his feet and straightway extending them again; making a sleepy, futile
clutch at the fur coat, that had slipped off his shoulders when he
turned. The bartender reached out and flung the coat up on Lance's
shoulders, and bit off a chew of tobacco and stowed it away in his
cheek. Presently he dozed again.
Dawn seeped in through the windows. Lance, lying flat on his stomach
with his face on his folded arms, slept soundly. The unpainted
buildings across the street became visible in the gloomy, lifeless
gray of a sunless morning. With the breeze that swept a flurry of gray
dust and a torn newspaper down the street, came the rattle of a wagon,
the sound of voices mingled in raucous, incoherent wrangling.
"They're comin'," yawned the bartender, glancing at the sleeper on the
pool table. "Better wake up; they're comin' pickled and fighty,
judgin' by the sound."
Lance sighed, turned his face away from the light and slept on,
untroubled by the nearing tumult.
Galloping horses came first, _ka-lup, ka-lup, ka-lup_, a sharp
staccato on the frosted earth. The rattle of the wagon ceased,
resumed, stopped outside the saloon. Other galloping horsemen came up
and stopped. The door was flung open violently, letting in men with
unfinished sentences hot on their tongues.
"Next time a Lorrigan dance comes off--"
"What I'd a done, woulda--"
"Fix them damn Lorrigans!"
Detached phrases, no one man troubling to find a listener, the words
came jumbled to the ears of Lance, who fancied himself in the
bunk-house at home, with the boys just in from a ride somewhere. He
was wriggling into a freshly uncomfortable posture on the table when
the fur coat was pulled off him, letting the daylight suddenly into
his eyes as his brain emerged from the fog of sleep.
"And here's the--guy that run away from me!" Bill Kennedy jerked off
his hat and brought it down with a slap on Lance's face. "Run off to
town, by jiminy, and hid! Run--"
Half asleep as he was--rather, just shocked awake--Lance heaved
himself off the table and landed one square blow on Bill Kennedy's
purple jaw. Bill staggered, caught himself and came back, arms up and
fists guarding his face. Lance disentangled his feet from the fur
coat, kicked it out of his way and struck again just as Kennedy was
slugging at him.
At the bar the long line of men whirled, glasses in hand, to watch the
fight. But it did not last long. Kennedy was drunk, and Lance was not.
So presently Kennedy was crawling on his knees amongst some overturned
chairs, and Lance was facing the crowd, every inch of him itching to
fight.
"Who was it said he was going to fix them damn Lorrigans?" he
demanded, coming at them warily. "I'm not packing a gun, but I'd like
to lick a few of you fellows that tried to rough-house the dance I
gave. Didn't cost you a cent; music, supper, everything furnished for
you folks to have a good time--and the way you had it was to wreck the
place like the rotten-souled hoodlums you are. Now, who is it wants to
fix the damn Lorrigans?"
"Me, for one; what yuh go'n take my girl away from me for?" a flushed
youth cried, and flung the dregs of his whisky glass at Lance. There
was not more than a half teaspoon in the glass, but the intent was
plain enough.
Lance walked up and knocked that young man staggering half across the
room, slapped with the flat of his hand another who leered at him,
whirled to meet some one who struck him a glancing blow on the ear,
and flung him after the first.
"You're all of you drunk--it's a one-sided fight all the way through,"
he cried, parrying a blow from Kennedy, who had gotten to his feet and
came at him again mouthing obscenity. "But I'll lick you, if you
insist."
His coat had hampered him until it obligingly slit up the back. He
wriggled out of the two halves, tore off his cuffs, and went after the
crowd with his bare fists. Some one lifted a chair threateningly, and
Lance seized it and sent it crashing through a window. Some one else
threw a beer mug, but he ducked in time and broke a knuckle on the
front teeth of the thrower. He saw a gap in the teeth, saw the man
edge out of the fray spitting blood while he made for the door, and
felt that the blow was worth a broken knuckle.
It was not a pretty fight. Such fights never are pretty. Lance himself
was not a pretty sight, when he had finished. There had been
shooting--but even in Jumpoff one hesitated to shoot down an unarmed
man, so that the bar fixtures suffered most. Lance came out of it with
a fragment of shirt hanging down his chest like a baby's bib, a cut
lip that bled all over his chin, a cheek skinned and swelling rapidly,
the bad knuckle and the full flavor of victory.
The saloon looked as though cattle had been driven through it. Bill
Kennedy lay sprawled over a card table, whimpering inarticulately
because he had lost his gun at the dance. The flushed youth who had
rashly claimed Mary Hope as his girl was outside with a washbasin
trying to stop his nose from bleeding. Others were ministering to
their hurts as best they might, muttering the thoughts that they dared
not express aloud.
Lance looked up from examination of his knuckle, caressed his cut lip
with the tip of his tongue, pulled the fragment of shirt down as far
as possible, gently rubbed his swelling cheek, and turned to the
bartender.
"I never licked a man yet and sent him home thirsty," he said. "Set it
out for the boys--and give me another highball. Then if you'll lend me
a coat and a pair of gloves, I'll go home."
Peace was ratified in whisky drunk solemnly. Lance paid, and turned to
go. One of the vanquished wabbled up to him and held out his hand to
shake.
"You damn Lorrigans, you got us comin' and goin'," he complained, "but
shake, anyway. I'm Irish meself, and I know a rale fight when I see
it. What we didn't git at the dance before we left, by heavins you
give us when we got into town--so I'm one that's game to say it was a
fine dance and not a dull momint anywhere!"
"That's something," Lance grinned wryly and wriggled into the fur
overcoat which the bartender generously lent him. He rejected the
gloves when he found that his hands were puffed and painful, and went
out to find breakfast.
Over a thick white cup of dubious coffee and a plate of sticky
hot-cakes he meditated glumly on the general unappreciativeness of the
world in general, and of the Black Rim in particular. What had
happened at the schoolhouse he could only surmise, but from certain
fragmentary remarks he had overheard he guessed that the schoolhouse
probably had suffered as much as the saloon. Black Rim, it would seem,
was determined that the Lorrigans should go on living up to their
reputations, however peacefully inclined the Lorrigans might be.
Two disquieting thoughts he took with him to the stable when he went
after the pinto team: Mary Hope would say that it was not a pleasant
surprise which he had given her at Cottonwood Spring. And Belle,--he
was not at all sure whether he was too big for Belle's quirt to find
the tender places on his legs, but he was very sure that the Irishman
spoke the truth. There would still be no dull moments for Lance when
he confronted the owner of that pinto team.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
HE TACKLES ANOTHER
Much to the disgust of Rosa and Subrosa, their new driver turned them
from the main trail just as they were beginning to climb joyously the
first grade of Devil's Tooth Ridge. Rosa and Subrosa were subdued,
plainly resentful of their subjection, and fretting to be in their own
stalls. Belle they could and did bully to a certain extent. They loved
to fight things out with Belle, they never missed an opportunity for
"acting up"--yet this morning they had been afraid to do more than nag
at each other with bared teeth; afraid to lope when this big man said,
"Hey--settle down, there!" with a grating kind of calm that carried
with it a new and unknown menace.
Some one had exuberantly fired the Whipple shack, and the pintos
wanted to whirl short around in their tracks when they saw the smoking
embers. They had wanted to bolt straight out across the rocky upland
and splinter the doubletree, and perhaps smash a wheel or two, and
then stand and kick gleefully at the wreck. If head-shakings and
flattened ears meant anything, Rosa and Subrosa were two disgruntled
pintos that morning. They had not dared do more than cut a small
half-circle out of the trail when they passed the blackened spot that
had been the Whipple shack.
Now they turned down the rocky, half-formed trail to Cottonwood
Spring, reluctantly but with no more than a half-hearted kick from
Subrosa to register their disgust. And to that Lance gave no heed
whatever. He did not so much as twitch a rein or yell a threat. He
drove surely--with one hand mostly because of the broken knuckle,
which was painful in the extreme--ignoring the pintos for the most
part.
He was meditating rather gloomily upon the innate cussedness of human
nature as it was developed in Black Rim Country. He was thinking of
Mary Hope--a little; of her eyes, that were so obstinately blue, so
antagonistically blue, and then, quite unexpectedly, so wistfully
blue; of her voice, that dropped quite as unexpectedly into pure
Scottish melody; of her primness, that sometimes was not prim at all,
but quaintly humorous, or wistfully shy.
He was thinking more often of the dance that had started out so well
and had ended--Lord knew how, except that it ended in a fight. He
remembered striking, in that saloon, faces that had been pummeled
before ever he sent a jab their way. There had been eyes already
closed behind purple, puffy curtains of bruised flesh. He had fought
animosity that was none of his creating.
Thinking of the fight, he thought of the wrecked saloon when the fight
was over. Thinking of the wrecked saloon led him to think of the
probable condition of the nice new schoolhouse. Thinking of that
brought him back to Mary Hope,--to her face as it looked when she rode
up to the place on Monday morning. Ride up to it she must, if she
meant to go on teaching, for there was no more Whipple shack.
"Rotten bunch of rough-necks," he summed up the men of Black Rim and
of Jumpoff. "And they'll blame the Devil's Tooth outfit--they'll say
the Lorrigans did it. Oh, well--heck!"
So he drove down into the hollow, tied the pintos to the post where
they stood the night before, crawled through the wire fence where Mary
Hope had left a small three-cornered fragment of the coat that "wasna"
hers at all, and went over to the schoolhouse, standing forlorn in the
trampled yard with broken sandwiches and bits of orange peel and empty
whisky flasks accentuating the unsightliness and disorder.
The door swung half open. The floor was scored, grimy with dirt
tracked in on heedless feet and ground into the wax that had been
liberally scattered over it to make the boards smooth for dancing. A
window was broken,--by some one's elbow or by a pistol shot, Lance
guessed. The planks placed along the wall on boxes to form seats were
pulled askew, the stovepipe had been knocked down and lay disjointed
and battered in a corner. It was not, in Lance's opinion, a pleasant
little surprise for the girl with the Scotch blue eyes.
He pulled the door shut, picked up the empty whisky flasks and threw
them, one after the other, as far as he could send them into a rocky
gulch where Mary Hope would not be likely to go. Then he recrossed the
enclosure, crawled through the fence, untied the pintos and drove
home.
The bunk house emanated a pronounced odor of whisky and bad air, and
much snoring, just as Lance expected. The horses dozed in the corral
or tossed listlessly their trampled hay; the house was quiet, deserted
looking, with the doors all closed and the blinds down in the windows
of the room that had been the birthplace of Belle's three boys.
Lance knew that every one would be asleep to-day. The Devil's Tooth
ranch had always slept through the day after a dance, with certain
yawning intermissions at mealtimes.
He unhitched the pintos, turned them loose in the corral, caught his
own horse, which one of the boys must have led home, and tied it to a
post. From the chuck-wagon, standing just where Riley had driven it to
a vacant spot beside the woodpile, Lance purloined a can of pork and
beans, a loaf of bread, and some butter. These things he put in a
bag.
For a minute he stood scowling at the silent house, undecided,
wondering just how soundly Belle was sleeping. He was not afraid of
Belle; no real Lorrigan was ever afraid of anything, as fear is
usually defined. But he wanted to postpone for a time her reckoning
with him. He wanted to face her when he had a free mind, when she had
slept well, when her temper was not so edgy. He wanted other things,
however, and he proceeded to get those things with the least effort
and delay.
He wanted soft cloths. On the clothesline dangled three undershirts,
three pair of drawers and several mismated socks. The shirts and
drawers were of the kind known as fleece-lined--which means that they
are fuzzy on the inside. They were Riley's complete wardrobe so far as
underwear went, but Lance did not trouble himself with unimportant
details. He took them all, because he had a swift mental picture of
the schoolhouse floor which would need much scrubbing before it would
be clean.
He was ready to mount and ride away when he remembered something else
that he would need. "Lye!" he muttered, and retraced his steps to the
house. Now he must go into the kitchen shed for what he wanted, and
Riley slept in a little room next the shed. But Riley was snoring
with a perfect rhythm that bespoke a body sunk deep in slumber, so
Lance searched until he found what he wanted, and added a full box of
a much-advertised washing powder for good measure. He was fairly well
burdened when he finally started up the trail again, but he believed
that he had everything that he would need, even a lump of putty, and a
pane of glass which he had carefully removed from a window of the
chicken house, and which he hoped would fit.
You may think that he rode gladly upon his errand; that the thought of
Mary Hope turned the work before him into a labor of love. It did not.
Lance Lorrigan was the glummest young man in the whole Black Rim, and
there was much glumness amongst the Rim folk that day, let me tell
you. He ached from fighting, from dancing, from sleeping on the pool
table, from hanging for hours to those darned pintos. His left hand
was swollen, and pains from the knuckle streaked like hot wires to his
elbow and beyond. His lips were sore--so sore he could not even swear
with any comfort--and even the pulling together of his black eyebrows
hurt his puffed cheek. And he never had scrubbed a floor in his life,
and knew that he was going to hate the work even worse than he hated
the men who had made the scrubbing necessary.
While he went up the Slide trail he wished that he had never thought
of giving a dance. He wished he had gone down to Los Angeles for his
Easter holiday, as one of his pals had implored him to do. He wished
Mary Hope would quit teaching school; what did she want to stay in the
Black Rim for, anyway? Why didn't she get out where she could amount
to something?
If there were any caressing cadences in the voice of Lance Lorrigan,
any provocative tilt to his eyebrows, any tenderness in his smile,
anything enigmatical in his personality, none of these things were
apparent when he set the first bucket of water on the stove to heat.
He had added to his charms a broad streak of soot across his forehead
and a scratch on his neck, acquired while putting up the stovepipe. He
had set his lip to bleeding because he forgot that it was cut, and
drew it sharply between his teeth when the stovepipe fell apart just
when he was sure it was up to stay. He had invented two new
cuss-words. What he had not done was weaken in his determination to
make that small schoolhouse a pleasant surprise for Mary Hope.
He did the work thoroughly, though a woman might have pointed out wet
corners and certain muddy splashes on the wall. He lost all count of
the buckets of water that he carried from the spring, and it occurred
to him that Mary Hope would need a new broom, for the one Belle had
provided was worn down to a one-sided wisp that reminded him of the
beard of a billy goat. He used two cans of condensed lye and all of
the washing powder, and sneezed himself too weak too swear over the
fine cloud of acrid dust that filled his nostrils when he sprinkled
the powder on the floor. But the floor was clean when he finished, and
so was the platform outside.
Of Riley's underwear there was left the leg of one pair of drawers,
which Lance reserved for dusting the desks and the globe that had by
some miracle escaped. While the floor was drying he took out the
broken windowpane, discovered that the one from the chicken house was
too short, and cut his thumb while he chipped off a piece of glass
from the other to fill the space. He did not make a very good job of
it. To hold the glass in place, he used shingle nails, which he had to
hunt for on the ground where they had dropped from the roof during
shingling, and when they had been driven into the frame--with the
handle of the screwdriver--they showed very plainly from the inside.
Then the putty did not seem to want to stick anywhere, but kept
crumbling off in little lumps. So Lance threw the putty at a gopher
that was standing up nibbling one of Riley's sandwiches, and went
after the desks.
These took some time to unwrap and carry into place. There were only
twelve, but Lance would have sworn before a jury that he carried at
least fifty single desks into the schoolhouse that afternoon, and
screwed them to the floor, and unscrewed them because the darned
things did not line up straight when viewed from the teacher's desk,
and he had a vivid impression that blue, blue eyes can be very
critical over such things as a crooked line of desks!
Perhaps it was because his head ached splittingly and his injured hand
throbbed until it was practically useless; at any rate the cleaning of
the schoolhouse, especially the placing of the desks, became fixed
afterward in his memory as the biggest, the most disagreeable incident
in his whole vacation.
At four-thirty however the task was accomplished. At the spring, Lance
scrubbed the water bucket clean, washed the dipper, placed them behind
the door. He got wearily into the borrowed fur coat, took a last
comprehensive survey of the room from the doorway, went back to erase
certain sentences scrawled on the blackboard by some would-be
humorist, took another look at the work of his aching hands, and went
away with the coffeepot in his hand and the screwdriver showing its
battered wooden handle from the top of his pocket. He was too tired to
feel any glow of accomplishment, any great joy in the thought of Mary
Hope's pleasure. He was not even sure that she would feel any
pleasure.
His chief emotion was a gloomy satisfaction in knowing that the place
was once more presentable, that it was ready for Mary Hope to hang up
her hat and ring her little bell and start right in teaching. That
what the Lorrigans had set out to do, the Lorrigans had done.
At the ranch he found Riley at the bunk house wrangling with the boys
over his lost wardrobe. In Riley's opinion it was a darned poor idea
of a darned poor joke, and it took a darned poor man to perpetrate it.
Lance's arrival scarcely interrupted the jangle of voices. The boys
had bruises of their own to nurse, and they had scant sympathy for
Riley, and they told him so.
Lance went into the house. He supposed he would have to replace
Riley's clothes, which he did, very matter-of-factly and without any
comment whatever, restitution being in this case a mere matter of
sorting out three suits of his own underwear, which were much better
than Riley's, and placing them on the cook's bed.
"That you, Lance? Where in the world have you been all this while? I
came mighty near going gunning after the man that stole my team, let
me tell you--and I would have, if Tom hadn't found your horse tied up
to the fence and guessed you'd gone to take Mary Hope home. But I must
say, honey, you never followed any short cut!"
This was much easier than Lance had expected, so he made shift to
laugh, though it hurt his lip cruelly. "Had to take her to Jumpoff,
Belle. Then I had to clean up that crowd of toughs that--"
"You cleaned up Tom's leavin's, then!" Belle made grim comment through
Lance's closed door. "I didn't think there was enough left of 'em to
lick, by the time our boys got through. Haven't you been to bed yet,
for heaven's sake!"
"I'm going to bed," mumbled Lance, "when I've had a bath and a meal.
And to-morrow, Belle, I think I'll hit the trail for 'Frisco. Hope you
don't mind if I leave a few days early. I've got to stop off anyway to
see a fellow in Reno I promised--any hot water handy?"
There was a perceptible pause before Belle answered, and then it was
not about the bath water. She would not have been Belle Lorrigan
if she had permitted a quiver in her voice, yet it made Lance
thoughtful.
"Honey, I don't blame you for going. I expect we are awful rough--and
you'd notice it, coming from civilized folks. But--you know, don't
you, that the Lorrigans never spoiled your party for you? It--it just
happened that the Jumpoff crowd brought whisky out from town. We
_tried_ to make it pleasant--and it won't happen again--"
"Bless your heart!" Clad with superb simplicity in a bathrobe, Lance
appeared unexpectedly and gathered her into his arms. "If you think
I'm getting so darn civilized I can't stay at home, take a look at me!
By heck, Belle, I'll bet there isn't a man in the whole Black Rim that
got as much fun out of that scrap as I did! But I've got to _go_." He
patted her reassuringly on the head, laid his good cheek against hers
for a minute and turned abruptly away into his own room. He closed the
door and stood absent-mindedly feeling his swollen hand. "I've got to
go," he repeated under his breath. "I might get foolish if I stayed.
Darned if I'll make a fool of myself over any girl!"
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
ABOUT A PIANO
In the lazy hour just after a satisfying dinner, Lance stood leaning
over an end of the piano, watching Belle while she played--he listened
and smoked a cigarette and looked as though he hadn't a thing on his
mind.
"I remember you used to sing that a lot for the little Douglas girl,"
he observed idly. "She used to sit and look at you--my word, but her
eyes were the bluest, the lonesomest eyes I ever saw! She seemed to
think you were next to angels when you sang. I saw it in her face, but
I was too much of a kid then to know what it was." He lighted a fresh
cigarette, placed it between Belle's lips so that she need not stop
playing while she smoked, and laughed as if he were remembering
something funny.
"She always looked so horrified when she saw you smoking," he said.
"And so adoring when you sang, and so lonesome when she had to ride
away. She was a queer kid--and she's just as unexpected now--just as
Scotch. Didn't you find her that way, dad?"
"She was Scotch enough," Tom mumbled from his chair by the fire.
"Humpin' hyenas! She was like handlin' a wildcat!"
"The poor kid never did have a chance to be human," said Belle, and
ceased playing for a moment. "Good heavens, how she did enjoy the two
hours I gave her at the piano! She's got the makings of a musician, if
she could keep at it."
"We-ell--" Having artfully led Belle to this point, Lance quite as
artfully edged away from it. "You gave her all the chance you could.
And she ought to be able to go on, if she wants to. I suppose old
Scotty's human enough to get her something to play on."
"Him? _Human!_" Tom shifted in his chair. "If pianos could breed and
increase into a herd, and he could ship a carload every fall, Scotty
might spend a few dollars on one."
"It's a darned shame," Belle exclaimed, dropping her fingers to the
keys again. "Mary Hope just _starves_ for everything that makes life
worth living. And that old devil--"
"Say--don't make me feel like a great, overgrown money-hog," Lance
protested. "A girl starving for music, because she hasn't a piano to
play on. And a piano costs, say, three or four hundred dollars. Of
course, we've got the money to buy one--I suppose I could dig up the
price myself. I was thinking I'd stake our schoolhouse to a library.
That's something it really needs. But a piano--I wish you hadn't said
anything about starving. I know I'd hate to go hungry for music,
but--"