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!" she 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 know _what_ to 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 the Lorrigans 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 perspiration streaming
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 know _what_ to do. She was past tears, it seemed to
Lance. She was white and worn and worried, and there 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. They 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'm _glad_ I'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." He bent
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
proud because 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.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
LANCE 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, was 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't _know?_ 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?"
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 they _go?_" 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--I _think_--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' _know_ nothing," 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. "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 he watched 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. I'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 held proudly, 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, shut 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
struck off 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
out and 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,
letting Coaley 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 Belle vaguely, her eyes clouding a
little. "We're getting so many cattle it keeps Tom on the go day and
night, seems to me. And he _will_ keep 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.