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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.
102CHAPTER NINEA 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 ranch103there 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 her104five 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 not105certain 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 been106loosened 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!Shameon 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 through107anything,” 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.”
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“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, originally109made 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.”
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“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’t111reckon 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.
“Ogisand,” said Minnie Boyle. “Andskollisshall. Swede’s easy. Andmedmeanswith––”
“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 your112horses 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 like113this––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 youdarecome in here!” Mary Hope called out, her voice shrill with excitement. “I––I’llbrainyou!”
“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 dug114her 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 spilling115from 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 particular116moment. 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 because117he 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.
118CHAPTER TENTHE 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, and119Lance 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 must120remember 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, theysayyou are my mother. And––do you want to know, honestly, what dad has been doing?”
“I’mgoingto 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––”
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“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 I122wouldn’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, if123they 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,somebodyhad 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 and124Jim 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 looks125to 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––aregularschoolhouse, 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 of126wood 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 that127was 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 to128some 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’tletit 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 a129revolver 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.130He 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?”
131
“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? A132yard––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.
133CHAPTER ELEVENLANCE 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 being134hampered 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 of135exile. 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! In136two 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,137pulling 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 bashfully138turning 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.”