245
“Why not? You’ve just come from the Lorrigans, haven’t you?” Lance studied her face. “You must have, or you wouldn’t be on this trail.”
“I went down to pay for the schoolhouse, since your father took the piano away.––And he would not take the money, and he said he would burn the house if I don’t teach in it––and I’ll die before ever I’ll open the door again, unless he takes the money. And he said if I left the money he would throw it down the crevice yonder––and he woulddoit! And do you think I’ll be under any obligation to Tom Lorrigan? You called my father hard, but your father is the hardest man that ever lived. The Lorrigans shallnot––”
Lance laughed, set her hat wrong side before on her head, tucked the elastic band under her chin, laughed again when she pettishly removed it and set the hat straight. “I wouldn’t worry over the schoolhouse right now––nor Tom Lorrigan either,” he said. “Look at your horse down there. If you’re all right, I’ll go down and see how many bones he’s broken. You had a chance for a nasty pile-up. Do you know that?”
“I’m grateful,” said Mary Hope soberly. “But it was Lorrigan meanness brought me here; it was a Lorrigan got me into the trouble now, and a Lorrigan got me out of it. It’salwaysthe Lorrigans.”
“Yes, and a Lorrigan’s got to see you a little farther before you’re through with them, so cheer246up.” Lance laughed again, an amused little chuckle that was calculated to take the droop out of Mary Hope’s lips, and failed completely.
He saw her cheeks were reddening, saw too that her face gave evidence of no particular bodily pain. She had probably fainted from fright, more than anything else, he decided, and her fright was now forgotten in her animosity. He slid off the bank, went down to where Jamie lay, took him by the bridle and urged him to stand. Which Jamie, after one or two scrambling attempts, managed to do. But the horse was hurt. He could scarcely hobble to the trail.
Without paying any visible attention to Mary Hope, Lance removed her saddle from Jamie, and brought it up to where she sat dispiritedly watching him. His manner was brisk, kind enough, but had an aloofness which made her keenly aware that he accepted her adherence to the feud and tacitly took his own place with the Lorrigans. Over this emergency she felt that he had unspokenly set a flag of truce. His attitude depressed her.
“There are just two things to do,” he said, laying the saddle at her feet. “You may ride that livery horse back home, and I’ll come along to-morrow and pick him up and take him in with me to Jumpoff; or you can let me go down to the ranch and bring up a gentle horse, and you can ride that home. I can get him when I come out to-morrow247with my traps. I advise you to take the gentle horse from the ranch, after the shake-up you’ve had. This town horse is not easy gaited, by any means. Your horse I’ll manage to get down to the ranch and do what I can for him. It’s his shoulder, I think, from the way he acts. He may be all right after a while.”
Mary Hope looked distressfully at Jamie, standing dejected where Lance had left him, his head sagging, every line of him showing how sick of life he was. She glanced swiftly up at Lance, bent her head suddenly and pressed the tips of her fingers along her cheek bones, wiping away tears that came brimming over her eyelids.
“You’d better let me bring up a horse and take you home,” Lance urged, the caressing note creeping into his voice.
“Oh, no! I can’t! I––what do I care how I get home? But if your father won’t take the money––You don’tknow!The whole Rim talks and gossips until I wish I were dead! And I can’t go on using the schoolhouse––and Tom Lorrigan says if I don’t––” She was crying at last, silently, miserably, her face hidden behind her hands.
“He’ll take the money.” Lance, after an indeterminate minute while he watched her, laid his hand lightly on her shoulder. “I’ll see that dad takes it. And I’ll give you a bill of sale that ought to shut the Black Rim mouths. I’m a Lorrigan248and I’m not going to apologize for the blood that’s in me, but I want you to know that if I had been home on the night of the Fourth the Lorrigans wouldn’t have done the rotten cheap thing they did.”
Mary Hope heard him tearing a leaf out of his memorandum book, looked up at him while he wrote rapidly. Without any comment whatever he gave her the paper, went up to where the hired horse stood, and coaxed it down through the Slide. Quickly, with the deftness that told of lifelong intimacy with horses and saddles, he set her own saddle on the hired horse, while Mary Hope read the terse bill of sale that set forth the legal “Ten dollars and other valuable considerations,” and was signed “Thomas Lorrigan, per L. M. Lorrigan.” It all seemed very businesslike, and heartened her so much that she was willing to be nice to Lance Lorrigan. But Lance remained strictly neutral.
“I’ll lead him up the Slide for you,” he said unemotionally when the horse was ready. “After he’s over that, I think you’ll be all right; you’re a good rider. And you need not feel under any obligations then to the Lorrigans. I was practically through with the horse, anyway, and it will be no trouble at all to drive by your place and get him to-morrow.”
“I can lead him up––” Mary Hope began, but Lance had already turned the horse and started249him up the Slide, so there was nothing for her to do but follow.
At the top she gave him the money bag, which he took without any words whatever on the subject. He held the horse until she had mounted, made sure that she was all right, chilled by his perfect politeness her nervous overture toward a more friendly parting, lifted his hat and turned immediately to go back down the Slide.
Mary Hope glanced back over her shoulder and saw his bobbing hat crown. “Ah, he’s just a Lorrigan, and I hate them all. But he let me pay––I’m quits with them now––and I’ll never in my life speak to one of them again!”
250CHAPTER TWENTYAS HE LIVED, SO HE DIED
Belle Lorrigan, with Lance beside her on the one seat of the swaying buckboard, swung through the open gate of the Douglas yard and drove to the sun-baked, empty corral. In the doorway of the house, as they dashed past, the bent body of Mother Douglas appeared. She stood staring after them, her eyes blurred with tears. “It’s that huzzy, the Lorrigan woman,” she said flatly, wiping her face on her checked apron, stiffly starched and very clean. “Do you go, Mary Hope, and get them the horse they’ve come for. If Hugh were here––”
From somewhere within the house the voice of Aleck Douglas rose suddenly in a high-keyed vindictive chanting. Mother Douglas turned, but the old man came with a rush across the floor, brushed past her and went swaying drunkenly to the corral, shouting meaningless threats. After him went Mary Hope, her eyes wide, her skirt flapping about her ankles as she ran.
“Oh, please do not pay any attention to father!”251she cried, hurrying to overtake him before he reached the buckboard. “He’s out of his head with pain, and he will not have a doctor––Father! listen! They only came for the horse I borrowed yesterday––they’re going directly––come back and get into your bed, father!”
Aleck Douglas was picking up a broken neck yoke for a weapon when Lance sprang out over a wheel and grappled with him. The old man’s right arm was swollen to twice its natural size and bandaged to his shoulder. His eyes were bloodshot, his breath fetid with the fever that burned him when he turned his face close to Lance.
“It’s his arm makes him crazy,” said Mary Hope breathlessly. “Last night it began, and mother and I cannot keep him in his bed, and we don’t knowwhatto do! He will not have a doctor, he says––”
“He’d better have,” said Belle shortly, hanging to the pintos that danced and snorted at the excitement. “I’ll send one out. Lance, you better stay here and look after him––he’ll kill somebody yet. Aren’t there any men on the place, for heaven’s sake?”
Mary Hope said there wasn’t, that Hugh was not expected back before night. They had bought a horse from the Millers, and it had jumped the fence and gone home, and Hugh had gone after it. Then she ran to do what she could to calm her father. Scotty, it would seem, wanted to drive the252Lorrigans off his land because they were thieves and cutthroats and had come there to rob him boldly in the broad light of day.
“Bat him on the head if you have to, Lance,” Belle called, cold-eyed but capable. “He’ll get sunstroke out here in this heat. And if you can get him into the house you had better tie him down till a doctor comes.” Then she left, with the pintos circling in a lope to get out through the gate and into the trail.
The last she saw of them, Lance and Mary Hope were both struggling with the old man, forcing him foot by foot to the house, where Mother Douglas stood on the doorstep crying, with her apron to her face.
She had the tough little team in a white lather, with their stubborn heads hanging level with their knees, when she stopped at the little railroad station and sent a peremptory wire to the Lava doctor who was most popular in the Black Rim. She waited until he arrived on the train which he luckily had time to catch, and then, the pintos having somewhat recovered under the solicitous rubbing-down of a hollow-chested stableman, she hustled the doctor and his black case into the buckboard and made the return drive in one hour and fifty minutes, which was breaking even her own record, who was called the hardest driver in the whole Rim country.
They found Lance with his coat off and the perspiration253streaming down his face, battling with Aleck Douglas who was raving still of the Lorrigans and threatening to kill this one who would not leave him alone to die in peace. Mary Hope and her mother were in the hot little kitchen where the last of the sunlight streamed through the faded green mosquito netting that sagged in and out as the breeze of sundown pushed through lazily.
The Lava doctor did not say much. He quieted the raving with his hypodermic needle, removed the amateurish bandage from the hand and the arm, looked at the wound, applied a cooling lotion, and dexterously wound on a fresh bandage. It seemed very little, Mary Hope thought dully, for a doctor to come all the way from Lava to do.
He would stay all night, he said. And the Lorrigans went home silent, depressed, even Belle finding nothing to say.
“I’ll ride over in the morning and see how he is,” Lance observed, as the tired little team climbed the Devil’s Tooth Ridge. “I’ll have to get the horse, anyway.”
The next morning, when he arrived rather early, he learned from Mary Hope that her father had died just before daylight, and that Hugh had not come back, and the doctor wanted to be taken to Jumpoff, and she could not leave her mother there alone, and a coffin must be ordered, and she did not knowwhatto do. She was past tears, it seemed to Lance. She was white and worn and worried, and254there was something in her eyes that made them too tragic to look at. He stood just outside the kitchen door and talked with her in a low voice so that Mother Douglas, weeping audibly in the kitchen, need not know he was there.
“The doctor can ride that livery horse in,” he said soothingly. “And I’ll wire to Lava for anything that you want, and notify any friends you would like to have come and see you through this.” He was very careful not to accent the word friends, but Mary Hope gave him a quick, pathetic glance when he said it.
“You’ve been kind––I––I can’t say just what I would like to say––but you’ve been kinder than some friends would be.”
She left the doorstep and walked with him to the stable, Lance leading his horse and slowing his pace to match her weary steps. “It––seems unreal, like something I’m dreaming. And––and I hope you won’t pay any attention to what father––said. He was out of his mind, and while he had the belief, he––”
“I’d rather not talk about that,” Lance interrupted quietly. “Your father believed that we’re all of us thieves, that we stole his stock. Perhaps you believe it––I don’t know. We’ve a hard name, got when the country was hard and it took hard men to survive. I don’t think the Lorrigans, when you come right down to it, were any worse than their neighbors. They’re no worse now.255They got the name of being worse, just because they were––well, stronger; harder to bully, harder to defeat. The Lorrigans could hold their own and then some. They’re still holding their own. There never was a Lorrigan ever yet backed down from anything, so I’m not going to back down from the name the Rim has given us. I’mgladI’m a Lorrigan. But I’m not glad to have you hate me for it.”
They were at the stable door, which Mary Hope pulled open. The hired horse stood in the second stall. Lance dropped the reins of his own horse, turned to Mary Hope and laid his hands on her shoulders, looking down enigmatically into her upturned, troubled face.
“Girl, don’t let us worry you at all. You’ve got trouble enough, and I’m going to do all I can to help you through it. I’ll send out friends; and then the Lorrigans won’t bother you. We won’t come to the funeral, because your father wouldn’t like to see us around, and your mother wouldn’t like to see us around, and you––”
“Oh, don’t!” Mary Hope drooped her face until her forehead rested on Lance’s arm.
Lance quivered a little. “Girl––girl, what is it about you that drives a man mad with tenderness for you, sometimes?” He slipped his free arm around her shoulders, pressed her close. “Oh, girl––girl! Don’t hate Lance––just because he’s a Lorrigan. Be fairer than that.” He256bent his head to kiss her, drew himself suddenly straight, his brows frowning.
“There––run back and ask your mother what all she would like to have done for her in town, and tell the doctor that I’ll have the horse ready for him in about two minutes. And be game––just go on being game. Your friends will be here just as soon as I can get them here.” He turned into the stable and began saddling the horse.
Mary Hope, after a moment of indecision, went back to the house, walking slowly, as though she dreaded entering again to take up the heavy burden of sorrow that must be borne with all its sordid details, all the meaningless little conventions that attend the passing of a human soul. She had not loved her father very much. He was not a man to be loved. But his going was a bereavement, would leave a desolate emptiness in her life. Her mother would fill with weeping reminiscence the hours she would have spent in complaining of his harshness. She herself must somehow take charge of the ranch, must somehow fill her father’s place that seemed all at once so big, so important in her world.
She looked back, wistfully, saw Lance leading out the horse. He had told her to be game––to go on being game. She wondered if he knew just how hard it was going to be for her. He had said that the Lorrigans were strong, were harder to defeat, had always held their own. He was proud257because of their strength! She lifted her head, carefully wiped the tears from her cheeks––Mary Hope seemed always to be wiping tears from her cheeks lately!––and opened the door. The Lorrigans? Very well, there was also the Douglas blood, and that was not weaker than the Lorrigan.
She was quite calm, quite impersonal when she gave Lance a list of the pitifully small errands she and her mother would be grateful if he would perform for them. Her lips did not quiver, her hands did not tremble when she took her father’s old red morocco wallet from the bureau drawer and gave Lance money to pay for the things they would need. Or if he would just hand the list to the Kennedys, she told him, they would be glad to attend to everything and save him the bother. They would come out at once, and perhaps Mrs. Smith would come. She thanked him civilly for the trouble he had already taken and added a message of thanks for Belle. She thanked him for the use of the horse and for attending to the schoolhouse matter for her. She was so extremely thankful that Lance exploded in one two-word oath when he rode away. Whereupon the doctor, who knew nothing of Lance’s thoughts, looked at him in astonishment.
258CHAPTER TWENTY-ONELANCE TRAILS A MYSTERY
Lance, rising at what he considered an early hour––five in the morning may well be considered early,––went whistling down to the corral to see what plans were on for the day. It was the day of Aleck Douglas’s funeral, but the Devil’s Tooth outfit would be represented only by a wreath of white carnations which Belle had ordered sent up from Pocatello. White carnations and Aleck Douglas did not seem to harmonize, but neither did the Devil’s Tooth and Aleck Douglas, and the white wreath would be much less conspicuous and far more acceptable than the Lorrigans, Lance was thinking.
He paused at the bunk-house and looked in. The place was deserted. He walked through it to the kitchen where the boys ate––the chuck-house, they called it––and found nothing to indicate that a meal had been eaten there lately. He went out and down to the stable, where Sam Pretty Cow was just finishing his stall cleaning. Shorty, who now had a permanently lame leg from falling under his horse up in the Lava Beds a year ago,259was limping across the first corral with two full milk buckets in his hands.
“Say, what time does this ranch get up, for heck sake?” Lance inquired of Sam Pretty Cow, stepping aside so that Sam might carry in a forkful of fresh hay.
“I dunno––long time ago.” Sam Pretty Cow turned the hay sidewise and went in to stuff his fragrant burden into the manger.
“I was going out with the boys, if they went anywhere. Where have they all headed for, Sam? I could overtake them, maybe.”
Sam Pretty Cow, returning to the doorway, shifted a quid of tobacco from one cheek to the other and grinned.
“I dunno, me,” he responded amiably.
“You don’tknow?Didn’t dad say anything? Didn’t the boys?” And then, with faint exasperation, “Doesn’t any one ever talk any more on this ranch?”
Sam Pretty Cow gave him a swift, oblique glance and spat accurately at a great horsefly that had lighted on a board end.
“Not much, you bet. Nh-hn.”
Lance called to Shorty, who had set his milk buckets down that he might open the little gate that swung inward,––the gate which horses were not supposed to know anything about.
“Oh-h, Shorty! Where did dad and the boys go this morning?”
260
Shorty turned slowly, pulling the gate open and propping it with a stick until he had set the buckets through. Deliberation was in his manner, deliberation was in his speech.
“Las’ night, you mean. They hit out right after midnight.”
“Well, where did theygo?” Lance ground his cigarette under his heel.
“You might ask ’em when they git back,” Shorty suggested cryptically, and closed the gate just as carefully as if forty freedom-hungry horses were milling inside the corral.
Lance watched him go and turned to Sam Pretty Cow who, having thrust his hay fork behind a brace in the stable wall, was preparing to vary his tobacco-chewing with a smoke.
“What’s the mystery, Sam? Where did they go? I’m here to stay, and I’m one of the family––Ithink––and you may as well tell me.”
Sam Pretty Cow lipped the edge of his cigarette paper, folded it down smoothly on the tiny roll of tobacco, leaned his body backward and painstakingly drew a match from the small pocket of his grimy blue overalls.
“I’m don’knownothing,” he vouchsafed equably. “I’m don’ ask nothing. I’m don’ hear nothing. You bet. Nh-hn––yore damn right.”
From under his lashes Lance watched Sam Pretty Cow. “I was over helping hold old Scotty in his bed, the other day,” he said irrelevantly.261“He was crazy––out of his head. He kept yelling that the Lorrigans were stealing his stock. He kept saying that a few more marks with a straight branding iron would turn his Eleven into an NL, ANL, DNL, LNL––any one of the Devil’s Tooth brands. Crazy with fever, he was.”
Sam Pretty Cow studied the match, decided which was the head of it, and drew it sharply along his boot sole.
“Yeah––yo’re damn right. Crazy, you bet yore life. Uh-huh.”
“He said the Miller’s Block brand could easily be turned into the N Block––Belle’s brand. He said horses had been run off the range––”
“He’s dead,” Sam observed unemotionally. “You bet. He’s gettin’ fun’ral to-day.”
“How long will the boys be out?” Lance pulled a splinter off the rail beside him and began separating the fibers with his finger nails that were too well cared for to belong to the Black Rim folk.
“I dunno, me.”
“Scotty sure was crazy, Sam. He tried twice to kill me. Once he jumped up and ran into the kitchen and grabbed a butcher knife off the table and came at me. He thought I was there to rob him. He called me Tom.”
“Yeah,” said Sam Pretty Cow, blowing smoke. “He’s damn lucky you ain’t Tom. Uh-huh––you bet.”
Lance lifted his eyebrows, was silent while he262watched Shorty limping down from the house, this time with table scraps for the chickens.
“Scotty was certainly crazy,” Lance turned again to Sam. “Over and over he kept saying, while he looked up at the ceiling, ‘The Lorrigan days are numbered. Though the wicked flourish like a green bay tree, they shall perish as dry grass. The days are numbered––their evil days are numbered.’”
Sam Pretty Cow smoked, flicked the ash from his cigarette with a coppery forefinger, looked suddenly full at Lance and grinned widely.
“Uh-huh. So’s them stars numbered, all right. I dunno, me. Tom Lorrigan’s damn smart man.” He reached down for an old bridle and grinned again. “Scotty, I guess he don’ say how many numbers them days is, you bet.” He started off, trailing his bridle reins carelessly in the dust.
“If you’re going to catch up a horse, Sam, I wish you’d haze in the best one on the ranch for me.”
Sam Pretty Cow paused, half turned, spat meditatively into the dust and jerked a thumb toward the stable.
“Me, I dunno. Bes’ horse on the ranch is in them box stall. Them’s Coaley. I guess you don’ want Coaley, huh?”
Lance bit his lip, looking at Sam Pretty Cow intently.
“You needn’t catch up a horse for me, Sam.263I’ll ride Coaley,” he said smoothly. Which brought a surprised grunt from Sam Pretty Cow, Indian though he was, accustomed though he was to the ways of the Lorrigans.
But it was not his affair if Lance and his father quarreled when Tom returned. Indeed, Tom might not return very soon, in which case he would not hear anything about Lance’s audacity unless Lance himself told it. Sam Pretty Cow would never mention it, and Shorty would not say a word. Shorty never did say anything if he could by any means keep silence.
Lance returned to the house, taking long strides that, without seeming hurried, yet suggested haste. He presently came down the path again, this time with a blanket roll and a sack with lumpy things tied in the bottom. He wore chaps, his spurs, carried a yellow slicker over his arm. On his head was a black Stetson, one of Tom’s discarded old hats.
He led Coaley from the box stall where he had never before seen him stand, saddled him, tied his bundles compactly behind the cantle, mounted and rode down the trail, following the hoof prints that showed freshest in the loose, gravelly sand. Coaley, plainly glad to be out of his prison, stepped daintily along in a rocking half trot that would carry him more miles in a day than any other horse in the country could cover, and bring him to the journey’s end with springy gait and head held264proudly, ears twitching, ready for more miles if his rider wanted more.
The tracks led up the road to the Ridge, turned sharply off where the brush grew scanty among the flat rocks that just showed their faces above the surface of the arid soil. Lance frowned and followed. For a long way he skirted the rim rock that edged the sheer bluff. A scant furlong away, on his right, a trail ran west to the broken land of Indian Creek. But since the horsemen had chosen to keep to the rocky ground along the rim, Lance followed.
He had gone perhaps a mile along the bluff when Coaley began to toss up his head and perk his ears backward, turning now and then to look. Lance was sunk too deep in bitter introspection to observe these first warning movements which every horseman knows. He was thinking of Mary Hope, who would be waking now to a day of sorrowful excitement. Thinking, too, of old Aleck Douglas and the things that he had said in his raving.
What Douglas had shouted hoarsely was not true, of course. He did not believe,––and yet, there was Shorty’s enigmatical answer to a simple question; there was Sam Pretty Cow, implying much while he actually said very little; there was this unheralded departure of all the Devil’s Tooth riders in the night, in the season between round-ups. There was Coaley feeling fit for anything,265shut up in the box stall while Tom rode another horse; and here was Lance himself taking the trail of the Devil’s Tooth outfit at a little after sunrise on a horse tacitly forbidden to all riders save Tom.
Coaley, in a place where he must pick his way between boulders, paused and lifted his head, staring back the way they had come. Lance roused himself from gloomy speculations and looked back also, but he could not see anything behind them save a circling hawk and the gray monotone of the barren plateau, so he urged Coaley in among the boulders.
There must be something back there, of course. Coaley was too intelligent a horse to make a mistake. But it might be some drifting range stock, or perhaps a stray horse. Certainly it was no one from the Devil’s Tooth, for Sam Pretty Cow had set off to mend a fence in the lower pasture, and Shorty never rode a horse nowadays for more than a half mile or so; and six o’clock in the morning would be rather early for chance riders from any other ranch. With a shrug, Lance dismissed the matter from his mind.
Where a faint, little-used trail went obliquely down the bluff to the creek bottom, Lance saw again the hoofprints which the rocky ground had failed to reveal. He could see no reason for taking this roundabout course to go up the creek, but he sent Coaley down the trail, reached the bottom and discovered that the tracks once more struck266off into rocky ground. His face hardened until his resemblance to Tom became more marked than usual, but where the tracks led he followed. Too often had he trailed stray horses in the past to be puzzled now, whether he could see the hoofprints or not.
They must have made for the other side of the creek, gone up Wild Horse gulch or the Little Squaw. There was just one place where they could cross the creek without bogging in the tricky mud that was almost as bad as quicksand. He therefore pulled out of the rocky patch and made straight for the crossing. He would soon know if they had crossed there. If they had not, then they would have turned again up Squaw Creek, and it would be short work cutting straight across to the only possible trail to the higher country.
He had covered half of the distance to the creek when Coaley again called his attention to something behind him. This time Lance glimpsed what looked very much like the crown of a hat moving in a dry wash that he had crossed not more than five minutes before. He pulled up, studied the contour of the ground behind him, looked ahead, saw the mark of a shod hoof between two rocks. The hoof mark pointed toward the crossing. Lance, however, turned down another small depression where the soil lay bare and Coaley left clean imprints, trotted along it until a welter of rocks made bad footing for the horse, climbed out267and went on level. Farther up the valley an abrupt curve in Squaw Creek barred his way with scraggly, thin willow growth that had winding cow trails running through it. Into one of these Lance turned, rode deep into the sparse growth, stopped where the trail swung round a huge, detached boulder, dismounted and dropped Coaley’s reins to the ground and retraced his steps some distance from the trail, stepping on rocks here and there and keeping off damp spots.
He reached the thin edge of the grove, stood behind a stocky bush and waited. In two or three minutes––they seemed ten to Lance––he saw the head and shoulders of a rider just emerging from the gully he himself had so lately followed.
Back on Coaley, following the winding trail, Lance pondered the matter. The way he had come was no highway––no trail that any rider would follow on any business save one. But just why should he be followed? He had thought at first that some one was trailing the Devil’s Tooth outfit, as he had been doing, but now it seemed plain that he himself was the quarry.
He flicked the reins on Coaley’s satiny neck, and the horse broke at once into a springy, swift trot, following the purposeless winding of the cow path. When they emerged upon the other side where the creek gurgled over a patch of rocks like cobblestones, Lance stopped and let him take a sip or two of water, then struck off toward the bluff, letting268Coaley choose his own pace, taking care that he kept to low ground where he could not be seen.
For an hour he rode and came to the junction of Mill Creek and the Squaw. Then, climbing through chokecherry thickets up a draw that led by winding ways to higher ground, Lance stopped and scrutinized the bottomland over which he had passed. Coaley stood alert, watching also that back trail, his ears turned forward, listening. After a moment, he began to take little mincing steps sidewise, pulling impatiently at the reins. As plainly as a horse could tell it, Coaley implored Lance to go on. But Lance waited until, crossing an open space, he saw a rider coming along at a shambling trot on the trail he had himself lately followed.
He frowned thoughtfully, turned Coaley toward home and rode swiftly in a long, distance-devouring lope.
He reached the ranch somewhere near ten o’clock, surprising Belle in the act of harnessing her pintos to a new buckboard at which they shied hypocritically. Belle stared at him round-eyed over the backs of her team.
“My good Lord, Lance! You––you could be Tom’s twin, in that hat and on that horse! What you been doing––doubling for him in a lead?”
Lance swung down and came toward her. “Belle, where did dad and the boys go?”
“Oh––fussing with the stock,” said Belle269vaguely, her eyes clouding a little. “We’re getting so many cattle it keeps Tom on the go day and night, seems to me. And hewillkeep buying more all the while. Did––did you want to go with them, honey? I guess Tom never thought you might. You’ve been away so long. You’d better not ride Coaley, Lance. Tom would just about murder you if he caught you at it. And where did you get hold of that hat?”
Lance laughed queerly. “I just picked it off the table as I came out. Mine is too new and stiff yet. This seemed to fit. And Coaley’s better off under the saddle than he is in the stable, Belle. He’s a peach––I always did want to ride Coaley, but I never had the nerve till I got big enough to lick dad.”
He caught Belle in a quick, breath-taking hug, kissed her swiftly on the cheek and turned Coaley into the corral with the saddle still on.
“Are you going over––to the funeral?” he asked as he closed the gate.
“I’m going to town, and I’ve got the letters you left on the table to be mailed. No, I’m not going to the funeral. I don’t enjoy having my face slapped––and being called a painted Jezebel,” she added dryly.
Under his breath Lance muttered something and went into the house, not looking at Belle or making her any reply.
“Lance,” said Belle to the pintos, “thinks we’re270rough and tough and just about half civilized. Lord, when you take a Lorrigan and educate him andpolishhim, you sure have got a combination that’s hard to go up against. Two years––and my heavens, I don’tknowLance any more! I never thought any Lorrigan could feazeme––but there’s something about Lance––”
In the house Lance was not showing any of the polish which Belle had mentioned rather regretfully. He was kneeling before a trunk, throwing books and pipes and socks and soft-toned silk shirts over his shoulder, looking for something which he seemed in a great haste to find. When his fingers, prying deep among his belongings, closed upon the thing he sought, he brought it up, frowning abstractedly.
A black leather case, small and curved, opened when he unbuckled the confining strap. A binocular, small but extremely efficient in its magnifying power he withdrew, dusting the lenses with the sleeve of his shirt. He had bought the glasses because some one had advised him to take a pair along when he went with a party of friends to the top of Mount Tamalpais one Sunday. And because he had an instinctive dislike for anything but the best obtainable, he had bought the highest-priced glasses he could find in San Francisco,––and perhaps the smallest. He buckled them back into their case, slapped them into his pocket and closed the trunk lid with a bang. From the mantel271in the living room he gleaned a box of cartridges for an extra six-shooter, which he cleaned and loaded carefully and tucked inside the waistband of his trousers, on the left side, following an instinct that brought him close to his grandfather, that old killer whom all men feared to anger.
“The horse and the hat; he thought it was dad he was trailing!” he said to himself, with his teeth clamped tight together. “Oh, well, when it comes to that kind of a game––”
He went out and down to the corral, watered Coaley and mounted again, taking the trail across pastures to Squaw Creek.
272CHAPTER TWENTY-TWOLANCE RIDES ANOTHER TRAIL
With a two-days’ growth of beard on his chin and jaws, a new, hard look in his eyes and the general appearance of a man who has been riding long and has slept in all his clothes, Lance rode quietly up to the corral gate and dismounted. A certain stiffness was in his walk when he led Coaley inside and turned a stirrup up over the saddle horn, his gloved fingers dropping to the latigo. Lance was tired––any one could see that at a glance. That he was preoccupied, and that his preoccupation was not pleasant, was also evident to the least observing eye.
Tom, coming out of the bunk house, studied him with narrowed lids as he came walking leisurely down to the corral. Tom’s movements also betrayed a slight stiffness of the muscles, as though he had ridden hard and long. He did not hurry. Lance had pulled off the saddle and the sweaty blanket and the bridle, and had turned Coaley into the corral before he knew that some one was coming.273Even then he did not turn to look. He was staring hard at a half-dozen horses grouped in the farther corner of the corral,––horses with gaunt flanks and the wet imprint of saddles. They were hungrily nosing fresh piles of hay, and scarcely looked up when Coaley trotted eagerly up to join them. Six of them––a little more than half of the outfit that had ridden away the other night.
“Well! I see you helped yourself to a new saddle horse,” Tom observed significantly, coming up behind Lance.
“Yes. Coaley acted lonesome, shut up in the box stall. Thought a little riding would do him good.” Lance’s eyes met Tom’s calmly, almost as if the two were mere acquaintances.
“You give him a plenty, looks like. Where yuh been?”
“I? Oh––just riding around.” Lance stooped indifferently to untie his slicker and blanket from the saddle.
“Thought I’d like to use him myself. Thinking some of riding into town this afternoon,” Tom said, still studying Lance.
“Well, if you want to ride Coaley, he’s good for it. I’d say he has more miles in him yet than any of that bunch over there.” With slicker and blanket roll Lance started for the house.
Tom did not say anything. He was scowling thoughtfully after Lance when Belle, coming from the chicken house with a late hatching of fluffy274little chicks in her hat, looked at him inquiringly. To her Tom turned with more harshness than he had shown for many a long day.
“Schoolin’ don’t seem to set good on a Lorrigan,” he said. “How long’s he goin’ to stay this time?”
“Why, honey, don’t youwantLance home? He rode Coaley––but that’s no crime. Lance wouldn’t hurt him, he’s too good a rider and he never was hard on horses. And Coaley just goeswildwhen he has to stand shut up all day––”
“Oh, it ain’t riding Coaley, altogether. He can ride Coaley and be darned. It’s the new airs he’s putting on that don’t set good with me, Belle. You wanted to make something of Lance, and now, by Henry, you’ll have to name the job you’ve made of him––I’d hate to!”
Belle put a hand into the cheeping huddle in her hat, lifted out a chick and held it to her cheek. “Why, you’re just imagining that Lance is different,” she contended, stifling her own recognition of the change. “He’ll settle right down amongst the boys––”
“The boys ain’t cryin’ to have him, Belle. Black Rimmers had ought to stay Black Rimmers, or get out and stay out. Lance ain’t either one thing or the other.”
“Why, Tom Lorrigan!” Belle dropped the chick into her hat and tucked the hat under her arm. Her eyes began to sparkle a little. “I275don’t think Lance liked it about the piano, but he’s the same Lance he always was. I’ve watched him, and he hasn’t said a thing or done a thing outa the way––he’s just thedearestgreat big fellow! And I can’t for the life of me see why you and the whole outfit hang back from him like he was a stranger. Education ain’t catching, Tom. And Lance don’t put on any airs at all, so why in the name of heaven you all––”
“Well, well, don’t get all excited, Belle. But if education was ketching, a lot of the boys would be rollin’ their beds. I’m going to town. Anything yuh want brought out?”
Belle did not answer. She went away to the house with her hatful of chicks, and put them into a box close to the stove until the mother hen made sure whether the four other eggs were anything more than just stale eggs. It would have been hard for Belle to explain just what the heaviness in her heart portended. Certainly it was not in her nature to worry over trifles,––yet these were apparent trifles that worried her. On the surface of the Devil’s Tooth life only faint ripples stirred, but Belle felt somehow as though she were floating in a frail boat over a quiet pool from whose depths some unspeakable monster might presently thrust an ominous head and drag her under.
In the crude yet wholly adequate bathroom she heard a great splashing, and guessed that it was Lance, refreshing himself after his trip. That,276she supposed, was another point that set him apart from the other boys. From June to September, whenever any of the male inhabitants of the Devil’s Tooth felt the need of ablutions beyond the scope of a blue enamel wash basin, he took a limp towel and rode down across the pasture to the creek, and swam for half an hour or so in a certain deep pool. Sometimes all of the boys went, at sundown, and filled the pool with their splashings. Only Lance availed himself of tub and soap and clean towels, and shaved every morning before breakfast.
She heard him moving about in his room, heard him go into the kitchen and ask Riley what the chances were for something to eat. She did not follow him, but she waited, expecting that he would come into the living room afterwards. She went to the piano and drummed a few bars of a new dance hit Lance had brought home for her, and with her head turned sidewise listened to the sound of his footsteps in the next room, his occasional, pleasantly throaty tones answering Riley’s high-pitched, nasal twang.
Her eyes blurred with unreasoning tears. He was her youngest. He was so big, so handsome, so like Tom,––yet so different! She did not believe that Tom could really see anything to cavil at in Lance’s presence, in his changed personality. Tom, she thought, was secretly as proud of Lance as she was, and only pretended to sneer at him to277hide that pride. The constraint would soon wear off, and Lance would be one of the boys again.
The screen door slammed. With a lump in her throat, Belle went to a window and looked out. Lance, in his new Stetson and a fresh shirt and gray trousers tucked into his riding boots, was on his way to the stable again. She watched him pick up a rope and go into the far corral where a few extra saddle horses dozed through the hot afternoon. She saw him return, leading a chunky little roan. Saw him throw his saddle on the horse. Saw him ride off––the handsomest young fellow in all the Black Rim––but with apparently never a thought that his mother might like a word with him, since he had been gone for two days without any explanation or any excuse. Which was not like Lance, who had always before remembered to be nice to Belle.
Up the Slide trail Lance rode, perhaps two hours behind Tom. The marks of Coaley’s hoofs were still fresh in the trail, but Lance did not appear to see them at all. He let the roan scramble over the shale as he would, let him take his own pace among the boulders and up through the Slide. At the top he put him into an easy lope which did not slacken until he reached the descent on the other side of the Ridge.
Presently, because the roan was an ambitious young horse and eager to reach the end of the trail, and Lance was too preoccupied to care what278pace he traveled, they arrived at Cottonwood Spring, circled the wire fence and whipped in through the open gate at a gallop.
The little schoolhouse was deserted. Lance dismounted and looked in, saw it still dismal with the disorder of the last unfortunate dance. It was evident that there had been no school since the Fourth of July.
Then he remembered that Mary Hope’s father had been sick all of the week, and it was now only two days since the funeral. She would not be teaching school so soon after his death.
He closed the door and remounted, his face somber. He had wanted to see Mary Hope. Since the morning after Scotty died he had fought a vague, disquieting sense of her need of him. There had been times when it seemed almost as though she had called to him across the distance; that she wished to see him. To-day he had obeyed the wordless call. He still felt her need of him, but since she was not at the school he hesitated. The schoolhouse was in a measure neutral ground. Riding over to the Douglas ranch was another matter entirely. Too keenly had he felt the cold animosity of Mother Douglas, the wild, impotent hate of old Scotty mouthing threats and accusations and vague prophecies of future disaster to the Lorrigans. He rode slowly out through the gate and took the trail made by the Devil’s Tooth team when they hauled down the materials for the279schoolhouse. The chunky roan climbed briskly, contentedly rolling the cricket in his bit. The little burring sound of it fitted itself somehow to the thought reiterating through Lance’s tired brain. “She wouldn’t want me––to come. She wouldn’t––want me––to come.”
The roan squatted and ducked sidewise, and Lance raised his head. Down the rough trail rode a big cowpuncher with sun-reddened face and an air of great weariness. His horse plodded wearily, thin-flanked, his black hair sweat-roughened and dingy. The rider looked at Lance with red-veined eyes, the inflamed lids showing sleepless nights.
“How’r yuh?” he greeted perfunctorily, as they passed each other.
“Howdy,” said Lance imperturbably, and rode on.
Lance’s eyebrows pulled together. He had no need of looking back; he had seen a great deal in the one glance he had given the stranger. He scrutinized the trail, measured with his eyes the size and the shape of the horse’s footprints.
After a little he left the wagon road and put the roan to the steep climb up the trail to the great Tooth of the ridge. He still frowned, still rode with bent head, his eyes on the trail. But now he was alert, conscious of his surroundings, thinking of every yard of ground they covered.
At a little distance from the base of the Tooth he280dismounted, tying the restive roan to a bush to prevent him from wandering around, nibbling investigatingly at weeds, bushes, all the things that interest a young horse.
Slowly, walking carefully on rocks, Lance approached the Tooth. A new look was in his face now,––a look half tender, half angry because of the tenderness. Several times he had met Mary Hope here at the Tooth, when he was just a long-legged youth with a fondness for teasing, and she was a slim, wide-eyed little thing in short skirts and sunbonnet. Always the meetings had pretended to be accidental, and always Mary Hope had seemed very much interested in the magnificent outlook and very slightly interested in him.
From the signs, some one else was much interested in the view. Lance came upon a place where a man had slipped with one foot and left the deep mark of his boot in the loose, gravelly soil. Sitting on a boulder, he made a leisurely survey of the place and counted three cigarette stubs that had fallen short of the crevice toward which they had evidently been flung. How many had gone into the crevice he could not tell. He slid off the boulder and, walking on a rock shelf that jutted out from the huge upthrust rock, examined the place very thoroughly.
At a certain spot where Mary Hope had been fond of sitting on the rock shelf with her straight little back against the Tooth’s smooth side, a281splendid view of the Devil’s Tooth ranch was to be had. The house itself was hidden in a cottonwood grove that Belle had planted when she was a bride, but the corrals, the pastures, the road up the Ridge was plainly visible. And in the shallow crack in the rock was another cigarette end, economically smoked down to a three-quarter-inch stub.
Lance returned by way of the shelf to the outcropping of rocks that would leave no trace of his passing. He untied and mounted the roan and circled the vicinity cautiously. Two hundred yards away, down the slope and on a small level place where the brush grew thick, he found where a horse had stood for hours. He looked at the hoofprints, turned back and rode down the schoolhouse trail again, following the tracks of the fagged black horse.
When another fifty yards would bring the basin in sight, Lance turned off the trail and dismounted, tied the roan again and went forward slowly, his eyes intent on the tops of the trees around Cottonwood Spring. A rattler buzzed suddenly, and he stopped, looked to see where the snake was coiled, saw it withdraw its mottled gray body from under a rabbit weed and drag sinuously away, its ugly head lifted a little, eyes watching him venomously. An unwritten law of the West he broke by letting the snake go. Again he moved forward, from bush to bush, from boulder to boulder. When all of the basin and the grove were revealed to him,282he stopped, removed his gray range hat and hung it on a near-by bush. He took his small field glasses from his pocket, dusted the lenses deliberately and, leaning forward across a rock with his elbows steadied on the stone and the glasses to his eyes, he swept foot by foot the grove.
He was some minutes in discovering a black horse well within the outer fringe of the cottonwoods, switching mechanically at the flies and mosquitoes that infested the place, and throwing his head impatiently to his side now and then when the sting was too sharp to ignore. With the glasses he could see the sweat-roughened hide ripple convulsively to dislodge the pestering insects, could see the flaring nostrils as the horse blew out the dust gathered from his hungry nosing amongst the coarse grass and weeds. The man Lance did not at once discover, but after a little he saw him rolled in canvas to protect himself from the mosquitoes. He seemed already fast asleep.
“He needs it,” said Lance grimly, with his twisted smile, and went back to the roan.