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 bowing stiffly before her, Lance looked at her over Jennie Miller's shoulder, and smiled that tantalizing, Lorrigan smile that always left her uneasily doubtful of its meaning.



CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A WAY HE HAD WITH HIM

It was at the chuck-wagon at midnight, while Riley and Sam Pretty Cow were serving tin cups of black coffee to a shuffling, too-hilarious crowd, that Lance next approached Mary Hope. She was standing on the outskirts of a group composed mostly of women, quite alone so far as cavaliers were concerned, for the gawky youth had gone after coffee. She was looking toward the sagebrush camp-fire around which a crowd of men had gathered with much horseplay at which they were laughing loudly, and she was wondering how best she could make Lance Lorrigan aware of her absolute indifference to him, when his voice drawled disconcertingly close to her ear:

"You're not lonely now, you girl—and you did find a secret at Cottonwood Spring. A pleasant little secret, wasn't it?"

Mary Hope's hands became fists at her side, held close against her best frock. "I think the fellows over by the fire have discovered your pleasant secret," she said, and did not turn her face toward him.

With his arms folded and his eyebrows pulled together and his lip between his teeth, Lance stared down at her face, studying it in the flicker of the distant firelight and the two lanterns. If her combativeness roused in him any resentment, he did not permit it to show in his voice.

"Some of the fellows from Jumpoff brought a bottle or two. That's no secret, except that I don't know where they have it cached. The schoolhouse is your—"

"I heard it was included in the Lorrigan refreshments."

"The schoolhouse is ready for your pleasure Monday morning," Lance spoke with that perfect impersonal courtesy that is so exasperating to a person who listens for something to resent. "I knew of it, of course—dad wanted it kept for a surprise. And he wanted me to tell you. It's the Lorrigan expression of their appreciation of the need of a school."

The gawky youth came stumbling up, his outstretched hands carefully holding two tin cups filled with coffee close to the boiling point. Being a youth of good intentions, he tried very hard not to spill a drop. Being gawky, he stubbed his toe as he was rounding the group of women, and Mrs. Miller shrieked and swung back her hand, cuffing the gawky one straight into the thickest of the crowd. Other women screamed.

Lance reached a long arm and plucked the youth out by the slack of his coat, shook him and propelled him into the darkness, where he collided violently with Sam Pretty Cow. Some one had been over-generous with Sam Pretty Cow. A drunken Indian is never quite safe. Sam Pretty Cow struck out blindly, yelling Piegan curses hoarsely as he fought. The crowd of men around the camp-fire came running. For a short space there was confusion, shouting, the shrill voices of scalded women denouncing the accident as a deliberate outrage.

Mrs. Miller whirled on Lance. "You pushed him on me! If that ain't a Lorrigan trick!—"

"Yeah—what yuh mean? Throwin' bilin' hot coffee on—"

"Who says it's a Lorrigan trick?"

"Might 'a' known what to expect—"

"Get back here, away from the crowd. There may be shooting," Lance muttered to Mary Hope, and pulled her to the rear of the wagon and around upon the farther side. She could not resist. His strength was beyond any hope of combating it with her small strength. Mrs. Miller, whose scalded shoulder led her to wild utterances without thought of their effect upon others, shouted at him as he hustled Mary Hope away:

"Yeah—run! You're the one that done it—now run! That's like a Lorrigan—do your dirty work and then crawl out and let somebody else take the blame! That kid never—"

"Aw, come back and fight, you big sneak!" A drunken voice bellowed hoarsely, and a gunshot punctuated the command.

"Go on—get on the other side of the schoolhouse. Run! The fools will all start to shooting now!"

Mary Hope stopped stubbornly. "I will not!" she defied him; and Lance without more argument lifted her from the ground, stooped and tossed her under the wagon, much as he would have heaved a bag of oats out of the rain.

"Don't you move until I tell you to," he commanded her harshly, and ran back, diving into the thick of the crowd as though he were charging into a football scrimmage.

"Who was it called me back to fight? Put up your guns,—or keep them if you like. It's all one to me!"

In the dim light he saw the gleam of a weapon raised before him, reached out and wrenched it away from the owner, and threw it far over his shoulder into the weeds. "Who said a Lorrigan run? I want that man!"

"I said it," bellowed a whisky-flushed man whose face was strange to him. "I said it, and I say it agin. I say—a Lorrigan!"

He lifted his gun above the pressure of excited men and women. Lance sprung upward and forward, landed on some one's foot, lunged again and got a grip on the hand that held the gun. With his left hand he wrenched the gun away. With his right he pulled the man free of the crowd and out where there was room. The crowd—men, now, for the women had fled shrieking—surged that way.

"Stand back there! I'll settle with this fellow alone." He held the other fast, his arms as merciless as the grip of a grizzly, and called aloud:

"This is a Lorrigan dance, and the Lorrigans are going to have order. Those of you who brought chips on your shoulders, and whisky to soak the chips in, can drink your whisky and do your fighting among yourselves, off the Lorrigan ranch. We all came here to have fun. There's music and room to dance, and plenty of chuck and plenty of coffee, and the dance is going right on without any fuss whatever.

"This poor boob here who thinks he wants to fight me just because I'm a Lorrigan, I never saw before. It wouldn't be a fair fight, because he's too drunk to do anything but make a fool of himself. There's nothing to fight about, anyway. A fellow was carrying two cups of boiling hot coffee, and he stubbed his toe, and some one got scalded a little. That's nothing to break up a dance over. The rest of you heard the noise and jumped at the conclusion there was trouble afoot. There isn't. I think you all want to go on with the dance and have a good time, except perhaps a few who are drunk. They are at liberty to go off somewhere and beat each other up to their hearts' content. Come on, now, folks—get your partners for a square dance—and everybody dance!"

His voice had held them listening. His words were not the words of a coward, yet they were a plea for peace, they seemed reasonable even to the half-drunken ones who had been the readiest to fight. The old-time range slogan, "Everybody dance!" sent three or four hurrying to find the girls they wanted. The trouble, it would appear, had ended as suddenly as it had begun and for a moment the tension relaxed.

The drunken one was still cursing, struggling unavailingly to tear himself away from Lance so that he could land a blow. Lance, looking out across the crowd, caught Belle's glance and nodded toward the schoolhouse. Belle hurried away to find the musicians and set them playing, and a few couples strayed after her. But there were men who stayed, pushing, elbowing to see what would happen when Lance Lorrigan loosened his hold on the Jumpoff man.

Lance did not loosen his hold, however. He saw Tom, Al, three or four Devil's Tooth men edging up, and sent them a warning shake of his head.

"Who knows this fellow? Where does he belong? I think his friends had better take care of him until he sobers up."

"We'll take care of him," said another stranger, easing up to Lance. "He won't hurt yuh; he was only foolin', anyway. Bill Kennedy, he always gits kinda happy when he's had one or two."

There was laughter in the crowd. Two or three voices were heard muttering together, and other laughs followed. Some one produced a bottle and offered the pugnacious one a drink. Lance let him go with a contemptuous laugh and went to where the Devil's Tooth men now stood bunched close together, their backs to the chuck-wagon.

"We'll have to clean up this crowd, before it's over," Al was saying to his father. "Might as well start right in and git 'er over with."

"And have it said the Lorrigans can't give a dance without having it end in rough-house!" Lance interrupted. "Cut out the idea of fighting that bunch. Keep them out of the house and away from the women, and let them have their booze down in the grove. That's where I've seen a lot of them heading. Come on, boys; it takes just as much nerve not to fight as it does to kill off a dozen men. Isn't that right, dad?"

"More," said Tom laconically. "No, boys, we don't want no trouble here. Come on in and dance. That's yore job—to keep 'er moving peaceable. I'll fire any man I ketch drinking Jumpoff booze. We've got better at the ranch. Come on!"

He led the way and his men followed him,—not as though they were particularly anxious to avoid trouble, but more like men who are trained to obey implicitly a leader who has some definite purpose and refuses to be turned from it. Lance, walking a few steps in the rear, wondered at the discipline his father seemed to maintain without any apparent effort.

"And they say the Lorrigans are a tough outfit!" he laughed, when he had overtaken Tom. "Dad, you've got the bunch trained like soldiers. I was more afraid our boys would rough things up than I was worried over the stews."

"Shucks! When we rough things up, it's when we want it rough. Al, he was kinda excited. But at that, we may have to hogtie a few of them smart Alecks from town, before we can dance peaceable."

Mary Hope, Lance discovered, was already in the schoolhouse. Also, several of the intoxicated were there, and the quadrille was being danced with so much zest that the whole building shook. That in itself was not unusual—Black Rim dances usually did become rather boisterous after supper—but just outside the door a bottle was being circulated freely, and two or three men had started toward the cottonwood grove for more. Duke, coming up to Lance where he stood in the doorway, pulled him to one side, where they could not be overheard.

"There's going to be trouble here, sure's you're knee-high to a duck. Dad won't let our bunch light into 'em, but they'll be fighting amongst themselves inside an hour. You better slip it to the women that the dance breaks up early. Give 'em a few more waltzes and two-steps, Lance, and then make it Home-Sweet-Home, if you don't want to muss up your nice city clothes," he added, with a laugh that was not altogether friendly.

"Mussing up nice city clothes is my favorite pastime," Lance retorted, and went inside again to see who was doing all the whooping. The chief whooper, he discovered, was Bill Kennedy, the man whom he had very nearly thrashed. Mary Hope was looking her Scotch primmest. Lance measured the primness, saw that there was a vacant space beside her, and made his precarious way toward it, circling the dancers who swung close to the benches and trod upon the toes of the wall flowers in their enthusiasm. He reached the vacant space and sat down just in time to receive Bill Kennedy in his lap. But Bill was too happy just then to observe whose lap he landed in, and bounced up with a bellowing laugh to resume his gyrations.

"Don't dance any more, girl," Lance said, leaning so that he could make himself heard without shouting in the uproar. "It's getting pretty wild—and it will be wilder. They must have hauled it out in barrels!"

Mary Hope looked at him, but she did not smile, did not answer.

"I'm sorry the secret is no nicer," Lance went on. "Now the floor will have to be scrubbed before a lady girl can come out and teach school here. I thought it would be great to have a house-warming dance,—but they're making it too blamed warm!"

Some one slipped and fell, and immediately there was a struggling heap where others had fallen over the first. There were shrieks of laughter and an oath or two, an epithet and then a loud-flung threat.

Lance started up, saw that Tom and Al were heading that way, and took Mary Hope by the arm.

"It's time little girls like you went home," he said smiling, and somehow got her to the door without having her trampled upon. "Where are your wraps?"

"There," said Mary Hope dazedly, and pointed to the corner behind them, where cloaks, hoods, hats and two sleeping children were piled indiscriminately.

Through the doorway men were crowding, two or three being pushed out only to be pushed in again by others eager to join the melee. In the rear of the room, near the musicians, two men were fighting. Lance, giving one glance to the fight and another to the struggling mass in the doorway, pushed up the window nearest them, lifted Mary Hope and put her out on the side hill. He felt of a coat or two, chose the heaviest, found something soft and furry like a cap, and followed her. Behind the door no one seemed to look. A solid mass of backs was turned toward him when he wriggled through on his stomach.

"Where's your horse?" he asked Mary Hope, while he slipped the coat on her and buttoned it.

"It does seem to me that a Lorrigan is always making me put on a coat!" cried Mary Hope petulantly. "And now, this isn't mine at all!"

"A non-essential detail. It's a coat, and that's all that matters. Where is your horse?"

"I haven't any horse here—oh, they're killing each other in there! The Kennedys brought me—and he's that drunk, now—"

"Good heck! Bill Kennedy! Well, come on. You couldn't go back with them, that's sure. I'll take you home, girl." He was leading her by the arm to the fence behind the house. "Wait, I'll lift a wire; can you crawl under?"

"Now, I've torn it! I heard it rip. And it isn't my coat at all," said Mary Hope. "Oh, they're murdering one another! I should think you'd be ashamed, having a dance like—"

"Coats can be bought—and murdered men don't swear like that. I'll have to borrow Belle's pintos, but we don't care, do we? Come on. Here they are. Don't get in until I get them untied and turned around. And when I say get in, you'd better make it in one jump. Are you game?"

"No Lorrigan will ever cry shame on a Douglas for a coward! You must be crazy, taking this awful team."

"I am. I'm crazy to get you away from here before they start shooting, back there." He spoke to the team gruffly and with a tone of authority that held them quiet, wondering at his audacity perhaps. He untied them, got the lines, stepped in and turned them around, the pintos backing and cramping the buckboard, lunging a little but too surprised to misbehave in their usual form.

"Get in—and hang on. There's no road much—but we'll make it, all right."

Like the pintos, Mary Hope was too astonished to rebel. She got in.

The team went plunging up the hill, snorting now and then, swerving sharply away from rock or bush that threatened them with vague horrors in the clear starlight. Behind them surged the clamor of many voices shouting, the confused scuffling of feet, a revolver shot or two, and threading the whole the shrill, upbraiding voice of a woman.

"That's Mrs. Miller," Mary Hope volunteered jerkily. "She's the one that was scalded."

"It wasn't her tongue that was hurt," Lance observed, and barely saved the buckboard from upsetting on a rock as Rosa and Subrosa shied violently and simultaneously at a rabbit scuttling from a bush before them.

He swung the pintos to the right, jounced down into some sort of trail, and let them go loping along at their usual pace.

"Belle has her own ideas about horse-training," Lance chuckled, steadying Subrosa with a twitch of the rein. "They'll hit this gait all the way to your ranch."

Mary Hope gave a gasp and caught him by the arm, shaking it a little as if she were afraid that otherwise he would not listen to her. "Oh, but I canna go home! I've a horse and my riding clothes in Jumpoff, and I must go for them and come home properly on horseback to-morrow! It's because of the lie I told my mother, so that I could come to the dance with the Kennedys. Set me down here anywhere, Lance Lorrigan, and let me walk until the Kennedys overtake me! They'll be coming soon, now—as soon as Bill Kennedy gets licket sober. You can stop the horses—surely you can stop them and let me out. But please, please do not take me home to-night, in this party dress—and a coat that isna mine at all!"

"I'm not taking you home, girl. I'm taking you to Jumpoff. And it won't matter to you whether Bill Kennedy is licked sober or not. And to-morrow I'll find out who owns the coat. I'll say I found it on the road somewhere. Who's to prove I didn't? Or if you disapprove of lying about it, I'll bring it back and leave it beside the road."

"It's a lot of trouble I'm making for you," said Mary Hope quite meekly, and let go his arm. "I should not have told the lie and gone to the dance. And I canna wear my own coat home, because it's there in the pile behind the door, and some one else will take it. So after all it will be known that I lied, and you may as well take me home now and let me face it."

To this Lance made no reply. But when the pintos came rattling down the hill to where the Douglas trail led away to the right, he did not slow them, did not take the turn.

Mary Hope looked anxiously toward home, away beyond the broken skyline. A star hung big and bright on the point of a certain hill that marked the Douglas ranch. While she watched it, the star slid out of sight as if it were going down to warn Hugh Douglas that his daughter had told a lie and had gone to a forbidden place to dance with forbidden people, and was even now driving through the night with one of the Lorrigans,—perchance the wickedest of all the wicked Lorrigans, because he had been away beyond the Rim and had learned the wickedness of the cities.

She looked wistfully at the face of this wickedest of the Lorrigans, his profile seen dimly in the starlight. He did not look wicked. Under his hat brim she could see his brows, heavy and straight and lifted whimsically at the inner points, as though he were thinking of something amusing. His nose was fine and straight, too,—not at all like a beak, though her father had always maintained that the Lorrigans were but human vultures. His mouth,—there was something in the look of his mouth that made her catch her breath; something tender, something that vaguely disturbed her, made her feel that it could be terribly stern if it were not so tender. He seemed to be smiling—not with his mouth, exactly, but away inside of his mind—and the smile showed just a little bit, at the corner of his lips. His chin was the Lorrigan chin absolutely; a nice chin to look at, with a little, long dimple down the middle. A chin that one would not want to oppose, would not want to see when the man who owned it was very angry.

Mary Hope had gone just so far in her analysis when Lance turned his head abruptly, unexpectedly, and looked full into her eyes.

"Don't be afraid, girl. Don't worry about the lie—about anything. It was a sweet little lie—it makes you just human and young and—sweet. Let them scold you, and smile, 'way down deep in your heart, and be glad you're human enough to tell a lie now and then. Because if you hadn't, we wouldn't be driving all these miles together to save you a little of the scolding. Be happy. Be just a little bit happy to-night, won't you, girl—you lonely little girl—with the blue, blue eyes!"

There it was again, that vibrant, caressing note in his voice. It was there in his eyes while he looked at her, on his lips while he spoke to her. But the next moment he looked ahead at the trail, spoke to Rosa who had flung her head around to bite pettishly at Subrosa, who snapped back at her.

Mary Hope turned her face to the starlit rangeland. Again she breathed quickly, fought back tears, fought the feeling that she had been kissed. All through the silent ride that followed she fought the feeling, knew that it was foolish, that Lance knew nothing whatever about that look, that tone which so affected her. He did not speak again. He sat beside her, and she felt that he was thinking about her, felt that his heart was making love to her—hated herself fiercely for the feeling, fought it and felt it just the same.

"It's just a way he has with him!" she told herself bitterly, when he swung the team up in front of the section house and helped her down. "He'd have the same way with him if he spoke to a—a rabbit! He doesna mean it—he doesna know and he doesna care!"

"Thank you, Mr. Lorrigan. It was very kind of you to bring me." Her voice was prim and very Scotch, and gave no hint of all she had been thinking.

"I'm always kind—to myself," laughed Lance, and lifted his hat and drove away.



CHAPTER FOURTEEN

IN WHICH LANCE FINISHES ONE JOB

In the Traffic saloon, whither Lance had gone to find a fire and an easy chair and something cheering to drink while he waited for the pinto team to rest and eat, he found a sleepy bartender sprawled before the stove, a black-and-white dog stretched flat on its side and growling while it dreamed, and an all-pervading odor of alcoholic beverages that appealed to him.

"A highball would make me happy, right now," he announced cheerfully, standing over the bartender, rubbing his fingers numbed from the keen air and from holding in the pintos, to which a slackened pull on the bits meant a tacit consent to a headlong run.

"Been to the dance?" The bartender yawned widely and went to mix the highball. "I been kinda waitin' up—but shucks! No tellin' when the crowd'll git in—not if they drink all they took with 'em."

"They were working hard to do just that when I left." Lance stood back to the stove. Having left in a hurry, without his overcoat, he was chilled to the bone, though the night had been mild for that time of the year. He hoped that the girl had not been uncomfortable—and yawned while the thought held him. He drank his highball, warmed himself comfortably and then, with some one's fur overcoat for a blanket, he disposed his big body on a near-by pool table, never dreaming that Mary Hope Douglas was remembering his tone, his words, his silence even; analyzing, weighing, wondering how much he had meant, or how little,—wondering whether she really hated him, whether she might justly call her ponderings by any name save curiosity. Such is the way of women the world over.

What Lance thought does not greatly matter. Such is the way of men that their thoughts sooner or later crystallize into action. The bartender would tell you that he went straight to sleep, with the fur coat pulled up over his ears and his legs uncovered, his modishly-shod feet extending beyond the end of the table. The bartender dozed in his chair, thinking it not worth while to close up, because the dance crowd might come straying in at any time with much noise and a great thirst, to say nothing of the possibility of thirsty men coming on the midnight freight that was always four or five hours late, and was now much overdue.

The freight arrived. Three men entered the saloon, drank whisky, talked for a few minutes and departed. The bartender took a long, heat-warped poker and attacked the red clinkers in the body of the stove, threw in a bucket of fresh coal, used the poker with good effect on the choked draft beneath, and went back to his chair and his dozing.

During the clamor of the fire-building Lance turned over, drawing up his feet and straightway extending them again; making a sleepy, futile clutch at the fur coat, that had slipped off his shoulders when he turned. The bartender reached out and flung the coat up on Lance's shoulders, and bit off a chew of tobacco and stowed it away in his cheek. Presently he dozed again.

Dawn seeped in through the windows. Lance, lying flat on his stomach with his face on his folded arms, slept soundly. The unpainted buildings across the street became visible in the gloomy, lifeless gray of a sunless morning. With the breeze that swept a flurry of gray dust and a torn newspaper down the street, came the rattle of a wagon, the sound of voices mingled in raucous, incoherent wrangling.

"They're comin'," yawned the bartender, glancing at the sleeper on the pool table. "Better wake up; they're comin' pickled and fighty, judgin' by the sound."

Lance sighed, turned his face away from the light and slept on, untroubled by the nearing tumult.

Galloping horses came first, ka-lup, ka-lup, ka-lup, a sharp staccato on the frosted earth. The rattle of the wagon ceased, resumed, stopped outside the saloon. Other galloping horsemen came up and stopped. The door was flung open violently, letting in men with unfinished sentences hot on their tongues.

"Next time a Lorrigan dance comes off—"

"What I'd a done, woulda—"

"Fix them damn Lorrigans!"

Detached phrases, no one man troubling to find a listener, the words came jumbled to the ears of Lance, who fancied himself in the bunk-house at home, with the boys just in from a ride somewhere. He was wriggling into a freshly uncomfortable posture on the table when the fur coat was pulled off him, letting the daylight suddenly into his eyes as his brain emerged from the fog of sleep.

"And here's the—guy that run away from me!" Bill Kennedy jerked off his hat and brought it down with a slap on Lance's face. "Run off to town, by jiminy, and hid! Run—"

Half asleep as he was—rather, just shocked awake—Lance heaved himself off the table and landed one square blow on Bill Kennedy's purple jaw. Bill staggered, caught himself and came back, arms up and fists guarding his face. Lance disentangled his feet from the fur coat, kicked it out of his way and struck again just as Kennedy was slugging at him.

At the bar the long line of men whirled, glasses in hand, to watch the fight. But it did not last long. Kennedy was drunk, and Lance was not. So presently Kennedy was crawling on his knees amongst some overturned chairs, and Lance was facing the crowd, every inch of him itching to fight.

"Who was it said he was going to fix them damn Lorrigans?" he demanded, coming at them warily. "I'm not packing a gun, but I'd like to lick a few of you fellows that tried to rough-house the dance I gave. Didn't cost you a cent; music, supper, everything furnished for you folks to have a good time—and the way you had it was to wreck the place like the rotten-souled hoodlums you are. Now, who is it wants to fix the damn Lorrigans?"

"Me, for one; what yuh go'n take my girl away from me for?" a flushed youth cried, and flung the dregs of his whisky glass at Lance. There was not more than a half teaspoon in the glass, but the intent was plain enough.

Lance walked up and knocked that young man staggering half across the room, slapped with the flat of his hand another who leered at him, whirled to meet some one who struck him a glancing blow on the ear, and flung him after the first.

"You're all of you drunk—it's a one-sided fight all the way through," he cried, parrying a blow from Kennedy, who had gotten to his feet and came at him again mouthing obscenity. "But I'll lick you, if you insist."

His coat had hampered him until it obligingly slit up the back. He wriggled out of the two halves, tore off his cuffs, and went after the crowd with his bare fists. Some one lifted a chair threateningly, and Lance seized it and sent it crashing through a window. Some one else threw a beer mug, but he ducked in time and broke a knuckle on the front teeth of the thrower. He saw a gap in the teeth, saw the man edge out of the fray spitting blood while he made for the door, and felt that the blow was worth a broken knuckle.

It was not a pretty fight. Such fights never are pretty. Lance himself was not a pretty sight, when he had finished. There had been shooting—but even in Jumpoff one hesitated to shoot down an unarmed man, so that the bar fixtures suffered most. Lance came out of it with a fragment of shirt hanging down his chest like a baby's bib, a cut lip that bled all over his chin, a cheek skinned and swelling rapidly, the bad knuckle and the full flavor of victory.

The saloon looked as though cattle had been driven through it. Bill Kennedy lay sprawled over a card table, whimpering inarticulately because he had lost his gun at the dance. The flushed youth who had rashly claimed Mary Hope as his girl was outside with a washbasin trying to stop his nose from bleeding. Others were ministering to their hurts as best they might, muttering the thoughts that they dared not express aloud.

Lance looked up from examination of his knuckle, caressed his cut lip with the tip of his tongue, pulled the fragment of shirt down as far as possible, gently rubbed his swelling cheek, and turned to the bartender.

"I never licked a man yet and sent him home thirsty," he said. "Set it out for the boys—and give me another highball. Then if you'll lend me a coat and a pair of gloves, I'll go home."

Peace was ratified in whisky drunk solemnly. Lance paid, and turned to go. One of the vanquished wabbled up to him and held out his hand to shake.

"You damn Lorrigans, you got us comin' and goin'," he complained, "but shake, anyway. I'm Irish meself, and I know a rale fight when I see it. What we didn't git at the dance before we left, by heavins you give us when we got into town—so I'm one that's game to say it was a fine dance and not a dull momint anywhere!"

"That's something," Lance grinned wryly and wriggled into the fur overcoat which the bartender generously lent him. He rejected the gloves when he found that his hands were puffed and painful, and went out to find breakfast.

Over a thick white cup of dubious coffee and a plate of sticky hot-cakes he meditated glumly on the general unappreciativeness of the world in general, and of the Black Rim in particular. What had happened at the schoolhouse he could only surmise, but from certain fragmentary remarks he had overheard he guessed that the schoolhouse probably had suffered as much as the saloon. Black Rim, it would seem, was determined that the Lorrigans should go on living up to their reputations, however peacefully inclined the Lorrigans might be.

Two disquieting thoughts he took with him to the stable when he went after the pinto team: Mary Hope would say that it was not a pleasant surprise which he had given her at Cottonwood Spring. And Belle,—he was not at all sure whether he was too big for Belle's quirt to find the tender places on his legs, but he was very sure that the Irishman spoke the truth. There would still be no dull moments for Lance when he confronted the owner of that pinto team.



CHAPTER FIFTEEN

HE TACKLES ANOTHER

Much to the disgust of Rosa and Subrosa, their new driver turned them from the main trail just as they were beginning to climb joyously the first grade of Devil's Tooth Ridge. Rosa and Subrosa were subdued, plainly resentful of their subjection, and fretting to be in their own stalls. Belle they could and did bully to a certain extent. They loved to fight things out with Belle, they never missed an opportunity for "acting up"—yet this morning they had been afraid to do more than nag at each other with bared teeth; afraid to lope when this big man said, "Hey—settle down, there!" with a grating kind of calm that carried with it a new and unknown menace.

Some one had exuberantly fired the Whipple shack, and the pintos wanted to whirl short around in their tracks when they saw the smoking embers. They had wanted to bolt straight out across the rocky upland and splinter the doubletree, and perhaps smash a wheel or two, and then stand and kick gleefully at the wreck. If head-shakings and flattened ears meant anything, Rosa and Subrosa were two disgruntled pintos that morning. They had not dared do more than cut a small half-circle out of the trail when they passed the blackened spot that had been the Whipple shack.

Now they turned down the rocky, half-formed trail to Cottonwood Spring, reluctantly but with no more than a half-hearted kick from Subrosa to register their disgust. And to that Lance gave no heed whatever. He did not so much as twitch a rein or yell a threat. He drove surely—with one hand mostly because of the broken knuckle, which was painful in the extreme—ignoring the pintos for the most part.

He was meditating rather gloomily upon the innate cussedness of human nature as it was developed in Black Rim Country. He was thinking of Mary Hope—a little; of her eyes, that were so obstinately blue, so antagonistically blue, and then, quite unexpectedly, so wistfully blue; of her voice, that dropped quite as unexpectedly into pure Scottish melody; of her primness, that sometimes was not prim at all, but quaintly humorous, or wistfully shy.

He was thinking more often of the dance that had started out so well and had ended—Lord knew how, except that it ended in a fight. He remembered striking, in that saloon, faces that had been pummeled before ever he sent a jab their way. There had been eyes already closed behind purple, puffy curtains of bruised flesh. He had fought animosity that was none of his creating.

Thinking of the fight, he thought of the wrecked saloon when the fight was over. Thinking of the wrecked saloon led him to think of the probable condition of the nice new schoolhouse. Thinking of that brought him back to Mary Hope,—to her face as it looked when she rode up to the place on Monday morning. Ride up to it she must, if she meant to go on teaching, for there was no more Whipple shack.

"Rotten bunch of rough-necks," he summed up the men of Black Rim and of Jumpoff. "And they'll blame the Devil's Tooth outfit—they'll say the Lorrigans did it. Oh, well—heck!"

So he drove down into the hollow, tied the pintos to the post where they stood the night before, crawled through the wire fence where Mary Hope had left a small three-cornered fragment of the coat that "wasna" hers at all, and went over to the schoolhouse, standing forlorn in the trampled yard with broken sandwiches and bits of orange peel and empty whisky flasks accentuating the unsightliness and disorder.

The door swung half open. The floor was scored, grimy with dirt tracked in on heedless feet and ground into the wax that had been liberally scattered over it to make the boards smooth for dancing. A window was broken,—by some one's elbow or by a pistol shot, Lance guessed. The planks placed along the wall on boxes to form seats were pulled askew, the stovepipe had been knocked down and lay disjointed and battered in a corner. It was not, in Lance's opinion, a pleasant little surprise for the girl with the Scotch blue eyes.

He pulled the door shut, picked up the empty whisky flasks and threw them, one after the other, as far as he could send them into a rocky gulch where Mary Hope would not be likely to go. Then he recrossed the enclosure, crawled through the fence, untied the pintos and drove home.

The bunk house emanated a pronounced odor of whisky and bad air, and much snoring, just as Lance expected. The horses dozed in the corral or tossed listlessly their trampled hay; the house was quiet, deserted looking, with the doors all closed and the blinds down in the windows of the room that had been the birthplace of Belle's three boys.

Lance knew that every one would be asleep to-day. The Devil's Tooth ranch had always slept through the day after a dance, with certain yawning intermissions at mealtimes.

He unhitched the pintos, turned them loose in the corral, caught his own horse, which one of the boys must have led home, and tied it to a post. From the chuck-wagon, standing just where Riley had driven it to a vacant spot beside the woodpile, Lance purloined a can of pork and beans, a loaf of bread, and some butter. These things he put in a bag.

For a minute he stood scowling at the silent house, undecided, wondering just how soundly Belle was sleeping. He was not afraid of Belle; no real Lorrigan was ever afraid of anything, as fear is usually defined. But he wanted to postpone for a time her reckoning with him. He wanted to face her when he had a free mind, when she had slept well, when her temper was not so edgy. He wanted other things, however, and he proceeded to get those things with the least effort and delay.

He wanted soft cloths. On the clothesline dangled three undershirts, three pair of drawers and several mismated socks. The shirts and drawers were of the kind known as fleece-lined—which means that they are fuzzy on the inside. They were Riley's complete wardrobe so far as underwear went, but Lance did not trouble himself with unimportant details. He took them all, because he had a swift mental picture of the schoolhouse floor which would need much scrubbing before it would be clean.

He was ready to mount and ride away when he remembered something else that he would need. "Lye!" he muttered, and retraced his steps to the house. Now he must go into the kitchen shed for what he wanted, and Riley slept in a little room next the shed. But Riley was snoring with a perfect rhythm that bespoke a body sunk deep in slumber, so Lance searched until he found what he wanted, and added a full box of a much-advertised washing powder for good measure. He was fairly well burdened when he finally started up the trail again, but he believed that he had everything that he would need, even a lump of putty, and a pane of glass which he had carefully removed from a window of the chicken house, and which he hoped would fit.

You may think that he rode gladly upon his errand; that the thought of Mary Hope turned the work before him into a labor of love. It did not. Lance Lorrigan was the glummest young man in the whole Black Rim, and there was much glumness amongst the Rim folk that day, let me tell you. He ached from fighting, from dancing, from sleeping on the pool table, from hanging for hours to those darned pintos. His left hand was swollen, and pains from the knuckle streaked like hot wires to his elbow and beyond. His lips were sore—so sore he could not even swear with any comfort—and even the pulling together of his black eyebrows hurt his puffed cheek. And he never had scrubbed a floor in his life, and knew that he was going to hate the work even worse than he hated the men who had made the scrubbing necessary.

While he went up the Slide trail he wished that he had never thought of giving a dance. He wished he had gone down to Los Angeles for his Easter holiday, as one of his pals had implored him to do. He wished Mary Hope would quit teaching school; what did she want to stay in the Black Rim for, anyway? Why didn't she get out where she could amount to something?

If there were any caressing cadences in the voice of Lance Lorrigan, any provocative tilt to his eyebrows, any tenderness in his smile, anything enigmatical in his personality, none of these things were apparent when he set the first bucket of water on the stove to heat. He had added to his charms a broad streak of soot across his forehead and a scratch on his neck, acquired while putting up the stovepipe. He had set his lip to bleeding because he forgot that it was cut, and drew it sharply between his teeth when the stovepipe fell apart just when he was sure it was up to stay. He had invented two new cuss-words. What he had not done was weaken in his determination to make that small schoolhouse a pleasant surprise for Mary Hope.

He did the work thoroughly, though a woman might have pointed out wet corners and certain muddy splashes on the wall. He lost all count of the buckets of water that he carried from the spring, and it occurred to him that Mary Hope would need a new broom, for the one Belle had provided was worn down to a one-sided wisp that reminded him of the beard of a billy goat. He used two cans of condensed lye and all of the washing powder, and sneezed himself too weak too swear over the fine cloud of acrid dust that filled his nostrils when he sprinkled the powder on the floor. But the floor was clean when he finished, and so was the platform outside.

Of Riley's underwear there was left the leg of one pair of drawers, which Lance reserved for dusting the desks and the globe that had by some miracle escaped. While the floor was drying he took out the broken windowpane, discovered that the one from the chicken house was too short, and cut his thumb while he chipped off a piece of glass from the other to fill the space. He did not make a very good job of it. To hold the glass in place, he used shingle nails, which he had to hunt for on the ground where they had dropped from the roof during shingling, and when they had been driven into the frame—with the handle of the screwdriver—they showed very plainly from the inside. Then the putty did not seem to want to stick anywhere, but kept crumbling off in little lumps. So Lance threw the putty at a gopher that was standing up nibbling one of Riley's sandwiches, and went after the desks.

These took some time to unwrap and carry into place. There were only twelve, but Lance would have sworn before a jury that he carried at least fifty single desks into the schoolhouse that afternoon, and screwed them to the floor, and unscrewed them because the darned things did not line up straight when viewed from the teacher's desk, and he had a vivid impression that blue, blue eyes can be very critical over such things as a crooked line of desks!

Perhaps it was because his head ached splittingly and his injured hand throbbed until it was practically useless; at any rate the cleaning of the schoolhouse, especially the placing of the desks, became fixed afterward in his memory as the biggest, the most disagreeable incident in his whole vacation.

At four-thirty however the task was accomplished. At the spring, Lance scrubbed the water bucket clean, washed the dipper, placed them behind the door. He got wearily into the borrowed fur coat, took a last comprehensive survey of the room from the doorway, went back to erase certain sentences scrawled on the blackboard by some would-be humorist, took another look at the work of his aching hands, and went away with the coffeepot in his hand and the screwdriver showing its battered wooden handle from the top of his pocket. He was too tired to feel any glow of accomplishment, any great joy in the thought of Mary Hope's pleasure. He was not even sure that she would feel any pleasure.

His chief emotion was a gloomy satisfaction in knowing that the place was once more presentable, that it was ready for Mary Hope to hang up her hat and ring her little bell and start right in teaching. That what the Lorrigans had set out to do, the Lorrigans had done.

At the ranch he found Riley at the bunk house wrangling with the boys over his lost wardrobe. In Riley's opinion it was a darned poor idea of a darned poor joke, and it took a darned poor man to perpetrate it. Lance's arrival scarcely interrupted the jangle of voices. The boys had bruises of their own to nurse, and they had scant sympathy for Riley, and they told him so.

Lance went into the house. He supposed he would have to replace Riley's clothes, which he did, very matter-of-factly and without any comment whatever, restitution being in this case a mere matter of sorting out three suits of his own underwear, which were much better than Riley's, and placing them on the cook's bed.

"That you, Lance? Where in the world have you been all this while? I came mighty near going gunning after the man that stole my team, let me tell you—and I would have, if Tom hadn't found your horse tied up to the fence and guessed you'd gone to take Mary Hope home. But I must say, honey, you never followed any short cut!"

This was much easier than Lance had expected, so he made shift to laugh, though it hurt his lip cruelly. "Had to take her to Jumpoff, Belle. Then I had to clean up that crowd of toughs that—"

"You cleaned up Tom's leavin's, then!" Belle made grim comment through Lance's closed door. "I didn't think there was enough left of 'em to lick, by the time our boys got through. Haven't you been to bed yet, for heaven's sake!"

"I'm going to bed," mumbled Lance, "when I've had a bath and a meal. And to-morrow, Belle, I think I'll hit the trail for 'Frisco. Hope you don't mind if I leave a few days early. I've got to stop off anyway to see a fellow in Reno I promised—any hot water handy?"

There was a perceptible pause before Belle answered, and then it was not about the bath water. She would not have been Belle Lorrigan if she had permitted a quiver in her voice, yet it made Lance thoughtful.

"Honey, I don't blame you for going. I expect we are awful rough—and you'd notice it, coming from civilized folks. But—you know, don't you, that the Lorrigans never spoiled your party for you? It—it just happened that the Jumpoff crowd brought whisky out from town. We tried to make it pleasant—and it won't happen again—"

"Bless your heart!" Clad with superb simplicity in a bathrobe, Lance appeared unexpectedly and gathered her into his arms. "If you think I'm getting so darn civilized I can't stay at home, take a look at me! By heck, Belle, I'll bet there isn't a man in the whole Black Rim that got as much fun out of that scrap as I did! But I've got to go." He patted her reassuringly on the head, laid his good cheek against hers for a minute and turned abruptly away into his own room. He closed the door and stood absent-mindedly feeling his swollen hand. "I've got to go," he repeated under his breath. "I might get foolish if I stayed. Darned if I'll make a fool of myself over any girl!"



CHAPTER SIXTEEN

ABOUT A PIANO

In the lazy hour just after a satisfying dinner, Lance stood leaning over an end of the piano, watching Belle while she played—he listened and smoked a cigarette and looked as though he hadn't a thing on his mind.

"I remember you used to sing that a lot for the little Douglas girl," he observed idly. "She used to sit and look at you—my word, but her eyes were the bluest, the lonesomest eyes I ever saw! She seemed to think you were next to angels when you sang. I saw it in her face, but I was too much of a kid then to know what it was." He lighted a fresh cigarette, placed it between Belle's lips so that she need not stop playing while she smoked, and laughed as if he were remembering something funny.

"She always looked so horrified when she saw you smoking," he said. "And so adoring when you sang, and so lonesome when she had to ride away. She was a queer kid—and she's just as unexpected now—just as Scotch. Didn't you find her that way, dad?"

"She was Scotch enough," Tom mumbled from his chair by the fire. "Humpin' hyenas! She was like handlin' a wildcat!"

"The poor kid never did have a chance to be human," said Belle, and ceased playing for a moment. "Good heavens, how she did enjoy the two hours I gave her at the piano! She's got the makings of a musician, if she could keep at it."

"We-ell—" Having artfully led Belle to this point, Lance quite as artfully edged away from it. "You gave her all the chance you could. And she ought to be able to go on, if she wants to. I suppose old Scotty's human enough to get her something to play on."

"Him? Human!" Tom shifted in his chair. "If pianos could breed and increase into a herd, and he could ship a carload every fall, Scotty might spend a few dollars on one."

"It's a darned shame," Belle exclaimed, dropping her fingers to the keys again. "Mary Hope just starves for everything that makes life worth living. And that old devil—"

"Say—don't make me feel like a great, overgrown money-hog," Lance protested. "A girl starving for music, because she hasn't a piano to play on. And a piano costs, say, three or four hundred dollars. Of course, we've got the money to buy one—I suppose I could dig up the price myself. I was thinking I'd stake our schoolhouse to a library. That's something it really needs. But a piano—I wish you hadn't said anything about starving. I know I'd hate to go hungry for music, but—"

"Well, humpin' hyenas! I'll buy the girl a piano. I guess it won't break the outfit to pay out a few more dollars, now we've started. We're outlaws, anyway—might as well add one more crime to the list. Only, it don't go to the Douglas shack—it goes into the schoolhouse. Lance, you go ahead and pick out some books and ship 'em on to the ranch, and I'll see they get over there. Long as we've started fixin' up a school, we may as well finish the job up right. By Henry, I'll show the Black Rim that there ain't anything small about the Lorrigans, anyway!"

"Dad, I think you're showin' yourself a real sport," Lance laughed. "We-ell, if you're game to buy a piano, I'm game to buy books. We staked Black Rim to a school, so we'll do the job right. And by the way, Belle, if you're going to get me to Jumpoff in time for that evening train, don't you think it's about time you started?"

That is how it happened that Mary Hope walked into the schoolhouse one Monday and found a very shiny new piano standing across one corner of the room where the light was best. On the top was a pile of music. In another corner of the room stood a bookcase and fifty volumes; she counted them in her prim, frugal way that she had learned from her mother. They were books evidently approved by some Board of Education for school libraries, and did not interest her very much. Not when a piano stood in the other corner.

She was early, so she opened it and ran her fingers over the keys. She knew well enough who had brought it there, and her mouth was pressed into a straight line, her eyes were troubled.

The Lorrigans—always the Lorrigans! Why did they do these things when no one expected goodness or generosity from them? Why had they built the schoolhouse—and then given a dance where every one got drunk and the whole thing ended in a fight? Every one said it was the Lorrigans who had brought the whisky. Some one told her they had a five-gallon keg of it in the shed behind the schoolhouse, and she thought it must be true, the way all the men had acted. And why had they burned the Whipple shack and all the school books, so that she could not have school until more books were bought?—an expense which the Swedes, at least, could ill afford.

Why had Lance taken her to Jumpoff, away from the fighting, and then gone straight to the saloon and gotten so drunk that he fought every one in town before he left in the morning? Why had he never come near her again? And now that he was back in California, why did he ignore her completely, and never send so much as a picture postal to show that he gave her a thought now and then?

Mary Hope would not play the piano that day. She was more stern than usual with her pupils, and would not so much as answer them when they asked her where the piano and all the books had come from. Which was a foolish thing to do, since the four Boyle children were keen enough to guess, and sure to carry the news home, and to embellish the truth in true range-gossip style.

Mary Hope fully decided that she would have the piano hauled back to the Lorrigans. Later, she was distressed because she could think of no one who would take the time or the trouble to perform the duty, and a piano she had to admit is not a thing you can tie behind the cantle of your saddle, or carry under your arm. The books were a different matter. They were for the school. But the piano—well, the piano was for Mary Hope Douglas, and Mary Hope Douglas did not mean to be patronized in this manner by Lance Lorrigan or any of his kin.

But she was a music-hungry little soul, and that night after she was sure that the children had ridden up over the basin's brim and were out of hearing, Mary Hope sat down and began to play. When she began to play she began to cry, though she was hardly conscious of her tears. She seemed to hear Lance Lorrigan again, saying, "Don't be lonely, you girl. Take the little pleasant things that come—" She wondered, in a whispery, heart-achey way, if he had meant the piano when he said that. If he had meant—just a piano, and a lot of books for school!

The next thing that she realized was that the light was growing dim, and that her throat was aching, and that she was playing over and over a lovesong that had the refrain:

"Come back to me, sweetheart, and love me as before— Come back to me, sweetheart, and leave me nevermore!"

Which was perfectly imbecile, a song she had always hated because of its sickly sentimentality. She had no sweetheart, and having none, she certainly did not want him back. But she admitted that there was a certain melodious swing to the tune, and that her fingers had probably strayed into the rhythm of it while she was thinking of something totally different.

The next day she played a little at noontime for the children, and when school was over she played for two hours. And the next day after that slipped away—she really had meant to ride over to the AJ, or send a note by the children, asking Jim Boyle if he could please remove the piano and saying that she felt it was too expensive a gift for the school to accept from the Lorrigans.

On the third day she really did send a prim little note to Jim Boyle, and she received a laconic reply, wholly characteristic of the Black Rim's attitude toward the Devil's Tooth outfit.

"Take all you can git and git all you can without going to jale. That's what the Lorrigans are doing, Yrs truly,

"J. A. Boyle."

It was useless to ask her father. She had known that all along. When Alexander Douglas slipped the collars up on the necks of his horses, he must see where money would be gained from the labor. And there was no money for the Douglas pocket in hauling a piano down the Devil's Tooth Ridge.

But the whole Black Rim was talking about it. Mary Hope felt sure that they were saying ill-natured things behind her back. Never did she meet man or woman but the piano was mentioned. Sometimes she was asked, with meaning smiles, how she had come to stand in so well with the Devil's Tooth. She knew that they were all gossiping of how Lance Lorrigan had taken her home from the dance, with Belle Lorrigan's bronco team. She had been obliged to return a torn coat to Mrs. Miller, and to receive her own and a long lecture on the wisdom of choosing one's company with some care. She had been obliged to beg Mrs. Miller not to mention the matter to her parents, and the word had gone round, and had reached Mother Douglas—and you can imagine how pleasant that made home for Mary Hope.

Because she was lonely, and no one seemed willing to take it away, she kept the piano. She played it, and while she played she wept because the Rim folk simply would not understand how little she wanted the Lorrigans to do things for her. And then, one day, she hit upon a plan of redeeming herself, for regaining the self-respect she felt was slipping from her with every day that the piano stood in the schoolhouse.

She would give a series of dances—they would be orderly, well-behaved dances, with no refreshments stronger than coffee and lemonade!—and she would sell tickets, and invite every one she knew, and beg them to come and help to pay for the school piano.

Even her mother approved that plan, though she did not approve dances. "But the folk are that sinfu' they canna bide wi' any pleasure save the hoppin' aboot wi' their arms around the waist of a woman," she sighed. "A church social wad be far more tae my liking, Hope—if we had only a church!"

"Well, since there isn't any church, and people won't go to anything but a dance, I shall have to get the money with dances," Mary Hope replied with some asperity. The subject was beginning to wear her nerves. "Pay for it I shall, if it takes all my teacher's salary for five years! I wish the Lorrigans had minded their own business. I've heard nothing but piano ever since it came there. I hate the Lorrigans! Sometimes I almost hate the piano."

"Ye shud hae thought on all that before ye accepit a ride home wi' young Lance, wi' a coat ye didna own on your back, and disobedience in your heart. 'Tis the worst of them a' ye chose to escort ye, Hope, and if he thought he could safely presume to gi' ye a present like yon piano, ye hae but yersel' tae blame for it."

"He didn't give it!" cried Mary Hope, her eyes ablaze with resentment. "He wasna here when it came. I havena heard from him and I dinna want to hear from him. It was Belle Lorrigan gave the piano, as I've said a million times. And I shall pay for it—"

"Not from your ain pocket will ye pay. Ye can give the dance—and if ye make it the Fourth of July, with a picnic in the grove, and a dance in the schoolhouse afterwards, 'tis possible Jeanie may come up from Pocatello wi' friends—and twa dollars wad no be too much to ask for a day and a night of entertainment."

"Well, mother! When you do—" Mary Hope bit her tongue upon the remainder of the sentence. She had very nearly told her mother that when she did choose to be human she had a great head for business.

It was a fine, practical idea, and Mary Hope went energetically about its development. She consulted Mrs. Kennedy. Mrs. Kennedy also had friends in Pocatello, and she obligingly gave the names of them all. She strongly advised written invitations, with a ticket enclosed and the price marked plainly. She said it was a crying shame the way the Lorrigans had conducted their dance, and that Mary Hope ought to be very careful and not include any of that rough bunch in this dance.

"Look how that young devil, Lance Lorrigan, abused my Bill, right before everybody!" she cited, shifting her youngest child, who was teething, to her hip that she might gesticulate more freely. "And look how they all piled into our crowd and beat 'em up! Great way to do—give a dance and then beat up the folks that come to it! And look at what Lance done right here in town—as if it wasn't enough, what they done out there! Bill's got a crick in his back yet, where Lance knocked him over the edge of a card table. You pay 'em for the piano, Hope; I'll help yuh scare up a crowd. But don't you have none of the Lorrigans, or there'll be trouble sure!"

Mary Hope flushed. "I could hardly ask the Lorrigans to come and help pay for their own present," she pointed out in her prim tone. "I had never intended to ask the Lorrigans."

"Well, maybe not. But if you did ask them, I know lots of folks that wouldn't go a step—and my Bill's one," said Mrs. Kennedy.

So much depends upon one's point of view. Black Rim gossip, which persisted in linking Mary Hope's name with Lance Lorrigan, grinned among themselves while they mentioned the piano, the schoolhouse, and the library as evidence of Lance's being "stuck on her." The Boyle children had frequently tattled to Mary Hope what they heard at home. Lance had done it all because he was in love with her.

Denial did not mend matters, even if Mary Hope's pride had not rebelled against protesting that the gossip was not true. Lance Lorrigan was not in love with her. Over and over she told herself so, fiercely and with much attention to evidence which she considered convincing. Only twice she had seen him in the two weeks of his visit. Once he had come to mend the lock his father had broken, and he had taken her home from the dance because of the fighting. Never had he made love to her.... Here she would draw a long breath and wonder a little, and afterwards shake her head and say to herself that he thought no more of her than of Jennie Miller. He—he just had a way with him.

Mary Hope's point of view was, I think, justifiable. Leaving out the intolerable implication that Lance had showered benefits upon her, she felt that the Lorrigans had been over-generous. The schoolhouse and the books might be accepted as a public-spirited effort to do their part. But the piano, since it had not been returned, must be paid for. And it seemed to Mary Hope that the Lorrigans themselves would deeply resent being invited to a dance openly given for the purpose of raising money to repay them. It would never do; she could not ask them to come.

Moreover, if the Lorrigans came there would be trouble, whether there was whisky or not. At the house-warming dance the Lorrigans had practically cleaned out the crowd and sent them home long before daylight. There had been no serious shooting—the Lorrigans had fought with their fists and had somehow held the crowd back from the danger-line of gun-play. But Mary Hope feared there would be a killing the next time that the Jumpoff crowd and the Lorrigans came together.

She tried to be just, but she had heard only one side of the affair,—which was not the Lorrigan side. Whispers had long been going round among the Black Rim folk; sinister whispers that had to do with cattle and horses that had disappeared mysteriously from the Rim range. Mary Hope could not help hearing the whispers, could not help wondering if underneath them there was a basis of truth. Her father still believed, in spite of Tom's exoneration, that his spotty yearling had gone down the gullets of Devil's Tooth men. She did not know, but it seemed to her that where every one hinted at the same thing, there must be some truth in their hints.

All of which proves, I think, that Mary Hope's point of view was the only one that she could logically hold, living as she did in the camp of the enemy; having, as she had, a delicate sense of propriety, and wanting above all things to do nothing crude and common. As she saw it, she simply could not ask any of the Lorrigans to her picnic and dance on the Fourth of July.



CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE LORRIGAN VIEWPOINT

I have said that much depends upon one's point of view. Mary Hope's viewpoint was not shared by the Devil's Tooth. They had one of their own, and to them it seemed perfectly logical, absolutely justifiable.

They heard all about the Fourth of July picnic and dance, to be held at Cottonwood Spring and in the schoolhouse of their own building. Immediately they remembered that Cottonwood Spring was on Lorrigan land, that Lorrigan money had paid for the material that went into the schoolhouse, that Lorrigan labor had built it, Lorrigan generosity had given it over to the public as represented by Mary Hope Douglas and the children who came to her to be taught. In their minds loomed the fact that Lorrigan money had bought books for the school, and that Tom Lorrigan himself had paid close to four hundred dollars for the piano.

They heard that invitations were being sent broadcast, that a crowd was coming from Pocatello, from Lava, from Jumpoff—invited to come and spend a day and night in merry-making. Yet no invitation came to the Devil's Tooth ranch, not a word was said to them by Mary Hope, not a hint that they were expected, or would be welcome.

Belle met Mary Hope in the trail one day, just a week before the Fourth. Mary Hope was riding home from school; Belle was driving out from Jumpoff. It is the custom of the outland places for acquaintances to stop for a bit of friendly conversation when they meet, since meetings are so far between. But, though Belle slowed the pintos to a walk, Mary Hope only nodded, said, "How do you do," and rode on.

"She looked guilty," Belle reported wrathfully to Tom and the boys at the supper table. "Guilty as sin. She seemed to be afraid I was going to ask her if I couldn't come to her dance. The little fool! Does she think for a minute I'd go? She hasn't so much as thanked you for that piano, Tom. She hasn't said one word."

"Well, I didn't put my name and ad-dress on it," Tom palliated the ingratitude while he buttered a hot biscuit generously. "And there wasn't any name on the books to show who bought 'em. Maybe she thinks—"

"I don't care what she thinks! It's the way she acts that counts. Everybody in Jumpoff has got invitations to her picnic and dance. They say it's to pay us for the piano—and they think she's doing some wonderful stunt. And we're left out in the cold!"

"We never was in where it was right warm, since I can remember," said Al. "Except when we made it warm ourselves."

"Sam Pretty Cow was saying yesterday—" and Duke repeated a bit of gossip that had a gibe at the Lorrigans for its point. "He got it over to Hitchcocks. It come from the Douglases. I guess Mary Hope don't want nothing of us—except what she can get out of us. We been a good thing, all right—easy marks."

Duke had done the least for her and therefore felt qualified to say the most. His last sentence did its work. Tom pulled his eyebrows together, drew his lip between his teeth and leaned back in his chair, thinking deeply, his eyes glittering between his half-closed lids.

"Easy marks, ay?" he snorted. "The Lorrigans have been called plenty of things, fur back as I can remember, but by the humpin' hyenas, they never was called easy marks before!"

That was Tom's last comment on the subject. Belle, not liking the look on his face, because she knew quite well what it portended, passed him two kinds of preserves and changed the subject. Al and Duke presently left for the bunk house. Mary Hope's party and her evident intention to slight the Lorrigans was not mentioned again for days.

But Tom's wrath was smoldering. He was not hasty. He waited. He himself met Mary Hope in the trail one day, lifted his hat to her without a word and rode on. Mary Hope let him go with a chilly nod and a murmured greeting which was no more than an empty form. Certainly she did not read Tom's mind, did not dream that he was thinking of the piano,—and from an angle that had never once presented itself to her.

So, now that you see how both were justified in their opinions, as formed from different points of view, let me tell you what happened.

Mary Hope had her picnic, with never a thunderstorm to mar the day. Which is unusual, since a picnic nearly always gets itself rained upon. She had sent out more than a hundred invitations—tickets two dollars, please—and there were more who invited themselves and had to be supplied with tickets cut hastily out of pasteboard boxes that had held sandwiches.

Mary Hope was jubilant. Mother Douglas, as official hostess, moved here and there among the women who fussed over the baskets and placated with broken pieces of cake their persistent offspring. Mother Douglas actually smiled, though her face plainly showed that it was quite unaccustomed to the expression, and tilted the smile downward at the corners. Mother Douglas was a good woman, but she had had little in her life to bring smiles, and her habitual expression was one of mournful endurance.

It was sultry, and toward evening the mosquitoes swarmed out of the lush grass around the spring and set the horses stamping and moving about uneasily. But it was a very successful picnic, with all the chatter, all the gourmandizing, all the gossip, all the childish romping in starched white frocks, all the innocuous pastimes that one expects to find at picnics.

Mary Hope wondered how in the world they were all going to find room inside the schoolhouse to dance. She had been frugal in the matter of music, dreading to spend any money in hiring professional musicians, lest she might not have enough people to justify the expense. Now she wished nervously that she had done as Lance Lorrigan had done, and brought musicians from Lava. Of course, there had been no piano when Lance gave his party, which was different. She herself meant to play, and Art Miller had brought his fiddle, and Jennie had volunteered to "chord" with him. But, Mary Hope felt much nervous apprehension lest these Pocatello and Lava people should think it was just Scotch stinginess on her part.