arched neck, his feet choosing daintily the little rough places in the
rock where long experience had taught him he would not slip. Big as
Tom was, Coaley carried him easily and reached the top without so much
as a flutter in the flanks to show that the climb had cost him an
effort.
"It's a dang darn shame I got to straddle strange horses just because
there ain't another in the country like you, Coaley," he muttered,
leaning forward to smooth the silky hide under the crinkly mane. "It's
going to set hard, now I'm tellin' yuh, to throw my saddle on some
plain, ordinary cayuse. But it's a bet I can't afford to overlook;
they made that plain enough."
Coaley pricked up his ears and looked, his big, bright eyes taking in
the shadow of a horse beside a clump of wild currant bushes that grew
in the very base of the Devil's Tooth. Tom grunted and rode over that
way, Coaley walking slowly, his knees bending springily like a dancer
feeling out his muscles.
Lance stood with his back toward them. His hat was pushed far back on
his head, and he was looking at Mary Hope, who leaned against the rock
and stared down into the valley below. Her hair, Tom observed, was not
"slicked back" to-day. It had been curled a little, probably on rags
twisted in after she had gone to bed and taken out before she arose in
the morning, lest her mother discover her frivolity and lecture her
long,--and, worse still, make her wet a comb and take all of the curl
out. A loose strand blew across her tanned cheek, so that she reached
up absently and tucked it behind her ear, where it would not stay for
longer than a minute.
"I am sure I didna know you would be here," she said, without taking
her eyes off the valley. "It is a view I like better than most, and I
have a right to ride where I please. And I have no wish to ride out of
my way to be friends with any one that tried to make my father out a
liar and an unjust man. He may be hard, but he is honest. And that is
more than some--"
"More than some can say--us Lorrigans, for instance!"
"I didna say that, but if the coat fits, you can put it on."
Mary Hope bit her lip and lashed a weed with her quirt. "All of this
is none of my doing," she added, with a dullness in her voice that may
have meant either regret or resentment. "You hate my father, and you
are mad because I canna side with you and hate him too. I am sorry the
trouble came up, but I canna see how you expect me to go on coming to
see your mither when you know my father would never permit it."
"You say that like you were speaking a piece. How long did you lay
awake last night, making it up? You can't make me swallow that,
anyway. Your father never permitted you to come in the first place,
and you know it. You made believe that old skate ran away with you
down the trail, and that you couldn't stop him. You've been coming
over to our place ever since, and you never asked old Scotty whether
he would permit it or not. I'm not saying anything about myself, but
it hurts Belle to have you throw her down right now. Under the
circumstances it makes her feel as if you thought we were thieves and
stole your dad's yearling."
"I'm not saying anything like that."
"Maybe you're not, but you sure are acting it. If you don't think
that, why don't you go on taking music lessons from Belle? What made
you stop, all of a sudden?"
"That," said Mary Hope stiffly, "is my own affair, Lance Lorrigan."
"It's mine, let me tell you. It's mine, because it hits Belle; and
what hits her hits me. If you think she isn't good enough for you to
visit, why in thunder have you been coming all this while? She isn't
any worse than she was two months ago, is she?"
"I'm not saying that she is."
"Well, you're acting it, and that's a darn sight worse."
"You ought to know that with all this trouble between your father and
my father--"
"Well, can you tell me when they ever did have any truck together?
Your father doesn't hate our outfit a darn bit worse than he ever
did. He found a chance to knife us, that's all. It isn't that he never
wanted to before."
"I'll thank you, Lance Lorrigan, not to accuse my father of knifing
anybody. He's my father and--"
"And that isn't anything to brag about, if you ask me. I'd rather have
my father doing time for stealing, than have him a darned, hide-bound
old hypocrite that will lie a man into the pen, and then go around and
pull a long face and call himself a Christian!"
"My father doesna lie! And he is not a hypocrite either. If your
father was half as--" She stopped abruptly, her face going red when
she saw Tom sitting on his horse beyond the shoulder of rock,
regarding her with that inscrutable smile which never had failed to
make her squirm mentally and wonder what he thought of her. She stood
up, trembling a little.
Lance turned slowly and met Tom's eyes without flinching. "Hello," he
said, on guard against the two of them, wondering what had brought his
dad to this particular point at this particular time.
"Hello. How d'yuh do, Miss Douglas? Lance, dinner's getting cold
waiting for you." Tom lifted his hat to Mary Hope, turned, and rode
back whence he had come, never glancing over his shoulder but
nevertheless keenly alert for the sound of voices.
He was not quite through the Slide when he heard the hoof beats of
Lance's horse come clicking down over the rocks. Tom smiled to himself
as he rode on, never looking back.
CHAPTER NINE
A LITTLE SCOTCH
In the Black Rim country March is a month of raw winds and cold rains,
with sleet and snow and storm clouds tumbling high in the West and
spreading to the East, where they hang lowering at the earth and then
return to empty their burden of moisture upon the shrinking live
things below.
In the thinly settled places March is also the time when children go
shivering to school, harried by weather that has lost a little of its
deadliness. In January and February their lives would not be safe from
sudden blizzards, but by the middle of March they may venture forth
upon the quest of learning.
Black Rim country was at best but scantily supplied with schools, and
on the Devil's Tooth range seven young Americans--three of them
adopted from Sweden--were in danger of growing up in deplorable
ignorance of what learning lies hidden in books. A twelve-mile stretch
of country had neither schoolhouse, teacher nor school officers
empowered to establish a school. Until the Swedish family moved into a
shack on the AJ ranch there had not been children enough to make a
teacher worth while. But the Swedish family thirsted for knowledge of
the English language, and their lamenting awoke the father of four
purely range-bred products to a sense of duty toward his offspring.
Wherefore Mary Hope Douglas, home from two winters in Pocatello, where
she had lived with a cousin twice removed and had gone to school and
had learned much, was one day invited to teach a school in the Devil's
Tooth neighborhood.
True, there was no schoolhouse, but there was a deserted old shack on
the road to Jumpoff. A few benches and a stove and table would
transform it into a seat of learning, and there were an old shed and
corral where the pupils might keep their saddle horses during school
hours. She would be paid five dollars a month per head, Jim Boyle of
the AJ further explained. Seven "heads" at five dollars each would
amount to thirty-five dollars a month, and Mary Hope felt her heart
jump at the prospect of earning so much money of her own. Moreover, to
teach school had long been her secret ambition, the solid foundation
of many an air castle. She forthwith consented to become the very
first school-teacher in the Devil's Tooth neighborhood, which hoped
some day to become a real school district.
She would have to ride five miles every morning and evening, and her
morning ride would carry her five miles nearer the Lorrigan ranch,
two of them along their direct trail to Jumpoff. Mary Hope would never
admit to herself that this small detail interested her, but she
thought of it the moment Jim Boyle suggested the old Whipple shack as
a schoolhouse.
Tom Lorrigan, riding home from Jumpoff after two days spent in Lava,
pulled his horse down to a walk and then stopped him in the trail
while he stared hard at the Whipple shack. Five horses walked uneasily
around inside the corral, manes and tails whipping in the gale that
blew cold from out the north. From the bent stovepipe of the shack a
wisp of smoke was caught and bandied here and there above the
pole-and-dirt roof. It seemed incredible to Tom that squatters could
have come in and taken possession of the place in his short absence,
but there was no other explanation that seemed at all reasonable.
Squatters were not welcome on the Devil's Tooth range. Tom rode up to
the shack, dismounted and let Coaley's reins drop to the ground. He
hesitated a minute before the door, in doubt as to the necessity for
knocking. Then his knuckles struck the loose panel twice, and he heard
the sound of footsteps. Tom pulled his hat down tighter on his
forehead and waited.
When Mary Hope Douglas pulled open the door, astonishment held them
both dumb. He had not seen the girl for more than a year,--he was not
certain at first that it was she. But there was no mistaking those
eyes of hers, Scotch blue and uncompromisingly direct in their gaze.
Tom pulled loose and lifted the hat that he had just tightened, and as
she backed from the doorway he entered the shack without quite knowing
why he should do so. Comprehensively he surveyed the mean little room,
bare of everything save three benches with crude shelves before them,
a kitchen table and a yellow-painted chair with two-thirds of the
paint worn off under the incessant scrubbing of mother Douglas. The
three Swedes, their rusty overcoats buttoned to their necks, goggled
at him round-eyed over the tops of their new spelling books, then
ducked and grinned at one another. The four Boyle children, also
bundled in wraps, exchanged sidelong glances and pulled themselves up
alert and expectant in their seats.
"School, eh?" Tom observed, turning as Mary Hope pushed the door shut
against the wind that rattled the small shack and came toward him
shivering and pulling her sweater collar closer about her neck. "When
did this happen?"
"When I started teaching here, Mr. Lorrigan." Then, mindful of her
manners, she tempered the pertness with a smile. "And that was
yesterday. Will you sit down?"
"No, thanks--I just stopped to see who was livin' here, and--" He
broke off to look up at the dirt roof. A clod the size of his fist had
been loosened by the shaking of the wind, and plumped down in the
middle of the teacher's desk. With the edge of his palm he swept clod
and surrounding small particles of dirt into his hat crown, and
carried them to the door.
"There's an empty calf shed over at the ranch that would make a better
schoolhouse than this," he observed. "It's got a shingle roof."
Mary Hope was picking small lumps of dirt out of her hair, which she
wore in a pompadour that disclosed a very nice forehead. "I just love
a roof with shingles on it," she smiled.
"H'm." Tom looked up at the sagging poles with the caked mud showing
in the cracks between where the poles had shrunken and warped under
the weight. A fresh gust of wind rattled dust into his eyes, and the
oldest Swede chortled an abrupt "Ka-hugh!" that set the other six
tittering.
"Silence! _Shame_ on you!" Mary Hope reproved them sternly, rapping on
the kitchen table with a foot rule of some soft wood that blazoned
along its length the name of a Pocatello hardware store. "Get to work
this instant or I shall be compelled to keep you all in at recess."
"You better haze 'em all home at recess, and get where it's warm
before you catch your death of cold," Tom advised, giving first aid to
his eye with a corner of his white-dotted blue handkerchief. "This
ain't fit for cattle, such a day as this."
"A north wind like this would blow through anything," Mary Hope
loyally defended the shack. "It was quite comfortable yesterday."
"I wouldn't send a dog here to school," said Tom. "Can't they dig up
any better place than this for you to teach in?"
"The parents of these children are paying out of their own pockets to
have them taught, as it is."
"They'll be paying out of their own pockets to have them planted, if
they ain't careful," Tom predicted dryly. "How're you fixed for
firewood? Got enough to keep warm on a hot day?"
Mary Hope smiled faintly. "Mr. Boyle hauled us a load of sage brush,
and the boys chop wood mornings and noons--it's a punishment when they
don't behave, or if they miss their lessons. But--the stove doesn't
seem to draw very well, in this wind. It smokes more than it throws
out heat." She added hastily, "It drew all right yesterday. It's this
wind."
"What you going to do if this wind keeps up? It's liable to blow for a
week or two, this time of year."
"Why--we'll manage to get along all right. They'd probably be out
playing in it anyway, if they weren't in school."
"Oh. And what about you?" Tom looked at her, blinking rapidly with his
left eye that was growing bloodshot and watery.
"I? Why, I've lived here all my life, and I ought to be used to a
little bad weather."
"Hunh." Tom shivered in the draught. "So have I lived here all my
life; but I'll be darned if I would want to sit in this shack all day,
the way the wind whistles through it."
"You might do it, though--if it was your only way of earning money,"
Mary Hope suggested shrewdly.
"Well, I might," Tom admitted, "but I sure would stop up a few
cracks."
"We've hardly got settled yet," said Mary Hope. "I intend to stuff the
cracks with rags just as soon as possible. Is your eye still paining?
That dirt is miserable stuff to stick in a person's eye. Shall I try
and get it out? Yesterday I got some in mine, and I had an awful
time."
She dismissed the children primly, with a self-conscious dignity and
some chagrin at their boorish clatter, their absolute ignorance of
discipline. "I shall ring the bell in ten minutes," she told them
while they scuffled to the door. "I shall give you two minutes after
the bell rings to get into your seats and be prepared for duty. Every
minute after that must be made up after school."
"Ay skoll go home now, sen you skoll not keep me by school from tan
minootes," the oldest of the Swedes stopped long enough to bellow at
her from the doorway. "Ole og Helge skoll go med. Ve got long way from
school, og ve don't be by dark ven ve come by home!"
He seized the square tobacco boxes, originally made to hold a pound
of "plug cut," and afterwards dedicated to whatever use a ranch man
might choose to put them. Where schools flourished, the tobacco boxes
were used for lunch. The Swedes carried three tied in flour sacks and
fastened to the saddles. The wind carried them at a run to the corral.
The two smaller boys, Ole and Helge, rode, one behind the other, on
one horse, a flea-bitten gray with an enlarged knee and a habit of
traveling with its neck craned to the left. Christian, the leader of
the revolt, considered himself well-mounted on a pot-bellied bay that
could still be used to round up cattle, if the drive was not more than
a couple of miles. Looking after them from the window that faced the
corral, Tom could not wonder that they were anxious to start early.
"You better let the rest go, too," he advised the perturbed teacher,
looking out at the four Boyle children huddled in the shelter of the
shack, the skirts of the girl whipping in the wind like a pillowslip
on a clothesline in a gale. "There ain't any sense trying to teach
school in a place like this, in such weather. Don't you know them kids
have got all of twelve miles to ride, facing this wind most of the
way? And you've got to ride five miles; and when the sun drops it's
going to be raw enough to put icicles on your ribs under the skin.
Tell 'em to go home. Pore little devils, I wouldn't ask a cow-critter
to face this wind after sundown."
"You do not understand that I must have discipline in this school, Mr.
Lorrigan. To-morrow I shall have to punish those Swedes for leaving
school without permission. I shall make an example of Christian, for
his impudence. I do not think he will want to disobey me again, very
soon!" Mary Hope took her handkerchief from her pocket, refusing to
consider for one moment the significance of its flapping in the wind
while the windows and doors were closed.
"You're just plain stubborn," Tom said bluntly. "You've no business
hanging out in a place like this!"
"I've the business of teaching school, Mr. Lorrigan. I suppose that is
as important to me as your business is to you. And I can't permit my
pupils to rebel against my authority. You would not let your men
dictate to you, would you?"
"They would have a right to call for their time if I asked them to do
some damfool thing like sitting in this shack with the wind blowing
through it at forty miles an hour."
"I am sorry, Mr. Lorrigan, that I must remind you that gentlemen do
not indulge in profanity before a lady."
"Oh, hell! What have I said that was outa the way? I wasn't cussing; I
was telling you what your father and mother ought to tell you, and
what they would if they didn't think more of a few dollars than they
do of their kid's health. But I don't reckon it's my put-in; only
it's any man's business to see that women and kids don't freeze to
death. And by the humpin' hyenas--"
With her lips in a straight line, her eyes very hard and bright and
with a consciousness of heaping coals of fire on the head of an enemy
of her house, Mary Hope had twisted a corner of her handkerchief into
a point, moistened it by the simple and primitive method of placing
the point between her lips, and was preparing to remove the dirt from
Tom's watering eye, the ball of which was a deep pink from irritation.
But Tom swung abruptly away from her, went stilting on his high heels
to the door, pulled it open with a yank and rounded the corner where
the four Boyle children stood leaning against the house, their chilled
fingers clasped together so that two hands made one fist, their teeth
chattering while they discussed the Swedes and tried to mimic
Christian's very Swedish accent.
"_Og_ is _and_," said Minnie Boyle. "And _skoll_ is _shall_. Swede's
easy. And _med_ means _with_--"
"Aw, it's just the way they try to say it in English," Fred Boyle
contradicted. "It ain't Swede--but gee, when the Scotch and the Swede
goes in the air to-morrow, I bet there'll be fun. If Mary Hope tries
to lick Chris--"
"You kids straddle your cayuses and hit for home," Tom interrupted
them. "There ain't going to be any more school to-day. Them your
horses in the shed? Well, you hump along and saddle up and beat it.
Go!"
He did not speak threateningly, at least he did not speak angrily. But
the four Boyle children gave him one affrighted glance and started on
a run for the corral, looking back over their shoulders now and then
as if they expected a spatter of bullets to follow them.
At the corral gate Minnie Boyle stopped and turned as though she meant
to retrace her steps to the house, but Tom waved her back. So Minnie
went home weeping over the loss of a real dinner-bucket and a slate
sponge which she was afraid the Swedes might steal from her if they
came earlier to school than she.
When Tom turned to reenter the shack for a final word with Mary Hope,
and to let her give first aid to his eye if she would, he found that
small person standing just behind him with set lips and clenched fists
and her hair blowing loose from its hairpins.
"Mr. Tom Lorrigan, you can just call those children back!" she cried,
her lips bluing in the cold gale that beat upon her. "Do you think
that with all your lawlessness you can come and break up my school?
You have bullied my father--"
"I'd do worse than bully him, if I had him in handy reach right now,"
Tom drawled, and took her by the shoulder and pushed her inside. "Any
man that will let a woman sit all day in a place like this--and I
don't care a damn if you are earning money doing it!--oughta have his
neck wrung. I'm going to saddle your horse for yuh while you bundle
up. And then you're going home, if I have to herd yuh like I would a
white heifer. I always have heard of Scotch stubbornness--but there's
something beats that all to thunder. Git yore things on. Yore horse
will be ready in about five minutes."
He bettered his estimate, returning in just four minutes to find the
door locked against him. "Don't you _dare_ come in here!" Mary Hope
called out, her voice shrill with excitement. "I--I'll _brain_ you!"
"Oh, you will, will yuh?" Whereupon Tom heaved himself against the
door and lurched in with the lock dangling.
Mary Hope had a stick of wood in her two hands, but she had not that
other essential to quick combat, the courage to swing the club on the
instant of her enemy's appearance. She hesitated, backed and
threatened him futilely.
"All right--fine! Scotch stubbornness--and not a damn thing to back it
up! Where's your coat? Here. Git into it." Without any prelude, any
apology, he wrested the stick of wood from her, pulled her coat off a
nail near by, and held it outspread, the armholes convenient to her
hands. With her chin shivering, Mary Hope obeyed the brute strength of
the man. She dug her teeth into her lip and thrust her arms
spitefully into the coat sleeves.
"Here's yo're hat. Better tie it on, if yuh got anything to tie it
with. Here."
He twitched his big silk neckerchief from his neck, pulled her toward
him with a gentle sort of brutality, and tied the neckerchief over her
hat and under her chin. He did it exactly as though he was handling a
calf that he did not wish to frighten or hurt.
"Got any mittens? Gloves? Put 'em on."
Standing back in the corner behind the door, facing Tom's bigness and
his inexorable strength, Mary Hope put on her Indian tanned, beaded
buckskin gloves that were in the pockets of her coat. Tom waited until
she had tucked the coatsleeves inside the gauntlets. He took her by
the arm and pulled her to the door, pushed her through it and held her
with one hand, gripping her arm while he fastened the door by the
simple method of pulling it shut so hard that it jammed in the casing.
He led her to where her horse stood backed to the wind and tail
whipping between his legs, and his eyes blinking half shut against the
swirls of dust dug out of the dry sod of the grassland. Without any
spoken command, Tom took the reins and flipped them up over Rab's
neck, standing forward and close to the horse's shoulder. Mary Hope
knew that she must mount or be lifted bodily into the saddle. She
mounted, tears of wrath spilling from her eyes and making her cheeks
cold where they trickled down.
The Boyle children, kicking and quirting their two horses--riding
double, in the Black Rim country, was considered quite comfortable
enough for children--were already on their way home. Mary Hope looked
at their hurried retreat and turned furiously, meaning to overtake
them and order them back. Tom Lorrigan, she reminded herself, might
force her to leave the schoolhouse, but he would scarcely dare to
carry his abuse farther.
She had gone perhaps ten rods when came a pounding of hoofs, and
Coaley's head and proudly arched neck heaved alongside poor,
draggle-maned old Rab.
"You're headed wrong. Have I got to haze yuh all the way home? Might
as well. I want to tell yore dad a few things."
He twitched the reins, and Coaley obediently shouldered Rab out of the
trail and turned him neatly toward the Douglas ranch. Even Rab was
Scotch, it would seem. He laid his ears flat, swung his head
unexpectedly, and bared his teeth at Coaley. But Coaley was of the
Lorrigans. He did not bare his teeth and threaten; he reached out like
a rattler and nipped Rab's neck so neatly that a spot the size of a
quarter showed pink where the hair had been. Rab squealed, whirled and
kicked, but Coaley was not there at that particular moment. He came
back with the battle light in his eyes, and Rab clattered away in a
stiff-legged run. After him went Coaley, loping easily, with high,
rabbit jumps that told how he would love to show the speed that was in
him, if only Tom would loosen the reins a half inch.
For a mile Tom kept close to Rab's heels. Then, swinging up alongside,
he turned to Mary Hope, that baffling half smile on his lips and the
look in his eyes that had never failed to fill her with trepidation.
"I ain't blaming yuh for being Scotch and stubborn," he said, "but you
notice there's something beats it four ways from the jack. Yo go on
home, now, and don't yuh go back to that board cullender till the
weather warms up. And tell yore folks that Tom Lorrigan broke up yore
school for yuh, so they wouldn't have to break up a case of
pneumonia."