CHAPTER ELEVEN
LANCE RIDES AHEAD
At fifteen minutes to four on a certain Tuesday afternoon, the firstreally pleasant day after the day of tearing, whooping wind that hadblown Tom into the role of school bully, Lance loped out upon thetrail that led past the Whipple shack a mile and a quarter farther on.Ostensibly his destination was the town of Jumpoff, although it wasnot the time of day when one usually started from the Devil's Toothranch to the post-office, with three unimportant letters as an excusefor the trip.
As he rode Lance sang lustily a love song, but he was not thinkingespecially of Mary Hope. In two years more than one California girlhad briefly held his fancy, and memory of Mary Hope had slightlydimmed. In his pocket were two letters, addressed to two Californiatowns. One letter had Miss Helene Somebody inscribed upon it, and onthe other was Miss Mildred Somebody Else. The love song, therefore,had no special significance, save that Lance was young and perfectlynormal and liked the idea of love, without being hampered by anydefinite form of it concentrated upon one girl.
For all that he had timed his trip so as to arrive at the Whippleshack just about the time when Mary Hope would be starting home. Hewas curious to see just how much or how little she had changed; toknow whether she still had that funny little Scotch accent thatmanifested itself in certain phrasings, certain vowel sounds atvariance with good English pronunciation. He wanted to know just howmuch Pocatello had done to spoil her. Beneath all was the primalinstinct of the young male dimly seeking the female whom his destinyhad ordained to be his mate.
As a young fellow shut in behind the Rim, with the outside world avast area over which his imagination wandered vaguely, Mary Hope hadappealed to him. She was the one girl in the Black Rim country whom hewould ride out of his way to meet, whose face, whose voice, lingeredwith him pleasantly for days after he had seen her and talked withher. He reflected, between snatches of song, that he might havethought himself in love with Mary Hope, might even have married her,had Belle not suddenly decided that he should go beyond the Rim andlearn the things she could not teach him. Belle must have wanted him,her youngest, to be different from the rest. He wondered with a suddenwhimsical smile, whether she was satisfied with the result of his twoyears of exile. Tom, he suspected, was not,--nor were Duke and Al.The three seemed to hold themselves apart from him, to look upon himas a guest rather than as one of the family returned after an absence.They did not include him in their talk of range matters and thebusiness of the ranch. He had once observed in them a secretembarrassment when he appeared unexpectedly, had detected a swiftchange of tone and manner and subject.
Surely they could not think he had changed sufficiently to make him anoutsider, he meditated. Aside from his teasing of Belle, he haddropped deliberately into the range vernacular, refraining only fromcertain crudities of speech which grated on his ears. He had put onhis old clothes, he had tried to take his old place in the ranch work.He had driven a four-horse team up the Ridge trail with lumber for theschoolhouse, and had negotiated the rock descent to Cottonwood Springwith a skill that pleased him mightily because it proved to him--andto Tom and the boys--that his range efficiency had not lessened duringhis absence. He had done everything the boys had done, except ride outwith them on certain long trips over the range. He had not gone simplybecause they had made it quite plain that they did not want him.
Nor did the hired cowboys want him with them,--ten of them in the bunkhouse with a cook of their own, and this only the middle of March! Intwo years the personnel of the bunk house had changed almostcompletely. They were men whom he did not know, men who struck him as"hard-boiled," though he could not have explained just wherein theydiffered from the others. Sam Pretty Cow and Shorty he could hobnobwith as of yore,--Sam in particular giving him much pleasure with hisunbroken reserve, his unreadable Indian eyes and his wide-lipped grin.The others were like Duke, Tom and Al,--slightly aloof, a bit guardedin their manner.
"And I suppose Mary Hope will be absolutely spoiled, with small-towndignity laid a foot deep over her Scotch primness. Still, a girl thathas the nerve to lift a club and threaten to brain Tom Lorrigan--"
He had forgotten the love song he was singing, and before he reachedfarther in his musings he met the Swedes, who stared at him round-eyedand did not answer his careless hello. A little farther, the Boylechildren rode up out of a dry wash, grinned bashfully at him andhurried on.
A saddlehorse was tied to a post near the Whipple shack. With longlegs swinging slightly with the stride of his horse, reins heldhigh and loose in one hand, his big hat tilted over his forehead,Lance rode up and dismounted as if his errand, though important, wasnot especially urgent. The door stood open. He walked up, tappedtwice with his knuckles on the unpainted casing, and entered,pulling off his hat and turning it round and round in his glovedfingers while he ducked his head, pressed his lips together with ahumorous quirk, shuffled his spurred feet on the dirty floor andbowed again as awkwardly as he could. In this manner he hoped todraw some little spark of individuality from Mary Hope, who sat behindher yellow-painted table and stared at him over her folded arms.But Mary Hope, he observed, had been crying, and compunction seizedhim suddenly.
"Well, what is it?" she asked him curtly, rubbing a palm down over onecheek, with the motion obliterating a small rivulet of tears.
"If you please, ma'am, I was sent to mend a lock on a door."
"What lock? On what door?" Mary Hope passed a palm down her othercheek, thus obliterating another rivulet that had ceased to flow tearsand was merely wet and itchy.
"If you please, ma'am, you can search me." Lance looked at herinnocently. "I didn't bring any lock with me, and I didn't bring anydoor with me. But I've got some screws and three nails and--lots ofgood intentions."
"Good intentions are very rare in this country," said Mary Hope, andmade meaningless marks on the bare tabletop with a blunt pencil.
Lance heard a twang of Scotch in the "very rare" which pleased him.But he kept his position by the doorway, and he continued bashfullyturning his big hat round and round against his chest,--though theaction went oddly with the Lorrigan look and the athletic poise ofhim. "Yes, ma'am. Quite rare," he agreed.
"In fact, I don't believe there is such a thing in the whole Black Rimcountry," stated Mary Hope, plainly nonplussed at his presence andbehavior.
"Could I show you mine?" Lance advanced a step. He was not sure, atthat moment, whether he wanted to go with the play. Mary Hope wasbetter looking than when he had seen her last. She had lost a gooddeal of the rusticity he remembered her to have possessed, but she waseither too antagonistic to carry on the farce, or she was waiting forhim to show his hand, to betray some self-consciousness. But the factthat she looked at him straight in the eyes and neither frowned norgiggled, set her apart from the ordinary range-bred girl.
"You talk like a country peddler. I'm willing to accept a sample, andsee if they are durable. Though I can't for the life of me see whyyou'd be coming here with good intentions."
"I'd be mending a lock on a door. Is this the door, ma'am? And is thisthe lock?"
Since the door behind him was the only door within five miles of them,and since the lock dangled from a splintered casing, Mary Hope almostsmiled. "It is a door," she informed him. "And it is a lock that hasbeen broken by a Lorrigan."
She was baiting him, tempting him to quarrel with her over the oldgrudge. Because she expected a reply, Lance made no answer whatever.He happened to have a dozen or so of nails in his coat pocket,left-overs from his assiduous carpentry on the house being builded forher comfort. The screws he possessed were too large, and he had nohammer. But no man worries over a missing hammer where rocks areplentiful, and Lance was presently pounding the lock into place, hisback to Mary Hope, his thoughts swinging from his prospective party tothe possible religious scruples of the Douglas family.
Mary Hope used to dance--a very little--he remembered, though she hadnot attended many dances. He recalled suddenly that a Christmas treeor a Fourth
of July picnic had usually been the occasions when MaryHope, with her skirts just hitting her shoe tops in front and saggingin an ungainly fashion behind, had teetered solemnly through a"square" dance with him. Mother Douglas herself had always sat verystraight and prim on a bench, her hands folded in her lap and her eyesblinking disapprovingly at the ungodly ones who let out an exultantlittle yip now and then when they started exuberantly through themazes of the "gran'-right-n-left."
Would Mary Hope attend the party? Should he tell her about it andask her to come? Naturally, he could not peacefully escort herpartyward,--the feud was still too rancorous for that. Or was it?At the Devil's Tooth they spoke of old Scotty as an enemy, but theyhad cited no particular act of hostility as evidence of his enmity.At the Devil's Tooth they spoke of the whole Black Rim country asenemy's country. Lance began to wonder if it were possible thatthe Lorrigans had adopted unconsciously the role of black sheep,without the full knowledge or concurrence of the Black Rimmers.
He did what he could to make a workable lock of one that had beenready to fall to pieces before his father heaved against it; hammeredin the loosened screws in the hinges, tossed the rock out into thescuffed sod before the shack, and picked up his hat. He had not oncelooked toward Mary Hope, but he turned now as if he were going to saygood-by and take himself off; as if mending the lock had really beenhis errand, and no further interest held him there.
He surprised a strange, wistful look in Mary Hope's eyes, a tremblingof her lips. She seemed to be waiting, fearing that he meant to gowithout any further overtures toward friendship.
The Whipple shack was not large. Ten feet spanned the distance betweenthem. Impulsively Lance covered that distance in three steps. At thetable he stopped, leaned toward her with his palms braced upon thetable, and stared full into Mary Hope's disturbed eyes.
"Girl," he said, drawing the word softly along a vibrant note in hisvoice that sent a tremor through her, "Girl, you're more lonesome thanScotch, and you're more Scotch than the heather that grows in yourfront yard to make your mother cry for the Highlands she sees when hereyes blur with homesickness. You were crying when I came--cryingbecause you're lonely. It's a big, wild country--the Black Rim. It's acountry for men to ride hell-whooping through the sage and camasgrass, with guns slung at their hips, but it's no country for a littleperson like you to try and carry on a feud because her father madeone. You're--too little!"
He did not touch her, his face did not come near her face. But in hiseyes, in his voice, in the tender, one-sided little smile, there wassomething,--Mary Hope caught her breath, feeling as if she had beenkissed.
"You little, lonesome girl! There's going to be a party at CottonwoodSpring, a week from Friday night. It's a secret--a secret for you. Andyou won't tell a soul that you were the first to know--and you'llcome, you girl, because it's your party. And not a soul will know it'syour party. If your father's Scotch is too hard for dancing--you'llcome just the same. You'll come, because the secret is for you. And--"He thought that he read something in her eyes and hastened toforestall her intention "--and you won't go near Cottonwood Springbefore the time of the party, because that wouldn't be playing fair.
"Don't be lonely, girl. The world is full of pleasant things, justwaiting to pop out at you from behind every bush. If you're good andkind and honest with life, the Fates are going to give you the bestthey've got. Don't be lonely! Just wait for the pleasant things into-morrow and to-morrow--in all the to-morrows. And one of them, girl,is going to show you the sweetest thing in life. That's love, you girlwith the tears back of your Scotch blue eyes. But wait for it--andtake the little pleasant things that minutes have hidden away in theto-morrows. And one of the pleasant times will be hidden at CottonwoodSpring, a week from Friday night. Wonder what it will be, girl. And ifany one tries to tell it, put your hands over your ears, so that youwon't hear it. Wait--and keep wondering, and come to Cottonwood Springnext Friday night. Adios, girl."
He looked into her eyes, smiling a little. Then, turning suddenly, heleft her without a backward glance. Left her with nothing to spoilthe haunting cadence of his voice, nothing to lift the spell oftender prophecy his words had laid upon her soul. When he was quitegone, when she heard the clatter of his horse's hoofs upon the aridsoil that surrounded the Whipple shack, Mary Hope still stared outthrough the open doorway, seeing nothing of the March barrenness,seeing only the tender, inscrutable, tantalizing face of LanceLorrigan,--tantalizing because she could not plumb the depths of hiseyes, could not say how much of the tenderness was meant for her, howmuch was born of the deep music of his voice, the whimsical,one-sided smile.
And Lance, when he had ridden a furlong from the place, had dippedinto a shallow draw and climbed the other side, turned half around inthe saddle and looked back.
"Now, why did I go off and leave her like that? Like an actor walkingoff the stage to make room for the other fellow to come on and say hislines. There's no other fellow--thank heck! And here are two miles wemight be riding together--and me preaching to her about taking thelittle, pleasant things that come unexpectedly!" He swung his horsearound in the trail, meaning to ride back; retraced his steps as faras the hollow, and turned again, shaking his head.
"Anybody could stop at the schoolhouse just as school's out, and ridea couple of miles down the road with the schoolma'am--if she let himdo it! Anybody could do that. But that isn't the reason, why I'mriding on ahead. What the hell is the reason?"
He stopped again on the high level where he could look back and seethe Whipple shack squatted forlornly in the gray stretch of sage withwide, brown patches of dead grass between the bushes.
"Lonesome," he named the wild expanse of unpeopled range land. "She'sterribly lonely--and sweet. Too lonely and sweet for me to play with,to ride a few miles with--and leave her lonelier than I found her. Icouldn't. There's enough sadness now in those Scotch blue eyes. Damnedif I'll add more!"
He saw Mary Hope come from the shack, pause a minute on the doorstep,then walk out to where her horse was tied to the post. He lifted thereins, pricked his horse gently with the spurs and galloped away toJumpoff, singing no more.