that kind. He
did not take the matter so indifferently as Douglas believed.

Duke and Mel Wilson, riding hard, came upon Tom just as he had roped
and thrown the steer in a shallow draw that hid them from the level
where Aleck Douglas waited.

"Hey!" Tom beckoned them close. "Old Douglas says there's a hide in
the willows this side of Squaw Butte, with the brand cut out; a
spotted yearling, and he claims it's his and he can swear to it
without the brand. I don't know a darn thing about it. Nobody does in
this outfit; I'll stake all I've got on that. But he's on the
fight--and a mule's a sheep alongside him when he's got his back up.
He left the hide where he found it. Haze this steer and ride over
there and see what there is to his talk. If you find a hide cachéd in
the willows, put it outa sight. We don't want any rustling scraps
started on this range; that's bad medicine always. If he can't produce
any hide, he can't start anything but talk--and talk's cheap."

A few moments later they came tearing up out of the draw, the steer
running strong, the three riders still hotly pursuing. Duke and Mel
rushed it on to the herd, and Tom dropped out of the race and came
along across to where Douglas wrath had not cooled but had smoldered
and waited for the wind of opposition to fan it to flame again.

"Well, you still mournin' over your spotty yearlin'?" Tom called. "You
must have more time than you know what to do with to-day. Us, we have
to _work_."

"If it's to the round-up ye're going, then I'll ride wi' ye, Tom
Lorrigan. I'm a fair mon and I wush na ill to my neighbors. But I
canna twiddle the thumbs whilst others fare well on Douglas beef."

"You can ride where you please; it's open range. But if you ride to
the herd I'll show you forty yearlings that I'll bet are dead ringers
for the one that you claim was killed. I never seen that hide neither,
unless maybe when the critter was using it.

"Now, I don't want any trouble with yuh, Scotty. But I tell yuh right
now I can't stand for much more of this talk about beef rustling.
Thief's a pretty hard word to use to a man's face--and get away with
it."

"'Tis a hard mon I'm usin' it tae," the Douglas retorted grimly.

"Braggin' about your nerve, are yuh, Scotty?"

"I have a name, Tam Lorrigan, and 'tisna Scotty." The Douglas face
twisted with anger. "I will no bandy worrds with ye. 'Tis ill I should
descend to the level o' them that deespitefully use me."

"Deespitefully!--why, humpin' hyenas! Ain't I letting yuh _live_? And
do yuh reckon any other man could walk up to me and call me a thief
and live long enough to take it back? Just because you're old, and
such a blamed fool you go around without a gun on yuh, I'm keepin' my
hands off you. I call yuh a coward. You wouldn't a dared to come over
here with a gun on yuh and talk the way you've done. You've got me
hog-tied. You know it. And damn yuh, I'll fight yuh now with the
law--which is the only way a coward will fight.

"You've done a heap of chawin' around about the Lorrigans, Scotty.
Don't think I ain't heard it. Maybe it's your religion to backbite
yore neighbors and say what you wouldn't dare to say to their face
with a gun on you so we'd be equal. I've passed it up. I've considered
the source and let it go. But when you come belly-achin' around about
me stealin' a spotty yearlin'--jest as if there wasn't but one on the
Black Rim range!--why, damn it, _you'll prove it_! Do you get that?
You'll prove it before a jury, or I'll sue yuh for libel and bust yuh.
I don't go much on the law, but by Henry, I'll use it on you!"

The Douglas eyes flickered uncertainly, but the Douglas mouth was
unyielding. "The law can no be cheatit so easy, Tam Lorrigan. I hae no
wush to send ye tae jail--but ye ken weel that wad be the penalty for
killin' yon beastie in the willows. I came to settle the matter fair
between neighbors, and tae warn ye to cease your evil doings on the
range. I wadna see yer woman come tae grief--"

"You can cut out that mercy talk, Scotty. And don't try to bring Belle
into this. If it comes to a showdown, lemme advise you, you'd better
sidestep Belle. The grief would all be yourn, if you and Belle lock
horns, and I'm telling yuh so."

They had reached the nearest margin of the herd. Cheyenne, a nameless
estray from the Wyoming ranges, chanced to be holding herd where the
two rode up. At him Tom looked, suspicion for the moment sharpening
his glance.

"You can ask this man what he knows about any spotted hide over by
Squaw Butte," he invited the Douglas stiffly. "He's practically a
stranger to the outfit--been here about a month. Maybe his word'll be
worth something to yuh--I dunno. You can ask him."

Douglas rode over to Cheyenne and said what he had to say. Tom
meanwhile held the herd and meditated on the petty injustices of
life--perhaps--and wished that a real he-man had come at him the way
Douglas had come. It irked Tom much to be compelled to meet hard words
with tolerant derision. Toleration was not much of a factor in his
life. But since he must be tolerant, he swung his horse to meet the
Douglas when the brief conversation with Cheyenne was over. The
Douglas head was shaking slowly, owning disappointment.

"Well, yuh might as well make the rounds, Scotty. Go on and ask all
the boys. If I asked 'em myself you might think it was a frame-up. And
when you've made the rounds, take a look through the herd. The chances
are that you'll find your spotty yearlin' walking around with her hide
on her. And when you're plumb through, you make tracks away from my
outfit. My patience is strainin' the buttons right now, looking at
your ugly mug. And lemme tell yuh--and you mark it down in your little
red book so yuh won't forget it--after you've peddled your woes to the
hull outfit, you bring in that hide and some proof, or you get down on
them marrow bones and apologize! I'm plumb tired of the way you act."

Aleck Douglas scowled, opened his hard lips to make a bitter answer
and reconsidered. He went off instead to interview the men, perhaps
thinking that adroit questioning might reveal a weak point somewhere
in their denial.

Tom rode over to Cheyenne. "Scotty's got his war clothes on," he
observed carelessly.

"Shore has," Cheyenne grinned. "But that's all right. He didn't make
nothin' off me. I never give him any satisfaction at all."

Tom's brows pulled together. "Well, now, if you know anything about
any hide with the brand cut out, you'd better come through,
Cheyenne."

"I never said I knowed anything about it. I guess mebby that's why I
couldn't give him no satisfaction." Cheyenne still grinned, but he
did not meet Tom's eyes.

"You spoke kinda queer for a man who don't know nothing, Cheyenne. Did
yuh think mebby it wasn't all NL beef you been eating?"

"Why, no. I never meant anything like that at all. I only said--"

"Straight talk don't need no explainin', Cheyenne. The Devil's Tooth
outfit shore likes the taste of its own beef. If any man fails to
agree with that, I want him to speak up right now."

Cheyenne pinched out the fire in his cigarette and flipped the stub
away from him. He did not look at Tom when he said:

"NL beef shore suits me. I don't know about any other brand. I ain't
et none to judge by."

"You bet your life you ain't," snapped Tom, as he turned away. "When
you sample another brand you won't be drawin' wages with this
outfit."

He rode away to the wagon, where a fire was already burning and the
branding irons heating. Cheyenne, with his hat pulled down over his
forehead so that he looked out from under the brim that shaded his
face, watched Tom queerly, a corner of his lips lifted in a half smile
that was not pleasant.




CHAPTER FIVE

THEY RIDE AND THEY DO NOT TELL WHERE


Aleck Douglas, having questioned the crew as Tom had suggested, and
having inexorably ridden through the herd--in search of brands that
had been "worked," or for other evidence of the unlawful acquisition
of wealth, rather than in hope of finding his spotted yearling--rode
away with the parting threat that he would "gang to the shuriff and
hae a talk wi' him." Tom had advised him of one or two other
destinations where he hoped the Douglas would arrive without any delay
whatever, and the branding proceeded rather slowly with the crew three
men short.

Duke and Mel Wilson rode in about three o'clock with a few cows and
calves which they had gleaned from some brushy draw to cover their
real errand. By the time they had snatched a hasty meal at the wagon a
mile away, and had caught up fresh horses, the afternoon's work was
nearly over. A little earlier than usual, Tom kicked the branding fire
apart, ordered the herd thrown on water and grazed back to the
bed-ground that had been used during round-up time ever since he could
remember, and rode slowly toward camp, whither the lucky ones not on
herd were speeding.

Cheyenne, Tom observed, seemed in a greater hurry than the others, and
he beckoned to him a slim, swarthy-skinned youth who answered to the
euphonious name of Sam Pretty Cow, who was three-quarters Indian and
forgiven the taint for the ability to ride anything he ever tried to
ride, rope anything he ever swung his loop at, and for his unfailing
good humor which set him far above his kind.

"Cheyenne's in a hurry to-night, Sam."

"Yeah. Ride hell out of his horse. I dunno, me." Sam grinned amiably
at his boss.

"I wish you would camp on his trail, Sam. He'll maybe ride somewhere
to-night."

"Yeah. Uh-huh. You bet," acquiesced Sam, and leaned forward a little,
meaning to gallop after Cheyenne.

"Hold on a minute! What did Scotty have to say, Sam?"

"Him? Talk a lot about spotty yearlin' he says is dead. Asking who
kills them calf. Search me, I dunno."

"Hear any talk among the boys about beef rustling?"

"Uh-huh. First I hear is them sour-face asking me who kills them
critter. Me, I dunno."

"If you hear anything about it, Sam, let me know. Scotty thinks we
done it."

"Yeah. Uh-huh. Anybody does something mean, everybody says, 'Damn
Lorrigans done it.' Too much talk in the Black Rim. Talking under
their hats all the time but no liking to fight them Lorrigans. Uh-huh.
They're scared, you bet."

"They'll have something to get scared at, if they ain't careful. I'm
getting tired of it," said Tom gloomily.

"Yeah, you bet!" agreed Sam, his voice all sympathy. Then seeing that
Tom had no immediate intention of saying more, he touched his horse
with his long-shanked spurs and hurried on to "camp on the trail of
Cheyenne."

Tom had nearly reached camp when Duke came pounding up behind him,
coming from the herd. Duke set his horse up, in two jumps slowing from
a gallop to a walk. Tom turned his head but he did not speak. Nor did
Duke wait for questions.

"Dad, we didn't find any hide over by Squaw Butte," he announced
abruptly. "Mel and I hunted every foot of the willows. I saw where a
critter had been killed, all right. There was some scuffed-out tracks
and blood on the ground. But there wasn't any hide. Scotty musta
cachéd it somewheres."

"Scotty claims he left it where he found it, for evidence," Tom said
gloomily.

"Darned if I'd take the blame for other folks' rustling," Duke
declared. "I wisht he'd of come to me with his tale of woe. I'd a
showed him where to head in, mighty darned sudden. I'd of asked where
was his proof; there's other cow outfits in the Black Rim besides the
Devil's Tooth, I'd tell him. And if he didn't have mighty darned good
evidence, I'd of--"

"Yes, I expect you would of tore the earth up all round him," Tom
interrupted drily. "You boys shore are fighty, all right--with your
faces. What I'm interested in, is whereabouts you and Mel hunted. That
hide wouldn't show up like the Devil's Tooth--understand. And Scotty
was bawling around like a man that's been hurt in the pocket. He found
a hide, and if it ain't his he shore thinks it is, and that's just
about the same. And we camped over there three days ago. Where all did
you and Mel look?"

"All over, wherever a hide could be cachéd. There ain't any over
there. Scotty musta dreamt it--or else he buried it."

"Scotty ain't the dreamy kind. Might be possible that the ones that
done the killing went back and had a burying--which they'd oughta
have had at the time. I can't sabe a man rustling beef and leaving
the hide laying around, unless--" Tom pulled his eyebrows together
in quick suspicion. "It kinda looks to me like a frame-up," he
resumed from his fresh viewpoint. "Well, you and Mel keep it under
your hats, Duke. Don't say nothing to any of the boys at all. But if
any of the boys has anything to say, you listen. Scotty made the
rounds to-day--talked to the whole bunch. They know all about his
spotty yearlin', gol darn him! I'd like to know if any of 'em has got
any inside dope. There's strangers in the outfit this spring. And,
Duke, you kinda keep your eye on Cheyenne. Al seems to think he
ain't right--but Al has got to the suspicious age, when every man
and his dog packs a crime on his conscience. You kinda stall around
and see if Cheyenne lets slip anything."

"What would happen to old Scotty Douglas if he lost a bunch, for gosh
sake? Drop dead, I reckon," grumbled Duke. "He's sure making a lot of
fuss over one measly yearlin'."

"Yeah--but I've saw bigger fusses made over smaller matters, son," Tom
drawled whimsically. "I saw two men killed over a nickel in change,
once. It ain't the start; it's the finish that counts."

"Well, looking at it that way, uh course--"

"That's the only way to look at it, son. Did you think, maybe, that I
hazed you over to find that hide and bury it, just to keep it from
scentin' up the scenery? It's what I could smell farther ahead that I
was after. If you'd looked ahead a little further, maybe you'd of
looked a little closer in the willers."

To this Duke had nothing to say; and presently he loped on, leaving
Tom to ride slowly and turn the matter of the spotted yearling over
and over in his mind until he had reached some definite conclusion.

Tom had the name of being a dangerous man, but he had not earned it by
being hasty. His anger was to be feared because it smoldered long,
rather than because it exploded into quick violence. He wanted to see
the trail ahead of him--and just now he thought he saw Trouble waiting
on the turn. No Lorrigan had ever ridden the other way because Trouble
waited ahead, but one Lorrigan at least would advance with his eyes
open and his weapons ready to his hand.

"Bring your proof," he had said in effect to Aleck Douglas, "or stand
trial for libel. Since you won't fight with guns, I'll fight you with
the law." Very good, if he could be sure that the Douglas would fail
to produce his proof.

Tom knew well enough the reputation he bore in the Black Rim country.
Before the coming of Belle, and later, of the boys, Tom had done his
share toward earning that reputation. But Belle and the boys had
changed his life far more than appeared on the surface. They had held
his rope from his neighbors' cattle, for one thing, though his
neighbors never had credited him with honesty.

It is true that Tom could remember certain incidents of the round-up
that had added to his herd and brought him a little nearer the
million-dollar mark. Without remorse he remembered, and knew that any
cowman in the country would do the same, or worse if he dared. For
branding irons do not always inquire very closely into the parentage
of a calf that comes bouncing up stiff-legged at the end of a
cowpuncher's rope. Nor need a maverick worry very long because he
belongs to no one, so long as cowmen ride the range. Cattle would
always stray into the Black Rim country from ranges across the
mountains, and of these the Black Rim took its toll. He supposed
strange irons were set now and then on the hide of an NL animal across
the mountains--but the branders had better not let him catch them at
it! On the other hand, he would see to it that they did not catch him
branding mavericks on his own range. To Tom that seemed fair
enough,--a give-and-take game of the rangeland. According to Tom's
code he was as honest as his neighbors, and that was honest enough for
practical purposes.

It happened that he had not killed Aleck Douglas' spotted yearling.
And to be accused of the theft hurt.

"Why, humpin' hyenas! If I'd a beefed that critter, old Scotty
wouldn't ever have found no hide to catch me on! What kinda mark does
he think I am! Rustle a beef and leave the hide laying around? why,
any darn fool would know better than that!"

It was characteristic of the Lorrigan influence that when Tom rode
into camp every one of the crew save his own sons quieted a little;
not enough to suggest timidity, but to a degree that told how well
they knew that their master was present.

That master quietly took stock of his men while they ate their supper
and loafed and smoked and talked. Cheyenne had unobtrusively retired
to the bed tent. With his thumbs pushed down inside his belt Tom
strolled past and slanted a glance inside. Cheyenne was squatted on
his heels shaving with cold lather and a cracked looking-glass propped
against a roll of bedding, and a razor which needed honing. In turning
his head to look at Tom he nicked his chin and while he stopped the
bleeding with a bit of old newspaper the size of a small finger-nail
he congratulated himself in the mistaken belief that Tom had not seen
him at all.

Cheyenne did not know Tom very well, else he would have taken it for
granted that Tom not only had seen him, but had also made a guess at
his reason for shaving in the middle of the week.

Tom walked on, making a mental tally of the girls within riding
distance from camp. Jennie Miller was reported engaged to an AJ man,
and besides, she lived too far away and was not pretty enough to be
worth the effort of a twenty-five mile ride just to hear her play
hymns distressingly on an organ with a chronic squeak in one pedal.
There was Alice Boyle at the AJ, and there was Mary Hope Douglas, who
was growing to be quite a young lady,--pretty good-looking, too, if
she wouldn't peel her hair back so straight and tight. Mary Hope
Douglas, Tom decided, was probably the girl. It struck Tom as
significant that she should be the daughter of the man who mourned the
loss of the yearling. He had not reached the rear of the tent before
he decided that he himself would do a little riding that night. He
caught and saddled Coaley, his own pet saddle horse that had never
carried any man save Tom--never would, so long as Tom had anything to
say about it--and set off toward the Devil's Tooth ranch. Cheyenne
ducked his head under the tent flap when he heard the sound of hoof
beats passing close, saw that it was his boss, noted the direction he
was taking, and heaved a sigh of relief. While he labored with the
knot in his handkerchief which must be tied exactly right before he
would leave the tent, Cheyenne had been composing a reason for leaving
camp. Now he would not need a reason, and he grinned while he
plastered his hair down in a sleek, artistically perfect scallop over
his right eyebrow. Tom was going to the home ranch,--to round up Al,
very likely. He would be gone all night and he would not know how many
of his men rode abroad that night.

So presently Cheyenne saddled the freshest horse in his string and
loped off, making an insulting sign with one hand when the boys wished
him luck with the girl and offered to go along and talk religion with
"feyther" just to help him out.

Very soon after that Sam Pretty Cow drifted away, and no one noticed
his absence. Sam Pretty Cow's wanderings never did attract much
attention. He was Injun, and Injuns have ways strange to white men.
For instance, he did not sleep in the tent, but spread his blankets
under whatever shelter he could find within hailing distance from the
others. He was always around when he was wanted, and that seemed to be
all that was expected of him. Sleep settled on the Devil's Tooth
round-up camp, and the night guard sang to the cattle while they rode
round and round the herd, and never dreamed that this night was not as
other nights had been.




CHAPTER SIX

BELLE MEETS AN EMERGENCY IN HER OWN WAY


A Meadow Lark, his conscience comfortable after a generous breakfast
of big and little worms carried to his mate hidden away under a thick
clump of rabbit weed down by the creek, spread rigid wings and
volplaned to the crooked post beside the corral gate, folded his
feathers snug and tilted his head aslant. _"Cler, cler, cler, cler-ee,
cler-ee!"_ he sang, and perked a wary eye toward the low-roofed
stable.

"Oh, I hear you, you sassy little sinner! I wouldn't think you'd have
the nerve, after what you've done to my radishes. I'm sure going to
mix with you, if you--Rosa! Lift a heel at me and you die! Stand
over--don't you try squeezing me against the wall, or I'll take my
quirt to you! Get over there, before I brain you! Hay-ah-h, you--"

From the sounds one would imagine that a bear, two lions and a mule
had come to handgrips in the stable, and that a woman of the Amazons
was battling with them all. The meadow lark knew better. This was his
second season on the Devil's Tooth ranch, and he knew that Belle
Lorrigan was merely harnessing her pinto team in the stable, and that
nothing out of the ordinary was taking place. Being a wise bird as
well as an inquisitive one, he fluttered up to the ridge-pole of the
roof and from that sanctuary listened beady-eyed to the customary
tumult.

Certain staccato epithets meant merely that Subrosa was objecting to
the crupper. A sudden stamping testified that Belle had approached
Rosa with the bridle. A high-keyed, musical voice chanting man-size
words of an intimidating nature followed which proved that the
harnessing was progressing as well as could be expected. Then came a
lull, and the meadow lark tilted forward expectantly, his head turned
sidewise to see what came next.

First came Belle Lorrigan, walking backward, a shot-loaded quirt
raised admonishingly to the chin of Subrosa who walked stiff-legged
and reluctant, his white-lashed, blue eyes rolling fearsomely, his
nostrils belling in loud snorts of protest. A complexity of
emotions stirred Subrosa. Afraid to lunge forward, hating to walk
circumspectly, eager for the race yet dreading the discipline of rein
and whip, Subrosa yielded perforce to the inevitable. As his heels
flicked over the low doorsill he swung round and landed one final
kick against the log wall, threw up his head in anticipation of the
quirt, stepped on a dragging trace chain and jumped as though it
was a rattler.

"None of that, you cantankerous brute! One of these days I'm going to
just naturally brain you, Sub. I'm getting good and tired of this
circus business. You settle down, now, and act human, or--"

Subrosa kicked at the trace and flipped it up so that it struck him
smartly on the rump. He jumped straight forward at Belle, who dodged
and landed the quirt none too gently on his nose. Subrosa sat down
violently, and Belle straightway kicked him in the paunch by way of
hinting that she preferred him standing. Then they had it out,
rampaging all over the round-pole corral until Belle, breathing a bit
fast but sparkly-eyed and victorious, led Subrosa through the gate and
up to the post where she snubbed him fast. She was turning to go after
Rosa when a young voice called to her anxiously.

"Oh, Mrs. Lorrigan! Quick, I'm in a hurry. I mustn't stay, because
they'll be here in a little while. But they're coming by the road and
I came down the trail, and that gave me time. I can't take any more
music lessons, Mrs. Lorrigan. Father is that angry wi' your
husband--and oh, Mrs. Lorrigan! If you have any hide that isna your
own, ye should hide it away at once! Because the shuriff--"

Belle laid her palms on her hips and stared blankly up at Mary Hope,
who sat nervously on old Rab at the gate.

"Heavens, child! My hide is my own--and at that it's pretty well
hidden. What about the sheriff? What's he got to say about it?"

"It's the stealing, Mrs. Lorrigan. Father has the shuriff wi' him, and
they are going to search the ranch for the hides--"

"Good Lord! _What_ hides?"

"The hides of my father's cattle. And if you have any, put them away
quick, where the shuriff canna find them, Mrs. Lorrigan! It's ill I
should go against my father, but you have been so good to me with the
music lessons, and--"

"Don't let the music lessons bother you, Hope. And I guess we're
entitled to all the cowhides we've got on the place, if that's what
you mean. What do you think we are--thieves, Hope Douglas?"

"I dinna say it. I only came to warn ye, so that you may have time tae
put your hides way oot o' their sicht when they come. I dinna want
that your husband should go to prison, Mrs. Lorrigan. But father is
that angry--"

"Well, say! Let me tell you something, Hope. If there's any talk of
stealing and prison for the Lorrigans, your dad had better keep outa
my Tom's sight. And outa mine," she added grimly. "There'll be no
searching for anything on this ranch when my Tom's not here to see
what goes on. You better go back and tell your dad I said it. If you
don't and he brings the sheriff on here, don't blame me if somebody
gets hurt."

"Oh, but it's the law they're bringing on ye! Ye canna go contrary to
the law!" Mary Hope's voice quavered with fear.

"Oh, can't I!" Belle gave her head a tilt. "You beat it, while the
going's good. I hear voices up on the road. If you don't want your dad
to come and catch you here--"

That settled it. Terror drove Mary Hope into the Devil's Tooth trail
at Rab's best pace, which was a stiff-legged lope. Her last glance
backward showed her Belle Lorrigan taking her six-shooter belt off the
buckboard seat and buckling it around her waist so that the gun hung
well forward. Mary Hope shuddered and struck Rab with the quirt.

Belle had led Rosa from the stable and was cautiously fastening the
neck yoke in place when the sheriff and Aleck Douglas rode around the
corner of the stable. Rosa shied and snorted and reared, and Belle
used the rein-ends for a whiplash until Rosa decided that she would
better submit to authority and keep her hide whole. She stood fairly
quiet after that, with little nipping dance-steps in one spot, while
Belle fastened buckles and snaps and trace chains. Subrosa, having had
his tantrum, contented himself with sundry head-shakings and snorts.
When the team was "hooked up" to Belle's satisfaction, she tied them
both firmly to the corral with short ropes, and finally turned her
attention to her visitors.

"Howdy, Mr. Douglas? Fine day we're having," she greeted the dour
Scotchman amiably.

The sheriff coughed behind his hand, looked sidelong at his companion,
rode a step or two nearer to Belle, swung a leg over the cantle of his
saddle. Perhaps he expected Aleck Douglas to introduce him, but he did
not wait for the formality.

"Mrs. Lorrigan, I'm sheriff of the county," he began ingratiatingly,
when his two feet were on the ground.

"You are?" Belle flashed a row of very white teeth. "You sure don't
look it. I'd have taken you for a regular human being."

"Mr. Douglas, here, would like to take a look at some hides Mr.
Lorrigan has got curing. He thinks possibly--"

"'Tis useless to cover the truth wi' saft words, shuriff," Douglas
interrupted glumly. "'Tis stolen cattle we are tracing, and 'tis here
we wad look for the hides of them. I hae guid reason--"

"You'll find my husband at the round-up. Before you do any searching,
you had better go and have a talk with him. When he's gone strangers
don't go prowling around this ranch."

"We'll have our talk with him after we've taken a look around,"
the sheriff amended, grinning a little. "It's just a matter of
form--nothing you need to object to, one way or the other. I don't
suppose we'll find anything--"

"No, I don't suppose you will. Not unless you find it on the road
back. I hate to seem unfriendly, but I'll just have to ask you to
crawl on your horse and go see Tom about it."

"Now, we don't want any unpleasantness at all, Mrs. Lorrigan. But this
man has swore out a warrant--"

"Shucks! What he does never did interest me one way or the other, and
does not now. I'm telling you there'll be no snooping around here
while Tom's away."

"Oh, well, now!" The sheriff rather prided himself on his ability to
"handle folks peaceable," as he expressed it. He injected a little
more of the oil of persuasiveness into his voice. It was his standard
recipe for avoiding trouble with a woman. "You don't think for a
minute I'd take advantage of his absence, Mrs. Lorrigan? Nothing like
that at all. We just want to see if a certain cowhide is here. If it
isn't, then we won't need to bother Tom at all, maybe. Get down, Mr.
Douglas, and we'll just have a look around. Mrs. Lorrigan ain't going
to make no objections to that."

Belle smiled. "Oh, yes, she is. She's going to do quite a lot of
objecting. You better stay right where you are, Scotty. You're a heap
safer."

The sheriff began to lose patience. "Now, look here, Mrs. Lorrigan!
You're dealing with the law, you know. We can't have any nonsense."

"We won't have," Belle assured him placidly. "That's what I've been
trying to beat into your head. Why, good Lord! Can't you take the hint
and see I'm trying not to have any trouble with yuh? I don't want to
have to _run_ you off the ranch--but as you say, there's not going to
be any nonsense. I said, _go_. I'm waiting to see if you've got sense
enough to do it."

"Sa-ay! Just look here now! Do you know it's a State's prison offense
to resist an officer!" The sheriff's face was growing red.

Belle laughed. "Sure. But I'm not. You--you're irresistible! And I
don't know you're an officer."

This went over the sheriff's head and was wasted, though Aleck Douglas
pulled down his mouth at the corners as though he was afraid he might
smile if he were not careful.

The sheriff took up his bridle reins, preparing to lead his horse over
to a post and tie him. He glanced at Belle and saw that she had a
six-shooter in her hand and a glitter in her eyes. Quite naturally he
hesitated. Then, at a perfectly plain signal from the gun, he turned
his palms toward her at a level with his shoulders.

"You needn't tie up. Crawl into the saddle and drift."

"I've got a search warrant--"

"You can keep it and show it to Tom. And get off this ranch just as
quick as that horse can take you. I'll have you both arrested for
trespassing. I'm not taking your word for anything, you see. _I_ don't
know anything about your warrant--hey, Riley!" This to the cook, who
came, taking steps as long as his legs would let him, and swinging a
damp dishcloth in one moist red hand.

"Riley, here's a man claims he's the sheriff and that he's got a
warrant to search the ranch. I don't believe a word of it, and I've
ordered him off the place. I wouldn't for the world resist an officer
of the law--put your hands up a little higher, Mr. Man!--but when Tom
ain't home no stranger is going to come snooping around here if I can
stop him. Ain't that right, Riley?"

"That's right, Belle," Riley acquiesced, working his oversized Adam's
apple convulsively. (Riley, by the way, would just as readily have
approved of murder if Belle had asked for his approval.)

"Well, you're a witness that I'm from Missouri. I've told this man to
go tell his troubles to Tom. If he's honest he'll do it. If he don't
go in about ten seconds, I'm going to throw a bullet through his hat.
_Then_ if he hangs around, I shall shoot him in his left leg just
about six inches above the knee. I can do it, can't I, Riley?"

"Well, now, you shore can, Belle!" Riley nodded his head emphatically.
"If you say six, I'd shore gamble a year's wages it won't be five,
or seven. Six inches above his knee goes, if you say six."

"All right. I'm just defending the ranch when Tom's gone. You hear me,
Mr. Man. Now, you git!"

The sheriff turned and opened his mouth to protest, and Belle shot the
promised bullet through his hat crown. The sheriff ducked and made a
wild scramble for the stirrup.

"Open your mouth again and I'll be awfully tempted to shoot that
crooked tooth out of it," Belle observed. "And in ten seconds,
remember, you're going to get--"

The sheriff still had two of the ten seconds to spare when he left,
Aleck Douglas following him glumly.

"It's him, all right. It's the sheriff, Belle," Riley informed her,
while they watched the two clatter up the road to where the real grade
began. "What's eatin' on 'em? Likely he did have a search warrant."

"He can use it, after I'm through. Old Scotty is trailing some rustled
stock, they claim. They came here looking for hides. You keep an eye
out, Riley, and see if they keep going. I guess they will--they'll go
after Tom. I'm going to have a look at those cowhides in the old
shed."

"Better let me," Riley offered. "It ain't any job for a woman nohow.
You watch the trail and I'll look."

Belle would not even consider the proposition. The Lorrigan reputation
never had troubled her much,--but it sent her now to the shed where
hides were kept stored until the hide buyer made his next annual visit
through the country. She did not believe that she would find any brand
save the various combinations of the NL monogram, but she meant to
make sure before any stranger was given access to the place.

The _job_ was neither easy nor pleasant, but she did it thoroughly.
Riley, roosting meditatively on the top rail of the corral where he
could watch the road down the bluff, craned his long neck inquiringly
toward her when she returned.

"Nothing but NL stuff, just as I thought," said Belle, holding her
hands as far away from her face as possible. "I knew Tom wouldn't have
any stolen hides on the place--but it was best to make sure."

"No ma'am, he wouldn't. I'm shore surprised they'd come and try to
find any. Looks bad to me, Belle. Looks to me like somebody is shore
tryin' to start somethin'. There's plenty in the Black Rim would like
to see Tom railroaded to the pen--plenty. Looks to me like they're
aimin' to pin something on him. No, sir, I don't like it. Uh course,"
he went on, letting himself loose-jointedly to the ground, "they
couldn't get nothing on Tom--not unless they framed something. But I
wouldn't put it a-past 'em to do it. No, ma'am, I wouldn't."

"Your bread's burning, Riley. I can smell it. Don't you never think
they'll frame on Tom. They may try it--but that's as far as they'll
get. They don't want to start anything with the Lorrigans!"

"Well, I left the oven door open. She ain't burning to hurt. Yuh see,
Scotty Douglas, he's religious and he don't never pack a gun. Them
kind's bad to tangle up with; awful bad. There ain't nothing much a
man can do with them religious birds. Them not being armed, you can't
shoot--it's murder. And that kinda ties a man's hands, as yuh might
say. They always take advantage of it, invariable. No, ma'am, it looks
bad."

"It'll look worse--for them that tries any funny business with this
outfit," Belle assured him. "Go along and 'tend to your baking. You
know I hate burnt bread. I'm going to drive over and see what they're
up to."

She untied Rosa and Subrosa, and because she was in a hurry she
permitted Riley to hold them by the bits while she climbed in, got the
lines firmly in one hand and her blacksnake in the other. Not often
did she deign to accept assistance, and Riley was all aquiver with
gratified vanity at this mark of her favor.

"Turn 'em loose--and get to that bread!" she cried, and circled the
pintos into the road. "You, Sub! Cut that out, now--settle down! Rosa!
Stead-dy, I ain't any Ben Hur pulling off a chariot race, remember!"

At a gallop they took the first sandy slope of the climb, and Belle
let them go. They were tough--many's the time they had hit the level
on top of the ridge without slowing to a walk on the way up. They had
no great load to pull, and if it pleased them to lope instead of trot,
Belle would never object.

As she sat jouncing on the seat of a buckboard with rattly spokes in
all of the four wheels and a splintered dashboard where Subrosa landed
his heels one day when he had backed before he kicked, one felt that
she would have made a magnificent charioteer. Before she had gone half
a mile her hair was down and whipping behind her like a golden
pennant. Her big range hat would have gone sailing had it not been
tied under her chin with buckskin strings. Usually she sang as she
hurtled through space, but to-day the pintos missed her voice.

Five miles out on the range she overtook the sheriff and Aleck Douglas
riding to the round-up. Aleck Douglas seldom rode faster than a
jogging trot, and the sheriff was not particularly eager for his
encounter with Tom Lorrigan. For that matter, no sheriff had ever been
eager to encounter a Lorrigan. The Lorrigan family had always been
counted a hazard in the office of the sheriff, though of a truth the
present generation had remained quiescent so far and the law had not
heretofore reached its arm toward them.

The two men looked back, saw Belle coming and parted to let her pass.
Belle yelled to her team and went by with never a glance toward
either, and the two stared after her without a word until she had
jounced down into a shallow draw and up the other side, the pintos
never slowing their lope.

"Well, I'm darned!" ejaculated the sheriff. His name, by the way, was
Perry. "I've heard tell of Belle Lorrigan drivin' hell-whoopin' over
the country with a team of bronks, but I kinda thought they was
stretching the truth. I guess not, though, if that's a sample."

"The woman hersel' is no so bad. 'Tis the men folk that are black wi'
sin. Drinkin', swearin', gamblin' thieves they be, and 'tis well they
should be taught a lesson." The Douglas head wagged self-righteously.

"Maybe it would be a good idea to go back and search the ranch now,
while she's gone." The sheriff pulled up, considering. "I didn't want
any trouble with her; I never do quarrel with a woman if I can get
around it any way. She's a holy terror. I guess I'll just ride back
and take a look at them hides."

Aleck Douglas eyed him sardonically, thinking perhaps of the
black-edged bullet hole that showed plainly in the sheriff's
hat-crown.

"'Tis a deal safer wi' the woman oot of the way," he agreed drily.

The sheriff nodded and turned back.




CHAPTER SEVEN

THE NAME


Tom Lorrigan may have seen bigger fusses made over smaller matters
than the hide of a spotty yearlin', but his boys never had.

No country is so isolated that gossip cannot find it out. The story of
the spotted yearling went speeding through the country. Men made thin
excuses to ride miles out of their way that they might air their
opinions and hear some fresh bit of news, some conjecture that grew to
a rumor and was finally repeated broadcast as truth. Children cringed
and wept while necks were scrubbed relentlessly, for a fever of
"visiting" attacked the women of the range. Miles they would travel to
visit a neighbor. And there they talked and talked and talked, while
the guest in neighborly fashion dried the dinner dishes for the
hostess in hot, fly-infested kitchens.

Aleck Douglas, infuriated by the contemptuous attitude which Tom had
taken toward him and his spotty yearling, and by his failure to find
any incriminating evidence on the Devil's Tooth ranch, swore to a
good many suspicions which he called facts, and had Tom arrested. The
sheriff had taken two deputies along with him, because he fully
expected that the Lorrigans would "go on the warpath" as Belle had
done. He was vastly astonished and somewhat chagrined when Tom gave a
snort, handed over his gun, and turned to one of his boys.

"Al," said Tom, "you go ahead with the round-up while I go in and fix
this up. May take a few days--depends on the gait I can get 'em to
travel. I'll have to rustle me a lawyer, too. But you know what to do;
keep 'er moving till I get back."

Black Rim country talked and chortled and surmised, and wondered what
made Tom so darned meek about it. They did not accuse him of any lack
of nerve; being a Lorrigan, his nerve could scarcely be questioned.
Opinion was about evenly divided. A few declared that Tom had
something up his sleeve, and there would be a killing yet. Others
insisted that Tom knew when he was backed into a corner. Old Scotty
Douglas had him dead to rights, they said, and Tom knew better than to
run on the rope. Men and women assumed the gift of prophecy, and all
prophesied alike. Tom Lorrigan would go "over the road"; for how long
they could only guess according to their secret hopes. Some predicted
a fifteen-year term for Tom. Others thought that he might get off
lightly--say with five or six years. They based their opinion on the
fact that men have been sent to the penitentiary for fifteen years,
there to repent of stealing a calf not yet past the age of prime veal.
And it is not so long since men were hanged for stealing a horse;
witness Tom's brother, who would surely have been lynched had he not
been shot. Witness also divers other Lorrigans whose careers had been
shortened by their misdeeds.

Much of the talk was peddled to Tom and the boys under the guise of
friendship. Having lived all of his life in the Black Rim country, Tom
knew how much the friendship was worth, knew that the Black Rim folk
had drawn together like a wolf pack, and were waiting only until he
was down before they rushed in to rend him and his family. Old grudges
were brought out and aired secretly. It would go hard with the
Lorrigan family if Tom were found guilty. Although he sensed the
covert malice behind the smiles men gave him, he would not yield one
inch from his mocking disparagement of the whole affair. He laid down
a law or two to his boys, and bade them hold their tongues and go
their way and give no heed to the clacking.

"The show ain't over till the curtain's down for good," he said,
borrowing a phrase from Belle. "We got a long time yet to live in the
Black Rim. We'll be right here when the smoke lifts. Hang and rattle
now, and keep your mouths shut. This here's the law-sharp's job. I'm
payin' him darn good money for it, too. When he's through, then we'll
play. But mark this down in yore little red book, boys: The less yuh
say right now, the stronger we can play the game when we're ready."

"If they do railroad yuh, dad, leave it to us. They'll be a sorry
looking bunch when we're through," said Lance, and meant every word of
it.

"They won't railroad me." Tom snorted and laughed his contempt of the
whole affair. "I ain't ever used the law to fight with before--but
shucks! When a scrap gets outside of gun range, one club's about the
same as another to me."

Optimism is a good thing, but it does not altogether serve, as Tom
discovered at the trial.

Evidence was produced which astonished him. For instance, an AJ man
had seen him riding over by Squaw Butte, on the night after Douglas
had accused him of stealing the spotted yearling. The AJ man seemed
embarrassed at his sudden prominence in the case, and kept turning his
big range hat round and round on one knee as he sat in the chair
sacred to those who bore witness to the guilt or innocence of their
fellow men in Black Rim country. He did not often look up, and when he
did he swallowed convulsively, as though something stuck in his
throat. But his story sounded matter-of-fact and honest.

He had ridden past Squaw Butte the night after Tom Lorrigan was
accused by Douglas. Yes, he knew it was that night, because next day
he heard about the fuss over at Devil's Tooth. He had been on his way
from Jumpoff and had cut across country because he was late. There was
a moon, and he had seen a man riding across an open space between the
creek and the willows. The man had gone in among the willows. The AJ
man had not thought much about it, though he did wonder a little, too.
It was late for a man to be riding around on the range.

When he reached the place, he saw a man ride out of the brush farther
along, into clear moonlight. It was Tom Lorrigan; yes, he was sure of
that. He knew the horse that Tom was riding. It was a big, shiny black
that always carried its head up; a high-stepping horse that a man
could recognize anywhere. No, he didn't know of any other horse in the
country just like it. He admitted that if he hadn't been sure of the
horse he would not have been sure it was Tom. He did not think Tom saw
him at all. He was riding along next the bank, in the shadow. He had
gone on home, and the next day he heard that Scotty Douglas claimed
the Lorrigans had rustled a yearling from him.

Later, Tom's lawyer asked him why he had not spoken to Tom. The AJ man
replied that he didn't know--he wasn't very close; not close enough
for talking unless he hollered.

That was all very well, and Black Rim perked its ears, thinking that
the case looked bad for Tom. Very bad indeed.

But Tom's lawyer proved very adroitly that the AJ man had not been in
Jumpoff at the time he claimed. He had been with his own outfit, and
if he had ridden past Squaw Butte that night he must have gone out
from the ranch and come back again. Which led very naturally to the
question, Why?

On the other hand, why had Tom Lorrigan ridden to Squaw Butte that
night? He himself explained that later on. He said that he had gone
over to see if there was any hide in the willows as Douglas had
claimed. He had not found any.

Thus two men admitted having been in the neighborhood of the stolen
hide on that night. Tom's lawyer was quick to seize the coincidence,
and make the most of it. Why, he asked mildly, might not the AJ outfit
have stolen the yearling? What was the AJ man doing there? Why not
suspect him of having placed the hide in the crevice where it had
later been found? That night the hide had been removed from the
willows where Douglas had first discovered it. Douglas had gone back
the next day after it, and it had been missing. It was not until
several days later that he had found it in the crevice. Why assume
that Tom Lorrigan had removed it?

"If I'd set out to caché that hide," Tom here interposed, "I'd have
buried it. Only a darn fool would leave evidence like that laying
around in sight."

For this the court reprimanded him, but he had seen several of the
jury nod their heads, unconsciously agreeing with him. And although
his remark was never put on record, it stuck deep in the minds of the
jury and had its influence later on. They remembered that the
Lorrigans were no fools, and they considered the attempt at concealing
the hide a foolish one--not to say childish.

Tom's lawyer did not argue openly that a conspiracy had been hatched
against Tom Lorrigan, but he so presented the case in his closing
argument to the jury that each man believed he saw an angle to the
affair which the defense had overlooked. It appeared to the jury to be
a "frame-up." For instance, why had Cheyenne, a Lorrigan man, ridden
over to the Douglas ranch and remained outside by the corral for a
long time, talking with Aleck Douglas, before he went inside to call
on the Douglas girl? Sam Pretty Cow impassively testified to that. He
had been riding over to see a halfbreed girl that worked for the
Blacks, and he had cut through the Douglas ranch to save time. He saw
Cheyenne's horse at the corral.

"Me, I dunno what she's doin' on that place. Cheyenne, he's in camp
when I'm go. I'm stop by the haystack. I'm see Cheyenne talk to
Scotty. That don't look good, you bet."

A full week the trial lasted, while the lawyers wrangled over evidence
and technicalities, and the judge ruled out evidence and later ruled
it in again. A full week Tom slept in the county jail,--and for all
their bad reputation, it was the first time a Lorrigan had lain down
behind a bolted door to sleep, had opened his eyes to see the dawn
light painting the wall with the shadow of bars.

There were nights when his optimism failed him, when Tom lay awake
trying to adjust himself to the harrying thought that long, caged
years might be his portion. Nights when he doubted the skill of his
"law-sharp" to free him from the deadweight of the Lorrigan reputation
and the malice of his neighbors. Of course, he would fight--to the
last dollar; but there were nights when he doubted the power of his
dollars to save him.

It was during those nights that the lawless blood of the Lorrigans ran
swiftly through the veins of Tom, who had set himself to win a million
honestly. It was then that he remembered his quiet, law-abiding years
regretfully, as time wasted; a thankless struggle toward the regard of
his fellow men. Of what avail to plod along the path of uprightness
when no man would point to him and say, "There is an honest man."

"They've give me the name, and I ain't got the game," cried Tom
bitterly, in the quiet of his cell. "Whether I go to the pen or
whether I don't, they better stand from under. They'll sure know a
Lorrigan's livin' in the Black Rim before I'm done."




CHAPTER EIGHT

THE GAME


At the long table in the living room of the Devil's Tooth ranch Tom
Lorrigan sat and sharpened an indelible pencil with the razor-edged
small blade of his jackknife. On the open space which Tom had cleared
with the sweep of his arm, a large-sized tablet of glazed and ruled
paper, with George Washington pictured in red and blue and buff on the
cover, received the wood parings from the pencil. It may have been
significant that Tom was careful in his work and made the pencil very
sharp.

Across the room, Belle swung around on the piano stool and looked at
him. "Honey, if you're going to make out the order to Montgomery,
Ward, I'd like to send on for some more music. I've been going over
that new list--"

"I ain't," said Tom, removing his cigarette from the corner of his
mouth and blowing the tiny, blue-painted shavings off George
Washington's face. "You go ahead and make out the order yourself."

Belle eyed the pencil-sharpening and sent a keen glance at Tom's face.
"Well, honey, from the way you're squaring up to that tablet, I
thought you was going to send on for a new buckboard and mower."

Tom bent his head and blew again, gave George a sardonic grin and
turned him face-down on the table, so that the ruled paper lay ready
to his hand.

"Right now I'm going to figure up what that dang spotty yearlin' of
old Scotty's cost me," he stated grimly. "And there's some other Black
Rimmers I've got a bill against."

"Hope you don't try holding your breath till you collect," Belle
retorted. "Honey, you'd best leave the Black Rimmers alone. I feel as
if we'd had enough excitement enough for a while. I wouldn't start
anything more right now, if I was you. Every last one of them is ready
to jump on your neck--and the Lord only knows why, unless it's because
you _didn't_ steal that darned spotted yearling! Some folks sure do
love to see the other fellow up to his eyebrows in trouble. They were
sitting there in that courtroom just _wishing_ you would be sent up. I
saw it in their faces, Tom. And that old rock-hearted Scotchman looked
as if he's just lost two bits when the jury said 'Not guilty.'"

"Mh-m--hm-m--that's what I'm figuring on now," said Tom, and bent to
his problem. "My old dad woulda gone out and shot up a few, but times
are changed and we're all getting so damn civilized we've got to stack
the cards or quit the game. Belle, what do you reckon it's worth to a
man to be hauled into court and called a cow thief?"

Belle's lips pressed together. "I don't know, Tom--but I know what it
would have cost 'em if they had sent you over the road. I had a gun on
me, and when that jury foreman stood up to give the verdict, it was
looking him in the eye through a buttonhole in my coat. Him and
Cheyenne and old Scotty and two or three more would sure have got
theirs, if he hadn't said, 'Not guilty.'"

"Lord bless yuh, I knew it all the time. Next time we go to court
you'll leave the artillery at home, old girl. I like to got heart
failure there for a minute, till I seen you ease down and lay your
hand in your lap." He looked at her and laughed a little. "I've got a
bill of damages against several of the folks around here, but I ain't
fool enough to try and collect with a six-gun."

He settled himself to his task, writing at the top of the page the
name of Aleck Douglas and after that "Dr." A full page he covered with
items set against the names of various neighbors. When he had finished
he folded the paper neatly and put it away with other important
memoranda, picked up his big gray Stetson and went over to kiss Belle
full on her red lips, and to smooth her hair, with a reassuring pat
on her plump shoulder as a final caress.

"Don't you worry none about the Black Rimmers," he said, "and don't
you worry about me. I've got to ride high, wide and handsome now to
make up the time and money I lost on account of the spotty yearlin',
and maybe I won't be home so much. But I ain't quarreling with my
neighbors, nor getting into any kind of ruckus whatever."

With the stilted, slightly stiff-legged gait born of long hours in the
saddle and of high-heeled riding boots, he walked unhurriedly to the
corral where the boys were just driving in a herd of horses.

Few of them showed saddle marks, all of them snorted and tossed
untrimmed manes and tails as they clattered against the stout poles,
circling the big corral in a cloud of dust and a thunder of hoof
beats. Pulling his hat down over his black brows to secure it against
the wind, Tom climbed the corral fence and straddled the top rail that
he might scan the herd.

"Pretty good-looking bunch, dad," said Al, reining up beside Tom. "We
had to ride some to get 'em in--they're sure snuffy. What you going to
do with 'em? Break out a few?"

"Some. Did yuh take notice, Al, that Coaley come within an ace of
sending me over the road? That there AJ man swore to the horse when he
wouldn't never have swore to me, but they all took it as a cinch it
was me he saw, because nobody else ever rides Coaley. And by the Lord
John, Al, that's the last time any man's going to swear to me in the
dark by the horse I'm ridin'. The Devil's Tooth outfit is going to
have a lot more saddle horses broke gentle than what they've got now.
And just between me and you, Al, any more night-ridin' that's done in
this outfit ain't going to be done on cayuses that can be told a mile
off on a dark night!"

"You're durn tootin', dad." Al grinned while he moistened the edge of
his rolled cigarette. "I thought at the time that Coaley was liable to
be a damn expensive horse for you to be ridin'." His eyes traveled
over the restless herd, singling out this horse and that for brief
study. "There's some right speedy stuff in that bunch," he said.
"They've got the look of stayers, some of 'em. Take that there bay
over there by the post: He's got a chest on him like a lion--and look
at them legs! There'd be a good horse for you, dad."

"One, maybe." Tom spat into the dust and, impelled by Al's example,
drew his own cigarette papers from his shirt pocket. "I'm thinkin' of
breakin' all we've got time for this summer. Darn this here makin' one
horse your trademark!"

Up at the house, Riley appeared in the kitchen doorway and gave a long
halloo while he wiped his big freckled hand on his flour-sack apron.
"Hoo-ee! Come an' git it!" He waited a moment, until he saw riders
dismounting and leading their horses into the little corral. Then he
turned back to pour the coffee into the big, thick, white cups
standing in single file around the long oil-cloth-covered table in the
end of the kitchen nearest the side door where the boys would
presently come trooping in to slide loose-jointedly into their places
on the long, shiny benches.

Tom pinched out the blaze of his match and threw one long leg back
over the corral fence. His glance went to the riders beyond the big
corral.

"Where's Lance at!" he called to Al, who was riding around to the
little corral.

"You can search me. He quit us when we got the horses into the corral,
and rode off up the Slide trail. If I was to make a guess, I would say
that he went to meet Mary Hope. They been doing that right frequent
ever since she quit coming here. 'Tain't no skin off my nose--but
Lance, he's buildin' himself a mess uh trouble with old Scotty, sure
as you're a foot high."

"Darn fool kid--let the old folks git to scrappin' amongst themselves,
and the young ones start the lovemakin'! I never knowed it to fail;
but you can skin me for a coyote if I know what makes 'em do it."
Grumbling to himself, Tom climbed down and followed Al. "You can
tell Riley I'll be late to dinner," he said, when he had come up
to where Al was pulling the saddle off his horse. "I ain't much
on buttin' into other folks' love affairs, but I reckon it maybe
might be a good idea to throw a scare into them two. I'm plumb sick
of Scotch--wouldn't take it in a highball right now if you was to
shove one under my nose!"

Al laughed, looking over his shoulder at Tom while he loosened the
latigo. "If you can throw a scare into Lance, you sure are a dinger,"
he bantered. "That youth is some heady."

"Looks to me like it runs in the family," Tom retorted. "You're some
heady yourself, if you ever took notice. And I don't give a damn how
heady any of you kids are; you can't run any rannies on your dad, and
you want to put that down in your little red book so you won't forgit
it!"

He led Coaley from the stable, mounted and rode away up the Slide
trail, more than half ashamed of his errand. To interfere in a love
affair went against the grain, but to let a Lorrigan make love to a
Douglas on the heels of the trial was a pill so bitter that he refused
to swallow it.

He urged Coaley up the trail, his eyes somber with resentment whenever
he saw the fresh hoofprints of Lance's horse in the sandy places. Of
the three boys, Lance was his favorite, and it hurt him to think that
Lance had so little of the Lorrigan pride that he would ride a foot
out of his way to speak to any one of the Douglas blood.

Up the Slide went Coaley, his head held proudly erect upon his high,
arched neck, his feet choosing daintily the little rough places in the
rock where long experience had taught him he would not slip. Big as
Tom was, Coaley carried him easily and reached the top without so much
as a flutter in the flanks to show that the climb had cost him an
effort.

"It's a dang darn shame I got to straddle strange horses just because
there ain't another in the country like you, Coaley," he muttered,
leaning forward to smooth the silky hide under the crinkly mane. "It's
going to set hard, now I'm tellin' yuh, to throw my saddle on some
plain, ordinary cayuse. But it's a bet I can't afford to overlook;
they made that plain enough."

Coaley pricked up his ears and looked, his big, bright eyes taking in
the shadow of a horse beside a clump of wild currant bushes that grew
in the very base of the Devil's Tooth. Tom grunted and rode over that
way, Coaley walking slowly, his knees bending springily like a dancer
feeling out his muscles.

Lance stood with his back toward them. His hat was pushed far back on
his head, and he was looking at Mary Hope, who leaned against the rock
and stared down into the valley below. Her hair, Tom observed, was not
"slicked back" to-day. It had been curled a little, probably on rags
twisted in after she had gone to bed and taken out before she arose in
the morning, lest her mother discover her frivolity and lecture her
long,--and, worse still, make her wet a comb and take all of the curl
out. A loose strand blew across her tanned cheek, so that she reached
up absently and tucked it behind her ear, where it would not stay for
longer than a minute.

"I am sure I didna know you would be here," she said, without taking
her eyes off the valley. "It is a view I like better than most, and I
have a right to ride where I please. And I have no wish to ride out of
my way to be friends with any one that tried to make my father out a
liar and an unjust man. He may be hard, but he is honest. And that is
more than some--"

"More than some can say--us Lorrigans, for instance!"

"I didna say that, but if the coat fits, you can put it on."

Mary Hope bit her lip and lashed a weed with her quirt. "All of this
is none of my doing," she added, with a dullness in her voice that may
have meant either regret or resentment. "You hate my father, and you
are mad because I canna side with you and hate him too. I am sorry the
trouble came up, but I canna see how you expect me to go on coming to
see your mither when you know my father would never permit it."

"You say that like you were speaking a piece. How long did you lay
awake last night, making it up? You can't make me swallow that,
anyway. Your father never permitted you to come in the first place,
and you know it. You made believe that old skate ran away with you
down the trail, and that you couldn't stop him. You've been coming
over to our place ever since, and you never asked old Scotty whether
he would permit it or not. I'm not saying anything about myself, but
it hurts Belle to have you throw her down right now. Under the
circumstances it makes her feel as if you thought we were thieves and
stole your dad's yearling."

"I'm not saying anything like that."

"Maybe you're not, but you sure are acting it. If you don't think
that, why don't you go on taking music lessons from Belle? What made
you stop, all of a sudden?"

"That," said Mary Hope stiffly, "is my own affair, Lance Lorrigan."

"It's mine, let me tell you. It's mine, because it hits Belle; and
what hits her hits me. If you think she isn't good enough for you to
visit, why in thunder have you been coming all this while? She isn't
any worse than she was two months ago, is she?"

"I'm not saying that she is."

"Well, you're acting it, and that's a darn sight worse."

"You ought to know that with all this trouble between your father and
my father--"

"Well, can you tell me when they ever did have any truck together?
Your father doesn't hate our outfit a darn bit worse than he ever
did. He found a chance to knife us, that's all. It isn't that he never
wanted to before."

"I'll thank you, Lance Lorrigan, not to accuse my father of knifing
anybody. He's my father and--"

"And that isn't anything to brag about, if you ask me. I'd rather have
my father doing time for stealing, than have him a darned, hide-bound
old hypocrite that will lie a man into the pen, and then go around and
pull a long face and call himself a Christian!"

"My father doesna lie! And he is not a hypocrite either. If your
father was half as--" She stopped abruptly, her face going red when
she saw Tom sitting on his horse beyond the shoulder of rock,
regarding her with that inscrutable smile which never had failed to
make her squirm mentally and wonder what he thought of her. She stood
up, trembling a little.

Lance turned slowly and met Tom's eyes without flinching. "Hello," he
said, on guard against the two of them, wondering what had brought his
dad to this particular point at this particular time.

"Hello. How d'yuh do, Miss Douglas? Lance, dinner's getting cold
waiting for you." Tom lifted his hat to Mary Hope, turned, and rode
back whence he had come, never glancing over his shoulder but
nevertheless keenly alert for the sound of voices.

He was not quite through the Slide when he heard the hoof beats of
Lance's horse come clicking down over the rocks. Tom smiled to himself
as he rode on, never looking back.




CHAPTER NINE

A LITTLE SCOTCH


In the Black Rim country March is a month of raw winds and cold rains,
with sleet and snow and storm clouds tumbling high in the West and
spreading to the East, where they hang lowering at the earth and then
return to empty their burden of moisture upon the shrinking live
things below.

In the thinly settled places March is also the time when children go
shivering to school, harried by weather that has lost a little of its
deadliness. In January and February their lives would not be safe from
sudden blizzards, but by the middle of March they may venture forth
upon the quest of learning.

Black Rim country was at best but scantily supplied with schools, and
on the Devil's Tooth range seven young Americans--three of them
adopted from Sweden--were in danger of growing up in deplorable
ignorance of what learning lies hidden in books. A twelve-mile stretch
of country had neither schoolhouse, teacher nor school officers
empowered to establish a school. Until the Swedish family moved into a
shack on the AJ ranch there had not been children enough to make a
teacher worth while. But the Swedish family thirsted for knowledge of
the English language, and their lamenting awoke the father of four
purely range-bred products to a sense of duty toward his offspring.

Wherefore Mary Hope Douglas, home from two winters in Pocatello, where
she had lived with a cousin twice removed and had gone to school and
had learned much, was one day invited to teach a school in the Devil's
Tooth neighborhood.

True, there was no schoolhouse, but there was a deserted old shack on
the road to Jumpoff. A few benches and a stove and table would
transform it into a seat of learning, and there were an old shed and
corral where the pupils might keep their saddle horses during school
hours. She would be paid five dollars a month per head, Jim Boyle of
the AJ further explained. Seven "heads" at five dollars each would
amount to thirty-five dollars a month, and Mary Hope felt her heart
jump at the prospect of earning so much money of her own. Moreover, to
teach school had long been her secret ambition, the solid foundation
of many an air castle. She forthwith consented to become the very
first school-teacher in the Devil's Tooth neighborhood, which hoped
some day to become a real school district.

She would have to ride five miles every morning and evening, and her
morning ride would carry her five miles nearer the Lorrigan ranch,
two of them along their direct trail to Jumpoff. Mary Hope would never
admit to herself that this small detail interested her, but she
thought of it the moment Jim Boyle suggested the old Whipple shack as
a schoolhouse.

Tom Lorrigan, riding home from Jumpoff after two days spent in Lava,
pulled his horse down to a walk and then stopped him in the trail
while he stared hard at the Whipple shack. Five horses walked uneasily
around inside the corral, manes and tails whipping in the gale that
blew cold from out the north. From the bent stovepipe of the shack a
wisp of smoke was caught and bandied here and there above the
pole-and-dirt roof. It seemed incredible to Tom that squatters could
have come in and taken possession of the place in his short absence,
but there was no other explanation that seemed at all reasonable.

Squatters were not welcome on the Devil's Tooth range. Tom rode up to
the shack, dismounted and let Coaley's reins drop to the ground. He
hesitated a minute before the door, in doubt as to the necessity for
knocking. Then his knuckles struck the loose panel twice, and he heard
the sound of footsteps. Tom pulled his hat down tighter on his
forehead and waited.

When Mary Hope Douglas pulled open the door, astonishment held them
both dumb. He had not seen the girl for more than a year,--he was not
certain at first that it was she. But there was no mistaking those
eyes of hers, Scotch blue and uncompromisingly direct in their gaze.
Tom pulled loose and lifted the hat that he had just tightened, and as
she backed from the doorway he entered the shack without quite knowing
why he should do so. Comprehensively he surveyed the mean little room,
bare of everything save three benches with crude shelves before them,
a kitchen table and a yellow-painted chair with two-thirds of the
paint worn off under the incessant scrubbing of mother Douglas. The
three Swedes, their rusty overcoats buttoned to their necks, goggled
at him round-eyed over the tops of their new spelling books, then
ducked and grinned at one another. The four Boyle children, also
bundled in wraps, exchanged sidelong glances and pulled themselves up
alert and expectant in their seats.

"School, eh?" Tom observed, turning as Mary Hope pushed the door shut
against the wind that rattled the small shack and came toward him
shivering and pulling her sweater collar closer about her neck. "When
did this happen?"

"When I started teaching here, Mr. Lorrigan." Then, mindful of her
manners, she tempered the pertness with a smile. "And that was
yesterday. Will you sit down?"

"No, thanks--I just stopped to see who was livin' here, and--" He
broke off to look up at the dirt roof. A clod the size of his fist had
been loosened by the shaking of the wind, and plumped down in the
middle of the teacher's desk. With the edge of his palm he swept clod
and surrounding small particles of dirt into his hat crown, and
carried them to the door.

"There's an empty calf shed over at the ranch that would make a better
schoolhouse than this," he observed. "It's got a shingle roof."

Mary Hope was picking small lumps of dirt out of her hair, which she
wore in a pompadour that disclosed a very nice forehead. "I just love
a roof with shingles on it," she smiled.

"H'm." Tom looked up at the sagging poles with the caked mud showing
in the cracks between where the poles had shrunken and warped under
the weight. A fresh gust of wind rattled dust into his eyes, and the
oldest Swede chortled an abrupt "Ka-hugh!" that set the other six
tittering.

"Silence! _Shame_ on you!" Mary Hope reproved them sternly, rapping on
the kitchen table with a foot rule of some soft wood that blazoned
along its length the name of a Pocatello hardware store. "Get to work
this instant or I shall be compelled to keep you all in at recess."

"You better haze 'em all home at recess, and get where it's warm
before you catch your death of cold," Tom advised, giving first aid to
his eye with a corner of his white-dotted blue handkerchief. "This
ain't fit for cattle, such a day as this."

"A north wind like this would blow through anything," Mary Hope
loyally defended the shack. "It was quite comfortable yesterday."

"I wouldn't send a dog here to school," said Tom. "Can't they dig up
any better place than this for you to teach in?"

"The parents of these children are paying out of their own pockets to
have them taught, as it is."

"They'll be paying out of their own pockets to have them planted, if
they ain't careful," Tom predicted dryly. "How're you fixed for
firewood? Got enough to keep warm on a hot day?"

Mary Hope smiled faintly. "Mr. Boyle hauled us a load of sage brush,
and the boys chop wood mornings and noons--it's a punishment when they
don't behave, or if they miss their lessons. But--the stove doesn't
seem to draw very well, in this wind. It smokes more than it throws
out heat." She added hastily, "It drew all right yesterday. It's this
wind."

"What you going to do if this wind keeps up? It's liable to blow for a
week or two, this time of year."

"Why--we'll manage to get along all right. They'd probably be out
playing in it anyway, if they weren't in school."

"Oh. And what about you?" Tom looked at her, blinking rapidly with his
left eye that was growing bloodshot and watery.

"I? Why, I've lived here all my life, and I ought to be used to a
little bad weather."

"Hunh." Tom shivered in the draught. "So have I lived here all my
life; but I'll be darned if I would want to sit in this shack all day,
the way the wind whistles through it."

"You might do it, though--if it was your only way of earning money,"
Mary Hope suggested shrewdly.

"Well, I might," Tom admitted, "but I sure would stop up a few
cracks."

"We've hardly got settled yet," said Mary Hope. "I intend to stuff the
cracks with rags just as soon as possible. Is your eye still paining?
That dirt is miserable stuff to stick in a person's eye. Shall I try
and get it out? Yesterday I got some in mine, and I had an awful
time."

She dismissed the children primly, with a self-conscious dignity and
some chagrin at their boorish clatter, their absolute ignorance of
discipline. "I shall ring the bell in ten minutes," she told them
while they scuffled to the door. "I shall give you two minutes after
the bell rings to get into your seats and be prepared for duty. Every
minute after that must be made up after school."

"Ay skoll go home now, sen you skoll not keep me by school from tan
minootes," the oldest of the Swedes stopped long enough to bellow at
her from the doorway. "Ole og Helge skoll go med. Ve got long way from
school, og ve don't be by dark ven ve come by home!"

He seized the square tobacco boxes, originally made to hold a pound
of "plug cut," and afterwards dedicated to whatever use a ranch man
might choose to put them. Where schools flourished, the tobacco boxes
were used for lunch. The Swedes carried three tied in flour sacks and
fastened to the saddles. The wind carried them at a run to the corral.
The two smaller boys, Ole and Helge, rode, one behind the other, on
one horse, a flea-bitten gray with an enlarged knee and a habit of
traveling with its neck craned to the left. Christian, the leader of
the revolt, considered himself well-mounted on a pot-bellied bay that
could still be used to round up cattle, if the drive was not more than
a couple of miles. Looking after them from the window that faced the
corral, Tom could not wonder that they were anxious to start early.

"You better let the rest go, too," he advised the perturbed teacher,
looking out at the four Boyle children huddled in the shelter of the
shack, the skirts of the girl whipping in the wind like a pillowslip
on a clothesline in a gale. "There ain't any sense trying to teach
school in a place like this, in such weather. Don't you know them kids
have got all of twelve miles to ride, facing this wind most of the
way? And you've got to ride five miles; and when the sun drops it's
going to be raw enough to put icicles on your ribs under the skin.
Tell 'em to go home. Pore little devils, I wouldn't ask a cow-critter
to face this wind after sundown."

"You do not understand that I must have discipline in this school, Mr.
Lorrigan. To-morrow I shall have to punish those Swedes for leaving
school without permission. I shall make an example of Christian, for
his impudence. I do not think he will want to disobey me again, very
soon!" Mary Hope took her handkerchief from her pocket, refusing to
consider for one moment the significance of its flapping in the wind
while the windows and doors were closed.

"You're just plain stubborn," Tom said bluntly. "You've no business
hanging out in a place like this!"

"I've the business of teaching school, Mr. Lorrigan. I suppose that is
as important to me as your business is to you. And I can't permit my
pupils to rebel against my authority. You would not let your men
dictate to you, would you?"

"They would have a right to call for their time if I asked them to do
some damfool thing like sitting in this shack with the wind blowing
through it at forty miles an hour."

"I am sorry, Mr. Lorrigan, that I must remind you that gentlemen do
not indulge in profanity before a lady."

"Oh, hell! What have I said that was outa the way? I wasn't cussing; I
was telling you what your father and mother ought to tell you, and
what they would if they didn't think more of a few dollars than they
do of their kid's health. But I don't reckon it's my put-in; only
it's any man's business to see that women and kids don't freeze to
death. And by the humpin' hyenas--"

With her lips in a straight line, her eyes very hard and bright and
with a consciousness of heaping coals of fire on the head of an enemy
of her house, Mary Hope had twisted a corner of her handkerchief into
a point, moistened it by the simple and primitive method of placing
the point between her lips, and was preparing to remove the dirt from
Tom's watering eye, the ball of which was a deep pink from irritation.
But Tom swung abruptly away from her, went stilting on his high heels
to the door, pulled it open with a yank and rounded the corner where
the four Boyle children stood leaning against the house, their chilled
fingers clasped together so that two hands made one fist, their teeth
chattering while they discussed the Swedes and tried to mimic
Christian's very Swedish accent.

"_Og_ is _and_," said Minnie Boyle. "And _skoll_ is _shall_. Swede's
easy. And _med_ means _with_--"

"Aw, it's just the way they try to say it in English," Fred Boyle
contradicted. "It ain't Swede--but gee, when the Scotch and the Swede
goes in the air to-morrow, I bet there'll be fun. If Mary Hope tries
to lick Chris--"

"You kids straddle your cayuses and hit for home," Tom interrupted
them. "There ain't going to be any more school to-day. Them your
horses in the shed? Well, you hump along and saddle up and beat it.
Go!"

He did not speak threateningly, at least he did not speak angrily. But
the four Boyle children gave him one affrighted glance and started on
a run for the corral, looking back over their shoulders now and then
as if they expected a spatter of bullets to follow them.

At the corral gate Minnie Boyle stopped and turned as though she meant
to retrace her steps to the house, but Tom waved her back. So Minnie
went home weeping over the loss of a real dinner-bucket and a slate
sponge which she was afraid the Swedes might steal from her if they
came earlier to school than she.

When Tom turned to reënter the shack for a final word with Mary Hope,
and to let her give first aid to his eye if she would, he found that
small person standing just behind him with set lips and clenched fists
and her hair blowing loose from its hairpins.

"Mr. Tom Lorrigan, you can just call those children back!" she cried,
her lips bluing in the cold gale that beat upon her. "Do you think
that with all your lawlessness you can come and break up my school?
You have bullied my father--"

"I'd do worse than bully him, if I had him in handy reach right now,"
Tom drawled, and took her by the shoulder and pushed her inside. "Any
man that will let a woman sit all day in a place like this--and I
don't care a damn if you are earning money doing it!--oughta have his
neck wrung. I'm going to saddle your horse for yuh while you bundle
up. And then you're going home, if I have to herd yuh like I would a
white heifer. I always have heard of Scotch stubbornness--but there's
something beats that all to thunder. Git yore things on. Yore horse
will be ready in about five minutes."

He bettered his estimate, returning in just four minutes to find the
door locked against him. "Don't you _dare_ come in here!" Mary Hope
called out, her voice shrill with excitement. "I--I'll _brain_ you!"

"Oh, you will, will yuh?" Whereupon Tom heaved himself against the
door and lurched in with the lock dangling.

Mary Hope had a stick of wood in her two hands, but she had not that
other essential to quick combat, the courage to swing the club on the
instant of her enemy's appearance. She hesitated, backed and
threatened him futilely.

"All right--fine! Scotch stubbornness--and not a damn thing to back it
up! Where's your coat? Here. Git into it." Without any prelude, any
apology, he wrested the stick of wood from her, pulled her coat off a
nail near by, and held it outspread, the armholes convenient to her
hands. With her chin shivering, Mary Hope obeyed the brute strength of
the man. She dug her teeth into her lip and thrust her arms
spitefully into the coat sleeves.

"Here's yo're hat. Better tie it on, if yuh got anything to tie it
with. Here."

He twitched his big silk neckerchief from his neck, pulled her toward
him with a gentle sort of brutality, and tied the neckerchief over her
hat and under her chin. He did it exactly as though he was handling a
calf that he did not wish to frighten or hurt.

"Got any mittens? Gloves? Put 'em on."

Standing back in the corner behind the door, facing Tom's bigness and
his inexorable strength, Mary Hope put on her Indian tanned, beaded
buckskin gloves that were in the pockets of her coat. Tom waited until
she had tucked the coatsleeves inside the gauntlets. He took her by
the arm and pulled her to the door, pushed her through it and held her
with one hand, gripping her arm while he fastened the door by the
simple method of pulling it shut so hard that it jammed in the casing.
He led her to where her horse stood backed to the wind and tail
whipping between his legs, and his eyes blinking half shut against the
swirls of dust dug out of the dry sod of the grassland. Without any
spoken command, Tom took the reins and flipped them up over Rab's
neck, standing forward and close to the horse's shoulder. Mary Hope
knew that she must mount or be lifted bodily into the saddle. She
mounted, tears of wrath spilling from her eyes and making her cheeks
cold where they trickled down.

The Boyle children, kicking and quirting their two horses--riding
double, in the Black Rim country, was considered quite comfortable
enough for children--were already on their way home. Mary Hope looked
at their hurried retreat and turned furiously, meaning to overtake
them and order them back. Tom Lorrigan, she reminded herself, might
force her to leave the schoolhouse, but he would scarcely dare to
carry his abuse farther.

She had gone perhaps ten rods when came a pounding of hoofs, and
Coaley's head and proudly arched neck heaved alongside poor,
draggle-maned old Rab.

"You're headed wrong. Have I got to haze yuh all the way home? Might
as well. I want to tell yore dad a few things."

He twitched the reins, and Coaley obediently shouldered Rab out of the
trail and turned him neatly toward the Douglas ranch. Even Rab was
Scotch, it would seem. He laid his ears flat, swung his head
unexpectedly, and bared his teeth at Coaley. But Coaley was of the
Lorrigans. He did not bare his teeth and threaten; he reached out like
a rattler and nipped Rab's neck so neatly that a spot the size of a
quarter showed pink where the hair had been. Rab squealed, whirled and
kicked, but Coaley was not there at that particular moment. He came
back with the battle light in his eyes, and Rab clattered away in a
stiff-legged run. After him went Coaley, loping easily, with high,
rabbit jumps that told how he would love to show the speed that was in
him, if only Tom would loosen the reins a half inch.

For a mile Tom kept close to Rab's heels. Then, swinging up alongside,
he turned to Mary Hope, that baffling half smile on his lips and the
look in his eyes that had never failed to fill her with trepidation.

"I ain't blaming yuh for being Scotch and stubborn," he said, "but you
notice there's something beats it four ways from the jack. Yo go on
home, now, and don't yuh go back to that board cullender till the
weather warms up. And tell yore folks that Tom Lorrigan broke up yore
school for yuh, so they wouldn't have to break up a case of
pneumonia."

Mary Hope was framing a sentence of defiance when Coaley wheeled and
went back the way they had come, so swiftly that even with shouting
she could not have made herself heard in that whooping wind. She
pulled Rab to a willing stand and stared after Tom, hating him with
her whole heart. Hating him for his domination of her from the moment
he entered the schoolhouse where he had no business at all to be;
hating him because even his bullying had been oddly gentle; hating him
most of all because he was so like Lance--and because he was not
Lance, who was away out in California, going to college, and had never
written her one line in all the time he had been gone.

Had it been Lance who rode up to the schoolhouse door, she would have
known how to meet and master the situation. She would not have been
afraid of Lance, she told herself savagely. She wouldn't have been
afraid of Tom--but the whole Black Rim was afraid of Tom. Well, just
wait until she happened some day to meet Lance! At least she would
make him pay! For two years of silence and brooding over his hardihood
for taking her to task for her unfriendliness, and for this new and
unbearable outrage, she would make Lance Lorrigan pay, if the fates
ever let them meet again.




CHAPTER TEN

THE LORRIGAN WAY


The Lorrigan family was dining comfortably in the light of a huge lamp
with a rose-tinted shade decorated with an extremely sinuous wreath of
morning glories trailing around the lower rim. A clatter of pots and
pans told that Riley was washing his "cookin' dishes" in the lean-to
kitchen that had been added to the house as an afterthought, the fall
before. Belle had finished her dessert of hot mince pie, and leaned
back now with a freshly lighted cigarette poised in her fingers.

"What have you got up your sleeve, Tom?" she asked abruptly, handing
Duke her silver matchbox in response to a gestured request for it.

"My arm," Tom responded promptly, pushing back his wristband to give
her the proof.

"Aw, cut out the comedy, Tom. You've been doing something that you're
holding out on us. I know that look in your eye; I ought, having you
and Lance to watch. You're near enough to double in a lead and not
even the manager know which is who. You've been doing something, and
Lance knows what it is. Now, I'll get it outa you two if I have to
shoot it out."

Lance, just returned from Berkeley during Easter holidays, lifted one
eyebrow at Tom, lowered one lid very slowly, and gave his mother a
level, sidelong glance.

"Your husband, my dear madame, has been engaged in a melodramatic role
created by himself. He is painfully undecided whether the hisses of
the orchestra attest his success as a villian; whether the whistling
up in the gallery demands an encore, or heralds an offering of
cabbages and ripe poultry fruit. I myself did not witness the
production, but I did chance to meet the star just as he was leaving
the stage. To me he confided the fact that he does not know whether it
was a one-act farce he put on, or a five-act tragedy played
accidentally hind-side before, with the villian-still-pursuing-her act
set first instead of fourth. I am but slightly versed in the drama as
played in the Black Rim the past two years. Perhaps if the star would
repeat his lines--"

"For-the-Lord-sake, Lance! As a dramatic critic you're the punkest
proposition I ever slammed my door against. Talk the way you were
brought up to talk and tell me the truth. What did Tom do, and how did
he do it?"

Lance drew his black eyebrows together, studying carefully the ethics
of the case. "Belle, you must remember that Dad is my father. Dad
must remember that you are my mother--technically speaking. By heck,
if it wasn't for remembering how you used to chase me up on the barn
every day or so with your quirt, I'd swear that you grew up with me
and are at this present moment at least two years younger than I am.
However, they _say_ you are my mother. And--do you want to know,
honestly, what dad has been doing?"

"I'm _going_ to know," Belle informed him trenchantly.

"Then let me tell you. I'll break it gently. Tom, your husband, the
self-confessed father of your offspring, to-day rode to an alleged
schoolhouse, threatened, ordered, and by other felonious devices hazed
three Swedes and the four Boyle kids out of the place and toward their
several homes and then when the schoolmarm very discreetly locked the
door and mildly informed him that she would brain him with a twig off
a sage-bush if he burst the lock, he straightway forgot that he was
old enough to have a son quite old enough to frighten, abduct and
otherwise lighten the monotonous life of said schoolmarm, and became a
bold, bad man. He bursted that door off its hinges--"

"You're a liar. I busted the lock," Tom grunted, without removing the
cigarette from his lips.

"He busted the lock of that door, madame; rushed in, wrested the sprig
of sage--"

"It was a club the size of my arm."

"Wrested the club from that schoolmarm, brutally and ferociously
forced her into her coat and hat, compelled her to mount her horse,
and then deliberately drove her away from that--"

"Shut up, Lance. You remind me of one of those monstrosities they
serve in the Lava House, that they call a combination salad. It's
about two-thirds wilted lettuce and the rest beets and carrots. I
don't ever eat them, but if I did they'd taste just like you sound."

"Oh, all right, then. With only two weeks' vacation I won't have time
for a real spree of Black Rim dialect and sober up in time for the
University. Let me mix it, Belle. I'll eat my own verbal combination
salad, if anybody has to. I won't ask you."

"You'll eat 'em, all right," Tom stated briefly, lifting an eyebrow at
him. "All I done, Belle, was to ride up to the Whipple shack to see
who was camped there. It was that Douglas girl and the Boyle kids and
them Swedes that live over beyond Boyle's. They was all setting there
having school,--with their overcoats on, half froze, and the wind
howling through like it was a corral fence. So when the Douglas girl
got her Scotch up and said she wouldn't turn 'em loose to go home, I
turned 'em loose myself and told 'em to beat it. And then I hazed her
home. Seems like they think that shack is good enough for women and
kids; but I wouldn't keep pigs in it, myself, without doing a lot of
fixing on it first."

"What dad seems to overlook is the attitude Boyle and old Scotty will
take, when they hear how Tom Lorrigan broke up school for 'em.
There'll be something drop, if you ask me--I hope it drops before I
have to leave."

Belle looked at him meditatively. "And where were you, Lance? With
Mary Hope?"

For answer, Lance smiled, with his mouth twisted a little to one side,
which made him resemble Tom more than ever. "A fellow sure does hate
to have his own father cut in--"

"So that's what ails you! Well, you may just as well know first as
last that Mary Hope hasn't spoken to one of us since the time they had
Tom up in court for stealing that yearling. You know how they acted;
and if you'd come home last summer instead of fooling around in
California, you'd know they haven't changed a darn bit. It's a shame.
I used to like Mary Hope. She always seemed kinda lonesome and half
scared--"

"She's got over it, then," Tom interrupted, chuckling. "She's got
spunk enough now for two of her size. Had that club lifted, ready to
brain me when I went in, just because I'd spoiled her rules for her.
If she had as much sense as she's got nerve--"

"Why don't they build her a schoolhouse, if they want her to teach?"
Belle pushed back her chair.

"Ever know the AJ to spend a cent they didn't have to?" Duke asked.
"Or old Scotty? The Swede ain't able. How're they paying her? This
ain't any school district."

"So much a head," Tom answered. "Not much, I reckon. The girl's got
nerve. I'll say that much for her. She was dodgin' clods of dirt from
the roof, and shivering and teaching to beat hell when I got there."

"They're going to be awful sore at you, Tom, for this," Belle
predicted. "They're going to say you did it because you hate the
Douglases, and it was Mary Hope teaching. Jim Boyle will side with old
Scotty, and there'll be the devil and all to pay. Did you tell those
kids why you sent 'em home?"

"I told the girl. No, I never told the kids. The Swedes had sense
enough to beat it when she let 'em out for recess. She got fighty over
that, and wouldn't let the school out and wait for good weather, so I
went out and told the Boyle kids to hit for home. Humpin' cats,
_somebody_ had to do something!

"So then the Scotch come out strong in the girl, and I made her go
home too. If I see 'em in that shack to-morrow, and the weather like
it is and like it's going to be, I'll send 'em home again. What in
thunder do I care what old Scotty and Jim Boyle says about it? If
they want a woman to learn their kids to read, they'd oughta give her
a better place than the Whipple shack to keep school in."

"They won't," said Belle. "A roof and four walls is all you can expect
of them. It's a shame. I expect Mary Hope is tickled to death to be
earning the money, too. She was taking music all winter in Pocatello,
I heard, and she and her mother saved up the money in nickels--Lord
knows how, the way old Scotty watches them!--to pay for the lessons.
It's a shame."

"What do they do for water? Old Man Whipple always hauled it in
barrels when he tried to hold down the camp." Al, tilting back his
chair, placidly picking his teeth, spoke for the first time.

"I didn't see no water barrel," Tom answered. "I reckon they make dry
camp. They had a stove that smoked, and three benches with some kinda
shelf for their books, and the girl was using a strip of tar-paper for
a blackboard. But there was no water."

"Say, what sort of country is this Black Rim, anyway?" Lance studied
the end of his cigarette, lifting his left eyebrow just as his father
had done five minutes before. "I hope to heck I haven't come home to
remodel the morals of the country, or to strut around and play
college-young-man like a boob; but on the square, folks, it looks to
me as though the Rim needs a lesson in citizenship. It doesn't mean
anything in our lives, whether there is a schoolhouse in the country
or not. Belle has looked out for us boys, in the matter of learning
the rudiments and a good deal besides. Say, Belle, do you know they
took my voice and fitted a glee club to it? I was the glee. And a
real, live professor told me I had technique. I told him I must have
caught it changing climates--but however, what you couldn't give us
with the books, you handed us with the quirt--and here and now I want
to say I appreciate it."

"All right, I appreciate your appreciation, and I wish to heaven you
wouldn't ramble all over the range when you start to say a thing.
That's one thing you learned in school that I'd like to take outa you
with a quirt."

"I was merely pointing out how we, ourselves, personally, do not need
a schoolhouse. But I was also saying that the Rim ought to have a
lesson in real citizenship. They call the Lorrigans bad. All right;
that's a fine running start. I'd say, let's give 'em a jolt. I'm game
to donate a couple of steers toward a schoolhouse--a _regular_
schoolhouse, with the Stars and Stripes on the front end, and a bench
behind the door for the water bucket, and a blackboard up in front,
and a woodshed behind--with a door into it so the schoolmarm needn't
put on her overshoes and mittens every time she tells one of the
Swedes to put a stick of wood in the stove. I'd like to do that, and
not say a darn word until it's ready to move into. And then I'd like
to stick my hands in my pockets and watch what the Rim would do about
it.

"I've wondered quite a lot, in the last two years, whether it's the
Black Rim or the Lorrigan outfit that's all wrong. I know all about
grandad and all the various and sundry uncles and forbears that earned
us the name of being bad; it makes darn interesting stuff to tell now
and then to some of the fellows who were raised in a prune orchard and
will sit and listen with watering mouths and eyes goggling. I've been
a hero, months on end, just for the things that my grandad did in the
seventies. Of course," he pulled his lips into their whimsical smile,
"I've touched up the family biography here and there and made heroes
of us all. But the fact remains there are degrees and differences in
badness. I've a notion that the Black Rim, taken by and large, is a
damn sight worse than the Devil's Tooth outfit. I'd like to try the
experiment of making the AJ and old Scotty ashamed of themselves. I'd
like to try a schoolhouse on 'em, and see if they're human enough to
appreciate it."

Duke, turning his head slowly, glanced at Al, and from him to Tom.
Without moving a muscle of their faces the two returned his look. Al
slid his cigarette stub thoughtfully into his coffee cup and let his
breath out carefully in a long sigh that was scarcely audible. Tom
took a corner of his lower lip between his teeth, matching Lance, who
had the same trick.

"Honey, that's fine of you! There aren't many that realize what a lot
of satisfaction there is in doing something big and generous and
making the other fellow ashamed of himself. And it would be a God's
mercy to Mary Hope, poor child. Leave it to the AJ and whatever other
outfit there is to send pupils, and Mary Hope could teach in the
Whipple shack till it rattled down on top of them. I know what the
place is. I put up there once in a hailstorm. It isn't fit for cattle,
as Tom says, unless they've fixed it a lot. I'll donate the furniture;
I'll make out the order right this evening for seats and blackboard
and a globe and everything, and make it a rush order!" Belle pushed
back her chair and came around to Lance, slipped her arms around his
neck and tousled his wavy mop of hair with her chin. "If the rest
won't come through you and I'll do it, honey--"

"Who said we wouldn't?" Tom got up, stretching his arms high above his
head,--which was very bad manners, but showed how supple he still was,
and how well-muscled. "No one ever called me a piker--and let me hear
about it. Sure, we'll build a schoolhouse for 'em, seeing they're too
cussed stingy to build one themselves. There's the lumber I had hauled
out for a new chicken house; to-morrow I'll have it hauled up to some
good building spot, and we'll have it done before the AJ wakes up to
the fact that anything's going on."

"I'll chip in enough to make her big enough for dances," volunteered
Duke. "Darn this riding fifteen or twenty miles to a dance!"

"I'll paint 'er, if you let me pick out the color," said Al. "Where
are you going to set 'er?"

"What's the matter with doing the thing in style, and giving a
house-warming dance, and turning it over to the neighborhood with a
speech?" bantered Lance, as they adjourned to the big living room,
taking the idea with them and letting it grow swiftly in enthusiasm.
"That would celebrate my visit, and I'd get a chance to size up the
Rim folks and see how they react to kindness. Lordy, folks, let's do
it!"

"We might," Belle considered the suggestion, while she thumbed the
latest mail-order catalogue, the size of a family bible and much more
assiduously studied. "They'd come, all right!" she added, with a
scornful laugh. "Even old Scotty would come, if he thought it wouldn't
cost him anything."

"Well, by heck, we won't _let_ it cost him anything!" Lance stood
leaning against the wall by the stove, his arms folded, the fingers of
his left hand tapping his right forearm. He did not know that this was
a Lorrigan habit, born of an old necessity of having the right hand
convenient to a revolver butt, and matched by the habit of carrying a
six-shooter hooked inside the trousers band on the left side.

Tom, studying Lance, thought how much he resembled his grandfather on
the night Buck Sanderson was killed in a saloon in Salmon City. Old
Tom had leaned against the wall at the end of the bar, with his arms
folded and his fingers tapping his right forearm, just as Lance was
doing now. He had lifted one eyebrow and pulled a corner of his lip
between his teeth when Buck came blustering in. Just as Lance smiled
at Duke's chaffing, Tom's father had smiled when Buck came swaggering
up to him with bold eyes full of fight and his right thumb hooked in
his chap belt. Old Tom had not moved; he had remained leaning
negligently against the wall with his arms folded. But the strike of a
snake was not so quick as the drop of his hand to his gun.

Tom was not much given to reminiscence; but to-night, seeing Lance
with two years of man-growth and the poise of town life upon him, he
slipped into a swift review of changing conditions and a vague
speculation upon the value of environment in the shaping of character.
Lance was all Lorrigan. He had turned Lorrigan in the two years of his
absence, which had somehow painted out his resemblance to Belle. His
hair had darkened to a brown that was almost black. His eyes had
darkened, his mouth had the Lorrigan twist. He had grown taller,
leaner, surer in his movements,--due to his enthusiasm for athletics
and the gym, though Tom had no means of knowing what had given him
that catlike quickness, the grace of perfect muscular coordination.
Tom thought it was the Lorrigan blood building Lance true to his
forbears as he passed naturally from youth to maturity. He wondered if
Lance, given the environment which had shaped his grandfather, would
have been a "killer," hated by many, feared by all.

Even now, if it came to the point of fighting, would not Lance fight
true to the blood, true to that Lorrigan trick of the folded arms and
the tapping fingers? Would not Lance--? Tom pulled his thoughts away
from following that last conjecture to its logical end. There were
matters in which it might be best not to include Lance, just as he had
been careful not to include Belle. For Lance might still be a good
deal like Belle, in spite of his Lorrigan looks and mannerisms. And
there were certain Lorrigan traits which would not bear any mixture of
Belle in the fiber.

"Well, now, that's all made out. I'll send to Salt Lake and get the
stuff quicker. Wake up, Tom, and tell us how long it will take to put
up the schoolhouse? Lance is going to give the dance--and there won't
be so much as a soggy chocolate cake accepted from the Rimmers. What
will you do, Lance? Put up a notice in Jumpoff?"

"Surely! A mysteriously worded affair, telling little and saying much.
Music and refresh--no, by heck, that sounds too wet and not solid
enough. Music and supper furnished free. Everybody welcome. Can't
Riley drive the chuck-wagon over and have the supper served by a
camp-fire? Golly, but I've been hungry for that old chuck-wagon! That
would keep all the mess of coffee and sandwiches out of the nice, new
schoolhouse."

"Who's going to hold their hat in front of the nice, new schoolhouse
till it's done and ready? And how're you going to let 'em know where
to come to, without giving away the secret?" Al, the practical,
stretched his long legs to the stove and thrust his hands deep into
his trousers pockets while he propounded these two conundrums. "Go on,
Lance. This is yore party."

Lance unfolded his arms and disposed his big body on a bearskin
covered lounge where he could take Belle's hand and pat it and
playfully pinch a finger now and then.

"To look at your hand, Belle, a fellow would swear that a blonde
manicure girl comes here twice a week," he said idly. "Where is the
schoolhouse going to be built? Why not put it just at the foot of the
ridge, at Cottonwood Spring? That's out of sight of the road, and if
the notice said 'Cottonwood Spring', folks would know where to head
for. It's close to the line of your land, isn't it, dad? A
yard--corral-size--fenced around the place would keep the cattle off
the doorstep, and they could water there just the same. If we're going
to do it, why not do it right?"

"I guess we could get down there with a load," Tom assented easily.
"I'd ruther have it on my land anyways."

"Don't think, Tom Lorrigan, that we'd ever take it back from Mary
Hope. No matter how Scotty acts up. But if they ever gave her the
double-cross and got some one else to teach--why it might be nice to
know it's our schoolhouse, on our land." Belle pulled her hand away
from Lance and went over to the piano. "It's all done but the
shingling," she said cheerfully. "Come on, Lance, see if you can sing
'Asleep in the Deep.' And then show me what you mean by saying you can
yodel now better than when I licked you the time you and Duke chased
the colt through the corral fence!"

"All done but the shingling--and I ain't got 'em bought yet!" grumbled
Tom, but was utterly disregarded in the sonorous chords of Belle's
prelude to the song.




CHAPTER ELEVEN

LANCE RIDES AHEAD


At fifteen minutes to four on a certain Tuesday afternoon, the first
really pleasant day after the day of tearing, whooping wind that had
blown Tom into the role of school bully, Lance loped out upon the
trail that led past the Whipple shack a mile and a quarter farther on.
Ostensibly his destination was the town of Jumpoff, although it was
not the time of day when one usually started from the Devil's Tooth
ranch to the post-office, with three unimportant letters as an excuse
for the trip.

As he rode Lance sang lustily a love song, but he was not thinking
especially of Mary Hope. In two years more than one California girl
had briefly held his fancy, and memory of Mary Hope had slightly
dimmed. In his pocket were two letters, addressed to two California
towns. One letter had Miss Helene Somebody inscribed upon it, and on
the other was Miss Mildred Somebody Else. The love song, therefore,
had no special significance, save that Lance was young and perfectly
normal and liked the idea of love, without being hampered by any
definite form of it concentrated upon one girl.

For all that he had timed his trip so as to arrive at the Whipple
shack just about the time when Mary Hope would be starting home. He
was curious to see just how much or how little she had changed; to
know whether she still had that funny little Scotch accent that
manifested itself in certain phrasings, certain vowel sounds at
variance with good English pronunciation. He wanted to know just how
much Pocatello had done to spoil her. Beneath all was the primal
instinct of the young male dimly seeking the female whom his destiny
had ordained to be his mate.

As a young fellow shut in behind the Rim, with the outside world a
vast area over which his imagination wandered vaguely, Mary Hope had
appealed to him. She was the one girl in the Black Rim country whom he
would ride out of his way to meet, whose face, whose voice, lingered
with him pleasantly for days after he had seen her and talked with
her. He reflected, between snatches of song, that he might have
thought himself in love with Mary Hope, might even have married her,
had Belle not suddenly decided that he should go beyond the Rim and
learn the things she could not teach him. Belle must have wanted him,
her youngest, to be different from the rest. He wondered with a sudden
whimsical smile, whether she was satisfied with the result of his two
years of exile. Tom, he suspected, was not,--nor were Duke and Al.
The three seemed to hold themselves apart from him, to look upon him
as a guest rather than as one of the family returned after an absence.
They did not include him in their talk of range matters and the
business of the ranch. He had once observed in them a secret
embarrassment when he appeared unexpectedly, had detected a swift
change of tone and manner and subject.

Surely they could not think he had changed sufficiently to make him an
outsider, he meditated. Aside from his teasing of Belle, he had
dropped deliberately into the range vernacular, refraining only from
certain crudities of speech which grated on his ears. He had put on
his old clothes, he had tried to take his old place in the ranch work.
He had driven a four-horse team up the Ridge trail with lumber for the
schoolhouse, and had negotiated the rock descent to Cottonwood Spring
with a skill that pleased him mightily because it proved to him--and
to Tom and the boys--that his range efficiency had not lessened during
his absence. He had done everything the boys had done, except ride out
with them on certain long trips over the range. He had not gone simply
because they had made it quite plain that they did not want him.

Nor did the hired cowboys want him with them,--ten of them in the bunk
house with a cook of their own, and this only the middle of March! In
two years the personnel of the bunk house had changed almost
completely. They were men whom he did not know, men who struck him as
"hard-boiled," though he could not have explained just wherein they
differed from the others. Sam Pretty Cow and Shorty he could hobnob
with as of yore,--Sam in particular giving him much pleasure with his
unbroken reserve, his unreadable Indian eyes and his wide-lipped grin.
The others were like Duke, Tom and Al,--slightly aloof, a bit guarded
in their manner.

"And I suppose Mary Hope will be absolutely spoiled, with small-town
dignity laid a foot deep over her Scotch primness. Still, a girl that
has the nerve to lift a club and threaten to brain Tom Lorrigan--"

He had forgotten the love song he was singing, and before he reached
farther in his musings he met the Swedes, who stared at him round-eyed
and did not answer his careless hello. A little farther, the Boyle
children rode up out of a dry wash, grinned bashfully at him and
hurried on.

A saddlehorse was tied to a post near the Whipple shack. With long
legs swinging slightly with the stride of his horse, reins held
high and loose in one hand, his big hat tilted over his forehead,
Lance rode up and dismounted as if his errand, though important, was
not especially urgent. The door stood open. He walked up, tapped
twice with his knuckles on the unpainted casing, and entered,
pulling off his hat and turning it round and round in his gloved
fingers while he ducked his head, pressed his lips together with a
humorous quirk, shuffled his spurred feet on the dirty floor and
bowed again as awkwardly as he could. In this manner he hoped to
draw some little spark of individuality from Mary Hope, who sat behind
her yellow-painted table and stared at him over her folded arms.
But Mary Hope, he observed, had been crying, and compunction seized
him suddenly.

"Well, what is it?" she asked him curtly, rubbing a palm down over one
cheek, with the motion obliterating a small rivulet of tears.

"If you please, ma'am, I was sent to mend a lock on a door."

"What lock? On what door?" Mary Hope passed a palm down her other
cheek, thus obliterating another rivulet that had ceased to flow tears
and was merely wet and itchy.

"If you please, ma'am, you can search me." Lance looked at her
innocently. "I didn't bring any lock with me, and I didn't bring any
door with me. But I've got some screws and three nails and--lots of
good intentions."

"Good intentions are very rare in this country," said Mary Hope, and
made meaningless marks on the bare tabletop with a blunt pencil.

Lance heard a twang of Scotch in the "very rare" which pleased him.
But he kept his position by the doorway, and he continued bashfully
turning his big hat round and round against his chest,--though the
action went oddly with the Lorrigan look and the athletic poise of
him. "Yes, ma'am. Quite rare," he agreed.

"In fact, I don't believe there is such a thing in the whole Black Rim
country," stated Mary Hope, plainly nonplussed at his presence and
behavior.

"Could I show you mine?" Lance advanced a step. He was not sure, at
that moment, whether he wanted to go with the play. Mary Hope was
better looking than when he had seen her last. She had lost a good
deal of the rusticity he remembered her to have possessed, but she was
either too antagonistic to carry on the farce, or she was waiting for
him to show his hand, to betray some self-consciousness. But the fact
that she looked at him straight in the eyes and neither frowned nor
giggled, set her apart from the ordinary range-bred girl.

"You talk like a country peddler. I'm willing to accept a sample, and
see if they are durable. Though I can't for the life of me see why
you'd be coming here with good intentions."

"I'd be mending a lock on a door. Is this the door, ma'am? And is this
the lock?"

Since the door behind him was the only door within five miles of them,
and since the lock dangled from a splintered casing, Mary Hope almost
smiled. "It is a door," she informed him. "And it is a lock that has
been broken by a Lorrigan."

She was baiting him, tempting him to quarrel with her over the old
grudge. Because she expected a reply, Lance made no answer whatever.
He happened to have a dozen or so of nails in his coat pocket,
left-overs from his assiduous carpentry on the house being builded for
her comfort. The screws he possessed were too large, and he had no
hammer. But no man worries over a missing hammer where rocks are
plentiful, and Lance was presently pounding the lock into place, his
back to Mary Hope, his thoughts swinging from his prospective party to
the possible religious scruples of the Douglas family.

Mary Hope used to dance--a very little--he remembered, though she had
not attended many dances. He recalled suddenly that a Christmas tree
or a Fourth of July picnic had usually been the occasions when Mary
Hope, with her skirts just hitting her shoe tops in front and sagging
in an ungainly fashion behind, had teetered solemnly through a
"square" dance with him. Mother Douglas herself had always sat very
straight and prim on a bench, her hands folded in her lap and her eyes
blinking disapprovingly at the ungodly ones who let out an exultant
little yip now and then when they started exuberantly through the
mazes of the "gran'-right-n-left."

Would Mary Hope attend the party? Should he tell her about it and
ask her to come? Naturally, he could not peacefully escort her
partyward,--the feud was still too rancorous for that. Or was it?
At the Devil's Tooth they spoke of old Scotty as an enemy, but they
had cited no particular act of hostility as evidence of his enmity.
At the Devil's Tooth they spoke of the whole Black Rim country as
enemy's country. Lance began to wonder if it were possible that
the Lorrigans had adopted unconsciously the role of black sheep,
without the full knowledge or concurrence of the Black Rimmers.

He did what he could to make a workable lock of one that had been
ready to fall to pieces before his father heaved against it; hammered
in the loosened screws in the hinges, tossed the rock out into the
scuffed sod before the shack, and picked up his hat. He had not once
looked toward Mary Hope, but he turned now as if he were going to say
good-by and take himself off; as if mending the lock had really been
his errand, and no further interest held him there.

He surprised a strange, wistful look in Mary Hope's eyes, a trembling
of her lips. She seemed to be waiting, fearing that he meant to go
without any further overtures toward friendship.

The Whipple shack was not large. Ten feet spanned the distance between
them. Impulsively Lance covered that distance in three steps. At the
table he stopped, leaned toward her with his palms braced upon the
table, and stared full into Mary Hope's disturbed eyes.

"Girl," he said, drawing the word softly along a vibrant note in his
voice that sent a tremor through her, "Girl, you're more lonesome than
Scotch, and you're more Scotch than the heather that grows in your
front yard to make your mother cry for the Highlands she sees when her
eyes blur with homesickness. You were crying when I came--crying
because you're lonely. It's a big, wild country--the Black Rim. It's a
country for men to ride hell-whooping through the sage and camas
grass, with guns slung at their hips, but it's no country for a little
person like you to try and carry on a feud because her father made
one. You're--too little!"

He did not touch her, his face did not come near her face. But in his
eyes, in his voice, in the tender, one-sided little smile, there was
something,--Mary Hope caught her breath, feeling as if she had been
kissed.

"You little, lonesome girl! There's going to be a party at Cottonwood
Spring, a week from Friday night. It's a secret--a secret for you. And
you won't tell a soul that you were the first to know--and you'll
come, you girl, because it's your party. And not a soul will know it's
your party. If your father's Scotch is too hard for dancing--you'll
come just the same. You'll come, because the secret is for you. And--"
He thought that he read something in her eyes and hastened to
forestall her intention "--and you won't go near Cottonwood Spring
before the time of the party, because that wouldn't be playing fair.

"Don't be lonely, girl. The world is full of pleasant things, just
waiting to pop out at you from behind every bush. If you're good and
kind and honest with life, the Fates are going to give you the best
they've got. Don't be lonely! Just wait for the pleasant things in
to-morrow and to-morrow--in all the to-morrows. And one of them, girl,
is going to show you the sweetest thing in life. That's love, you girl
with the tears back of your Scotch blue eyes. But wait for it--and
take the little pleasant things that minutes have hidden away in the
to-morrows. And one of the pleasant times will be hidden at Cottonwood
Spring, a week from Friday night. Wonder what it will be, girl. And if
any one tries to tell it, put your hands over your ears, so that you
won't hear it. Wait--and keep wondering, and come to Cottonwood Spring
next Friday night. Adios, girl."

He looked into her eyes, smiling a little. Then, turning suddenly, he
left her without a backward glance. Left her with nothing to spoil
the haunting cadence of his voice, nothing to lift the spell of
tender prophecy his words had laid upon her soul. When he was quite
gone, when she heard the clatter of his horse's hoofs upon the arid
soil that surrounded the Whipple shack, Mary Hope still stared out
through the open doorway, seeing nothing of the March barrenness,
seeing only the tender, inscrutable, tantalizing face of Lance
Lorrigan,--tantalizing because she could not plumb the depths of his
eyes, could not say how much of the tenderness was meant for her, how
much was born of the deep music of his voice, the whimsical,
one-sided smile.

And Lance, when he had ridden a furlong from the place, had dipped
into a shallow draw and climbed the other side, turned half around in
the saddle and looked back.

"Now, why did I go off and leave her like that? Like an actor walking
off the stage to make room for the other fellow to come on and say his
lines. There's no other fellow--thank heck! And here are two miles we
might be riding together--and me preaching to her about taking the
little, pleasant things that come unexpectedly!" He swung his horse
around in the trail, meaning to ride back; retraced his steps as far
as the hollow, and turned again, shaking his head.

"Anybody could stop at the schoolhouse just as school's out, and ride
a couple of miles down the road with the schoolma'am--if she let him
do it! Anybody could do that. But that isn't the reason, why I'm
riding on ahead. What the hell is the reason?"

He stopped again on the high level where he could look back and see
the Whipple shack squatted forlornly in the gray stretch of sage with
wide, brown patches of dead grass between the bushes.

"Lonesome," he named the wild expanse of unpeopled range land. "She's
terribly lonely--and sweet. Too lonely and sweet for me to play with,
to ride a few miles with--and leave her lonelier than I found her. I
couldn't. There's enough sadness now in those Scotch blue eyes. Damned
if I'll add more!"

He saw Mary Hope come from the shack, pause a minute on the doorstep,
then walk out to where her horse was tied to the post. He lifted the
reins, pricked his horse gently with the spurs and galloped away to
Jumpoff, singing no more.




CHAPTER TWELVE

SHE WILL, AND SHE WON'T


Cottonwood Spring was a dished-out oasis just under the easy slope of
Devil's Tooth Ridge. From no part of the Jumpoff trail could it be
seen, and the surrounding slope did not offer much inducement to
cattle in March, when water was plentiful; wherefore riders would
scarcely wander into the saucer-like hollow that contained the
cottonwoods and the spring. A picnic had once been held there, but the
festivities had been marred by a severe thunderstorm that came just as
a wordy quarrel between two drunken cowpunchers was fast nearing the
gun-pulling stage. Lightning had struck the side hill just beyond the
grove, and the shock of it had knocked down and stunned the two
disputants, and three saddle horses standing in the muddy overflow
from the spring. For this reason, perhaps, and because it was on
Lorrigan land, the place had never thereafter been frequented save by
the stock that watered there.

But from the head of the little basin a wide view was had of the
broken land beyond Devil's Tooth. The spring was clear and cold and
never affected by drouth. By following the easy slope around the point
of the main trail from Jumpoff to the Lorrigan ranch, no road-building
was necessary, and in summer the cottonwoods looked very cool and
inviting--though at certain times they harbored buffalo gnats and many
red ants that would bite, which rendered the shade less grateful than
it looked. But to the Lorrigans it seemed an ideal site for a
schoolhouse.

Ten days after they had planned the deed, the schoolhouse stood ready
for the dance. In the lean-to shed, twelve shiny yellow desks that
smelled strongly of varnish were stacked in their heavy paper
swaddlings, waiting to be set in place when the dance was done. Belle
herself had hemmed scrim curtains for the windows, which Riley had
washed copiously. The blackboard, with the names of various Devil's
Tooth men and a "motto" or two scrawled upon it was in place; the
globe was on the teacher's desk, and the water bucket on its shelf in
the corner, with a shiny new tin dipper hanging on a nail above it.

If you were to believe the frequent declarations, every puncher on the
ranch had done his durnedest to put 'er up, and put 'er up right. Sam
Pretty Cow had nailed a three-foot American flag to the front gable,
and had landed on a nail when he jumped from the eaves. On the night
of the dance he was hobbling around the chuck-wagon with half a pound
of salt pork bound to his foot, helping Riley, who had driven over to
the spring early, burdened with the importance of his share in the
entertainment.

A dance in the Black Rim country has all the effect of a dog fight in
a small village with empty streets. No sooner does it start than one
wonders where all the people came from.

At eight o'clock toiling horses drawing full loads of humanity began
to appear over the rim of the hollow, to pick their way carefully down
toward the lighted windows, urged by their drivers. Men on horseback
made the descent more swiftly, with a clatter of small rocks kicked
loose as they came. They encountered a four-wire fence, circled it to
where a lantern, hung on a post, revealed a gate that lay flat on the
ground to leave a welcoming space for teams and saddle horses to pass
through.

Beside the schoolhouse, with two lanterns shedding a yellow glow on
his thin, sandy hair, Riley, at the chuck-wagon, arranged doughnuts,
sandwiches, pies and cakes to his liking, wiped his red hands
frequently on his clean flour-sack apron, and held carefully unprofane
conversation with the women who came fluttering over to him, their
arms burdened.

"No, mom, sorry! I know I'm turnin' down something that's better than
anything I got here, but this here party's on the Lorrigans. No, mom,
I got orders not to take in s'much as a sour pickle from nobody. You
jest put it back in the rig, whatever you got there, and consider't
you got some Sat'day bakin' did up ahead.

"Yes, mom, it's Lance's party. He's home for a visit, an' he kinda
wanted to have a dance an' meet the folks, seein' he's been away quite
a spell and kain't stay long.

"Yes, mom, he's goin' back to college first the week.

"Hey! I wisht you'd tie up yore cayuses other side the shack. Folks'll
be comin' around here for their supper, and they don't wanta git their
faces kicked off whilst they're huntin' grub to fill 'em.

"No, mom, we ain't takin' any cakes or nothin' off nobody. Lance, he
wanted to give this dance an' give it _right_. Ain't goin' to cost
nobody a thing but sore corns, t'night!"

Lance had hired an Italian violinist and his boy who played a harp
much taller than himself and people coming from Jumpoff had brought
them out. The Millers had come, with all their outfit. The AJ outfit
was there to a man. The Swedes were present, sitting together in the
corner by the water bucket, and the Conleys, who lived over by Camas
Creek beyond the AJ, had come. The Conleys had sheep, and were not
firmly settled in the Black Rim, sheepmen being looked at askance.
There were families from nearer Jumpoff,--one really did wonder where
they all came from, when the country seemed so wide and unpeopled.

Lance was surprised to see how many were there who were total
strangers. Until the dancing began the men stood outside and smoked,
leaving the women and children to arrange themselves on benches along
the wall inside. Lance knew the custom well enough, and he did not go
in. But he tried to see who came with every load that was deposited
within the circle of light on the narrow platform that embellished the
front.

At nine o'clock, when the musicians were trying their instruments
tentatively and even the most reluctant male was being drawn
irresistibly to the humming interior, Lance frankly admitted to
himself that he was not happy, and that his condition was the direct
result of not having seen Mary Hope enter the door.

He sought out Tom, who was over at the chuck-wagon, taking an early
cup of coffee. Tom blew away the steam that rose on the chill night
air and eyed Lance. "Well, when do we make the speech? Or don't we?"
he demanded, taking a gulp and finding the coffee still too hot for
comfort. "Don't ask me to; I done my share when I built 'er. You can
tell the bunch what she's for."

"Oh, what the heck do we want with a speech?" Lance remonstrated.
"They know it's a schoolhouse, unless they're blind. And I thought
maybe some one--you, probably, since you're the one who hazed her out
of the other place--would just tell Mary Hope to bring her books over
here and teach. And I thought, to cinch it, you could tell Jim Boyle
that you felt you ought to do something toward a school, and since you
couldn't furnish any kids, you thought you'd furnish the house. That
ought to be easy. It's up to you, I should say. But I wouldn't make
any speech."

Tom grunted, finished his coffee and proceeded to remove all traces of
it from his lips with his best white handkerchief. "Where's Jim Boyle
at?" he asked, moving into the wide bar of dusk that lay between the
lights of the chuck-wagon and the glow from the two windows facing
that way.

"I believe I'd speak about it first to Mary Hope," Lance suggested,
coming behind him. "But she hasn't come yet--"

As if she heard and deliberately moved to contradict him, Mary Hope
danced past the window, the hand of a strange young man with a crisp
white handkerchief pressed firmly between her shoulder blades. Mary
Hope was dancing almost as solemnly as in the days of short skirts and
sleek hair, her eyes apparently fixed upon the shoulder of her partner
who gazed straight out over her head, his whole mind centered upon
taking the brunt of collisions upon the point of his upraised elbow.

"I'll ketch her when she's through dancing," promised Tom. But Lance
had another thought.

"Let me tell Mary Hope, dad. I'm going to dance with her, and it will
be easy."

In the darkness Tom grinned and went on to find Jim Boyle standing in
a group of older men on the platform that served as a porch. Jim Boyle
was smoking a cheap cigar brought out from Jumpoff by the section
boss. He listened reflectively, looked at the glowing tip of the
evil-smelling cigar, threw the thing from him and reached for his
cigarette papers with an oath.

"Now, that's damn white of yuh, Tom," he said. "I leave it to the
boys if it ain't damn white. Not having no school district I'm puttin'
up the money outa my own pocket to pay the teacher. And havin' four
kids to feed and buy clothes for, I couldn't afford to build no
schoolhouse, I tell yuh those. And uh course, I didn't like to go
round askin' fer help; but it's damn white of yuh to step in an' do
yore share towards making the Rim look like it was civilized.
Sederson, he'll feel the same way about it. And I'm gitting a
foreman that's got a kid, school age; we sure'n hell do need a
schoolhouse. Rim's settlin' up fast. I always said, Tom, that you
was white. I leave it to the boys here."

Inside, Lance was not finding it so easy to make the announcement.
Last Tuesday, Mary Hope had not understood just why he had ridden
on ahead of her for two miles--she could see the small dust cloud
kicked up by his horse on the Jumpoff trail, so there could be no
mistake--when he knew perfectly well that she must ride that way, when
he could not have failed to see her horse saddled and waiting at
the door. It seemed to Mary Hope an obscure form of mockery to tell
her not to be lonely--to tell her in a caressing tone that left with
her all the effect of kisses--and then to ride away without one
backward glance, one word of excuse. Until she had mounted and had
seen him on the trail ahead, she had not realized how he had mocked
her.

For days--until Friday, to be explicit--she had been quite determined
not to go near Cottonwood Spring. Then she had suddenly changed her
mind, dismissed school half an hour early, put old Rab in a lather on
the way home, dressed herself and announced to her mother that she
must ride into Jumpoff for school supplies, and that she would stay
all night with the Kennedys. It had taken two years and the dignity of
school-teacher to give Mary Hope the courage to announce things to her
mother. As it was, she permitted her mother to explain as best she
might to Hugh Douglas. Her courage did not reach to that long,
uncompromising upper lip of her father's.

She had folded her prettiest dress carefully into a flat bundle, had
thrown it out of her window and left the house in her riding clothes.
There was a saddle horse, Jamie, a Roman-nosed bay of uncertain temper
and a high, rocking gait, which she sometimes used for long trips. She
saddled him now and hurried away, thankful to be gone with her
package and her guilty conscience before her father arrived. She was
very good friends with the Kennedys, at the section house. If there
was a dance within forty miles, the Kennedys might be counted upon to
attend; and that is how Mary Hope arrived at the schoolhouse with a
load from Jumpoff. She had seen Lance standing near the door, and
Lance had paid no attention to her, but had left an AJ man to claim
the first two-step. Wherefore Lance walked straight into trouble when
he went to Mary Hope and asked for the next dance with her.

"So sorry--it's promised already," said Mary Hope, in her primmest
tone.

"There's a dance after the next one," he hinted, looking down from his
more-than-six feet at her where she sat wedged between Mrs. Boyle and
Jennie Miller.

"So sorry--but I think that one is promised also," said Mary Hope.

Lance drew a corner of his lip between his teeth, let it go and lifted
his eyebrows whimsically at Jennie Miller, whom he had once heard
playing on her organ, and whom he had detested ever since with an
unreasoning animosity born solely of her musical inability and her
long neck that had on its side a brown mole with three coarse hairs in
it.

"If Miss Douglas has two dances engaged in advance, it's quite
hopeless to hope for a dance with Miss Miller," he said, maliciously
drawing the sentence through certain vibrant tones which experience
had taught him had a certain pleasing effect upon persons. "Or is it
hopeless? Are you engaged for every dance to-night, Miss Miller? And
if you are, please may I stand beside you while you eat a sandwich at
midnight?"

Jennie Miller giggled. "I ain't as popular as all that," she retorted,
glancing at Mary Hope, sitting very straight and pretty beside her.
"And if I was, I don't go and promise everybody that asks. I might
want to change my mind afterwards if some other fellow comes along I
liked better--and I've saw too many fights start over a girl
forgetting who she's promised to dance with."

"You don't want to see a fight start now, do you?" Lance smiled down
at her without in the least degree betraying to Mary Hope that he
would like to pull Jennie Miller by force from that seat and occupy it
himself.

"I never can see why men fight over things. I hate fights," Miss
Miller stammered, agitated by a wild feeling that perhaps she was
going to be made love to.

"Then don't forget that you are going to dance with me." The music
just then started again, and he offered her his arm with a certain
import that made Mary Hope clench her hands.

Mary Hope was punished for her lie. She had not promised that dance,
and so she sat on the plank bench and saw Lance and Jennie Miller
sway past her four times before a gawky youth who worked for her
father caught sight of her and came over from the water-bucket corner
to ask her for the dance. That was not the worst. On the fourth round
of Lance and Jennie, and just as the gawky one was bowin

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