CHAPTER FIFTEEN
HE TACKLES ANOTHER
Much to the disgust of Rosa and Subrosa, their new driver turned themfrom the main trail just as they were beginning to climb joyously thefirst grade of Devil's Tooth Ridge. Rosa and Subrosa were subdued,plainly resentful of their subjection, and fretting to be in their ownstalls. Belle they could and did bully to a certain extent. They lovedto fight things out with Belle, they never missed an opportunity for"acting up"--yet this morning they had been afraid to do more than nagat each other with bared teeth; afraid to lope when this big man said,"Hey--settle down, there!" with a grating kind of calm that carriedwith it a new and unknown menace.
Some one had exuberantly fired the Whipple shack, and the pintoswanted to whirl short around in their tracks when they saw the smokingembers. They had wanted to bolt straight out across the rocky uplandand splinter the doubletree, and perhaps smash a wheel or two, andthen stand and kick gleefully at the wreck. If head-shakings andflattened ears meant anything, Rosa and Subrosa were two disgruntledpintos that morning. They had not dared do more than cut a smallhalf-circle out of the trail when they passed the blackened spot thathad been the Whipple shack.
Now they turned down the rocky, half-formed trail to CottonwoodSpring, reluctantly but with no more than a half-hearted kick fromSubrosa to register their disgust. And to that Lance gave no heedwhatever. He did not so much as twitch a rein or yell a threat. Hedrove surely--with one hand mostly because of the broken knuckle,which was painful in the extreme--ignoring the pintos for the mostpart.
He was meditating rather gloomily upon the innate cussedness of humannature as it was developed in Black Rim Country. He was thinking ofMary Hope--a little; of her eyes, that were so obstinately blue, soantagonistically blue, and then, quite unexpectedly, so wistfullyblue; of her voice, that dropped quite as unexpectedly into pureScottish 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 welland had ended--Lord knew how, except that it ended in a fight. Heremembered striking, in that saloon, faces that had been pummeledbefore ever he sent a jab their way. There had been eyes alreadyclosed behind purple, puffy curtains of bruised flesh. He had foughtanimosity that was none of his creating.
Thinking of the fight, he thought of the wrecked saloon when the fightwas over. Thinking of the wrecked saloon led him to think of theprobable condition of the nice new schoolhouse. Thinking of thatbrought him back to Mary Hope,--to her face as it looked when she rodeup to the place on Monday morning. Ride up to it she must, if shemeant to go on teaching, for there was no more Whipple shack.
"Rotten bunch of rough-necks," he summed up the men of Black Rim andof Jumpoff. "And they'll blame the Devil's Tooth outfit--they'll saythe Lorrigans did it. Oh, well--heck!"
So he drove down into the hollow, tied the pintos to the post wherethey stood the night before, crawled through the wire fence where MaryHope had left a small three-cornered fragment of the coat that "wasna"hers at all, and went over to the schoolhouse, standing forlorn in thetrampled yard with broken sandwiches and bits of orange peel and emptywhisky flasks accentuating the unsightliness and disorder.
The door swung half open. The floor was scored, grimy with dirttracked in on heedless feet and ground into the wax that had beenliberally scattered over it to make the boards smooth for dancing. Awindow was broken,--by some one's elbow or by a pistol shot, Lanceguessed. The planks placed along the wall on boxes to form seats werepulled askew, the stovepipe had been knocked down and lay disjointedand battered in a corner. It was not, in Lance's opinion, a pleasantlittle surprise for the girl with the Scotch blue eyes.
He pulled the door shut, picked up the empty whisky flasks and threwthem, one after the other, as far as he could send them into a rockygulch where Mary Hope would not be likely to go. Then he recrossed theenclosure, crawled through the fence, untied the pintos and drovehome.
The bunk house emanated a pronounced odor of whisky and bad air, andmuch snoring, just as Lance expected. The horses dozed in the corralor tossed listlessly their trampled hay; the house was quiet, desertedlooking, with the doors all closed and the blinds down in the windowsof 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 Toothranch had always slept through the day after a dance, with certainyawning intermissions at mealtimes.
He unhitched the pintos, turned them loose in the corral, caught hisown horse, which one of the boys must have led home, and tied it to apost. From the chuck-wagon, standing just where Riley had driven it toa vacant spot beside the woodpile, Lance purloined a can of pork andbeans, a loaf of bread, and some butter. These things he put in abag.
For a minute he stood scowling at the silent house, undecided,wondering just how soundly Belle was sleeping. He was not afraid ofBelle; no real Lorrigan was ever afraid of anything, as fear isusually defined. But he wanted to postpone for a time her reckoningwith him. He wanted to face her when he had a free mind, when she hadslept well, when her temper was not so edgy. He wanted other things,however, and he proceeded to get those things with the least effortand delay.
He wanted soft cloths. On the clothesline dangled three undershirts,three pair of drawers and several mismated socks. The shirts anddrawers were of the kind known as fleece-lined--which means that theyare fuzzy on the inside. They were Riley's complete wardrobe so far asunderwear went, but Lance did not trouble himself with unimportantdetails. He took them all, because he had a swift mental picture ofthe schoolhouse floor which would need much scrubbing before it wouldbe clean.
He was ready to mount and ride away when he remembered something elsethat he would need. "Lye!" he muttered, and retraced his steps to thehouse. Now he must go into the kitchen shed for what he wanted, andRiley slept in a little room next the shed. But Riley was snoringwith a perfect rhythm that bespoke a body sunk deep in slumber, soLance searched until he found what he wanted, and added a full box ofa much-advertised washing powder for good measure. He was fairly wellburdened when he finally started up the trail again, but he believedthat he had everything that he would need, even a lump of putty, and apane of glass which he had carefully removed from a window of thechicken house, and which he hoped would fit.
You may think that he rode gladly upon his errand; that the thought ofMary 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, andthere was much glumness amongst the Rim folk that day, let me tellyou. He ached from fighting, from dancing, from sleeping on the pooltable, from hanging for hours to those darned pintos. His left handwas swollen, and pains from the knuckle streaked like hot wires to hiselbow and beyond. His lips were sore--so sore he could not even swearwith any comfort--and even the pulling together of his black eyebrowshurt 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 hatedthe men who had made the scrubbing necessary.
While he went up the Slide trail he wished that he had never thoughtof giving a dance. He wished he had gone down to Los Angeles for hisEaster holiday, as one of his pals had implored him to do. He wishedMary Hope would quit teaching school; what did she want to stay in theBlack Rim for, anyway? Why didn't she get out where she could amountto 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 wereapparent 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 foreheadand a scratch on his neck, acquired while putting up the stovepipe. Hehad set his lip to bleeding because he forgot that it was cut, anddrew it sharply between his teeth when the stovepipe fell apart justwhen he was sure it was up to stay. He had invented two newcuss-words. What he had not done was weaken in his determination tomake that
small schoolhouse a pleasant surprise for Mary Hope.
He did the work thoroughly, though a woman might have pointed out wetcorners and certain muddy splashes on the wall. He lost all count ofthe buckets of water that he carried from the spring, and it occurredto him that Mary Hope would need a new broom, for the one Belle hadprovided was worn down to a one-sided wisp that reminded him of thebeard of a billy goat. He used two cans of condensed lye and all ofthe washing powder, and sneezed himself too weak too swear over thefine cloud of acrid dust that filled his nostrils when he sprinkledthe powder on the floor. But the floor was clean when he finished, andso 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 bysome miracle escaped. While the floor was drying he took out thebroken windowpane, discovered that the one from the chicken house wastoo short, and cut his thumb while he chipped off a piece of glassfrom the other to fill the space. He did not make a very good job ofit. To hold the glass in place, he used shingle nails, which he had tohunt for on the ground where they had dropped from the roof duringshingling, and when they had been driven into the frame--with thehandle of the screwdriver--they showed very plainly from the inside.Then the putty did not seem to want to stick anywhere, but keptcrumbling off in little lumps. So Lance threw the putty at a gopherthat was standing up nibbling one of Riley's sandwiches, and wentafter the desks.
These took some time to unwrap and carry into place. There were onlytwelve, but Lance would have sworn before a jury that he carried atleast fifty single desks into the schoolhouse that afternoon, andscrewed them to the floor, and unscrewed them because the darnedthings did not line up straight when viewed from the teacher's desk,and he had a vivid impression that blue, blue eyes can be verycritical over such things as a crooked line of desks!
Perhaps it was because his head ached splittingly and his injured handthrobbed until it was practically useless; at any rate the cleaning ofthe schoolhouse, especially the placing of the desks, became fixedafterward in his memory as the biggest, the most disagreeable incidentin his whole vacation.
At four-thirty however the task was accomplished. At the spring, Lancescrubbed the water bucket clean, washed the dipper, placed them behindthe door. He got wearily into the borrowed fur coat, took a lastcomprehensive survey of the room from the doorway, went back to erasecertain sentences scrawled on the blackboard by some would-behumorist, took another look at the work of his aching hands, and wentaway with the coffeepot in his hand and the screwdriver showing itsbattered wooden handle from the top of his pocket. He was too tired tofeel any glow of accomplishment, any great joy in the thought of MaryHope's pleasure. He was not even sure that she would feel anypleasure.
His chief emotion was a gloomy satisfaction in knowing that the placewas once more presentable, that it was ready for Mary Hope to hang upher hat and ring her little bell and start right in teaching. Thatwhat the Lorrigans had set out to do, the Lorrigans had done.
At the ranch he found Riley at the bunk house wrangling with the boysover his lost wardrobe. In Riley's opinion it was a darned poor ideaof a darned poor joke, and it took a darned poor man to perpetrate it.Lance's arrival scarcely interrupted the jangle of voices. The boyshad bruises of their own to nurse, and they had scant sympathy forRiley, and they told him so.
Lance went into the house. He supposed he would have to replaceRiley's clothes, which he did, very matter-of-factly and without anycomment whatever, restitution being in this case a mere matter ofsorting out three suits of his own underwear, which were much betterthan Riley's, and placing them on the cook's bed.
"That you, Lance? Where in the world have you been all this while? Icame mighty near going gunning after the man that stole my team, letme tell you--and I would have, if Tom hadn't found your horse tied upto the fence and guessed you'd gone to take Mary Hope home. But I mustsay, honey, you never followed any short cut!"
This was much easier than Lance had expected, so he made shift tolaugh, 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 throughLance's closed door. "I didn't think there was enough left of 'em tolick, 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 youdon't mind if I leave a few days early. I've got to stop off anyway tosee a fellow in Reno I promised--any hot water handy?"
There was a perceptible pause before Belle answered, and then it wasnot about the bath water. She would not have been Belle Lorriganif she had permitted a quiver in her voice, yet it made Lancethoughtful.
"Honey, I don't blame you for going. I expect we are awful rough--andyou'd notice it, coming from civilized folks. But--you know, don'tyou, that the Lorrigans never spoiled your party for you? It--it justhappened 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, Lanceappeared unexpectedly and gathered her into his arms. "If you thinkI'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 thatgot as much fun out of that scrap as I did! But I've got to _go_." Hepatted her reassuringly on the head, laid his good cheek against hersfor a minute and turned abruptly away into his own room. He closed thedoor and stood absent-mindedly feeling his swollen hand. "I've got togo," he repeated under his breath. "I might get foolish if I stayed.Darned if I'll make a fool of myself over any girl!"