The B. M. Bower Megapack

by B. M. Bower

  So Lance carried with him the full measure of his rage against Mary Hope and the Devil’s Tooth, when he rode out of Jumpoff on a lean-flanked black horse that rolled a wicked eye back at the rider and carried his head high, looking for trouble along the trail.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  MARY HOPE HAS MUCH TROUBLE

  Mary Hope, still taking her own point of view, had troubles in plenty to bear. In her own way she was quite as furious as was Lance, felt quite as injured as did the Devil’s Tooth outfit, had all the humiliation of knowing that the Black Rim talked of nothing but her quarrel with the Lorrigans, and in addition had certain domestic worries of her own.

  Her mother harped continually on the piano quarrel and the indignity of having been “slappit” by the painted Jezebel. But that was not what worried Mary Hope most, for she was long accustomed to her mother’s habit of dwelling tearfully on some particular wrong that had been done her. Mary Hope was worried over her father.

  On the day of the Fourth he had stayed at home, tinkering up his machinery, making ready for haying that was soon to occupy all his waking hours,—and they would be as many as daylight would give him. He had been doing something to an old mower that should have gone to the junk heap long ago, and with the rusty sickle he had managed to cut his hand very deeply, just under the ball of the thumb. He had not taken the trouble to cleanse the cut thoroughly, but had wrapped his handkerchief around the hand and gone glumly on with his work. Now, on the third day, Mary Hope had become frightened at the discoloration of the wound and the way in which his arm was swelling, and had begged him to let her drive him to Jumpoff where he could take the train to Lava and a doctor. As might be expected, he had refused to do anything of the kind. He would not spend the time, and he would not spend the money, and he thought that a poultice would draw out the swelling well enough. Mary Hope had no faith in poultices, and she was on the point of riding to Jumpoff and telegraphing for a doctor when her father cannily read her mind and forbade her so sternly that she quailed before him.

  There was another thing, which she must do. She must take the money she had gotten from the dance and with it pay Tom Lorrigan for the schoolhouse, or stop the school altogether. Jim Boyle, when she had ridden over to the AJ to tell him, had said that she could do as she pleased about paying for the schoolhouse; but if she refused to teach his kids, he would get some one else who would. Jim Boyle seemed to feel no compunctions whatever about accepting favors from the Devil’s Tooth. As to Sederson, the Swede, he was working for Boyle, and did what his boss said. So the matter was flung back upon Mary Hope for adjustment according to the dictates of her pride or conscience, call it which you will.

  Her mother advised her to keep the money and buy another piano. But Mary Hope declared that she would not use the schoolhouse while it was a Lorrigan gift; whereupon Mother Douglas yielded the point grudgingly and told her to send Hugh, the gawky youth, to the Devil’s Tooth with the three hundred dollars and a note saying what the money was for. But her father would not permit Hugh to go, reiterating feverishly that he needed Hugh on the ranch. And with the pain racking him and making his temper something fearful to face, Mary Hope dared not argue with him.

  So she herself set out with her money and her hurt pride and all her troubles, to pay the Devil’s Tooth outfit for the schoolhouse—approximately, since she had only a vague idea of the cost of the building—and then be quit of the Lorrigan patronage forever.

  It happened that she found Tom at home and evidently in a temper not much milder than her father’s. Two of the Devil’s Tooth men were at the stable door when she rode up, and to them Tom was talking in a voice that sent shivers over Mary Hope when she heard it. Not loud and declamatory, like her father’s, but with a certain implacable calm that was harder to face than stormy vituperation.

  But she faced it, now that she was there and Tom had been warned of her coming by Coaley, who pointed his ears forward inquiringly when she neared the stable. The two cowpunchers gave Tom slanting glances and left, muttering under their breaths to each other as they led their sweaty horses into a farther corral.

  Tom lifted his hand to his hat brim in mute recognition of her presence, gave her a swift inquiring look and turned Coaley into the stable with the saddle on. Mary Hope took one deep breath and, fumbling at a heavy little bag tied beside the fork of her saddle, plunged straight into her subject.

  “I’ve brought the money I raised at the dance, Mr. Lorrigan,” she said. “Since you refused to take it for the piano, I have brought it to pay you for the schoolhouse—with Mr. Boyle’s approval. I have three hundred and twelve dollars. If that is not enough, I will pay you the balance later.” She felt secretly rather well satisfied with the speech, which went even better than her rehearsals of it on the way over.

  Then, having untied the bag, she looked up, and her satisfaction slumped abruptly into perturbation. Tom was leaning back against the corral rails, with his arms folded—and just why must he lift his eyebrows and smile like Lance? She was going to hand him the bag, but her fingers bungled and she dropped it in the six-inch dust of the trail.

  Tom unfolded his arms, moved forward a pace, picked up the bag and offered it to her. “You’ve got the buying fever, looks like to me,” he observed coldly. “I haven’t got any schoolhouse to sell.”

  “But you have! You built it, and—”

  “I did build a shack up on the hill, awhile back,” Tom admitted in the same deliberate tone, “but I turned it over to Jim Boyle and the Swede and whoever else wanted to send their kids there to school.” Since Mary Hope refused to put out her hand for the bag, Tom began very calmly to retie it on her saddle. But she struck his hand away.

  “I shall not take the money. I shall pay for the schoolhouse, Mr. Lorrigan. Unless I can pay for it I shall never teach school there another day!” Her voice shook with nervous tension. One did not lightly and unthinkingly measure wills with Tom Lorrigan.

  “That’s your business, whether you teach school or not,” said Tom, holding the bag as though he still meant to tie it on the saddle.

  “But if I don’t they will hire another teacher, and that will drive me away from home to earn money—” Mary Hope had not in the least intended to say that, which might be interpreted as a bid for sympathy.

  “Well, Belle, she says no strange woman can use that schoolhouse. They might not find anything to teach school in, if they tried that.”

  “You’ve got to keep that money.” Mary Hope turned the Roman-nosed horse half away, meaning to leave Tom there with the money in his hand.

  Tom reached calmly out and caught the horse by the bridle.

  “I want to tell you something,” he drawled, in the voice which she had heard when she came up. “I haven’t ‘got’ to do anything. But I tell you what I will do. If you don’t take this money back and go ahead with your school-teaching as if nothing had happened, I’ll burn that schoolhouse to the last chip in the yard. And this money I’ll take and throw down that crevice under the Tooth, up there. The money won’t do nobody any good, and the schoolhouse won’t be nothing at all but a black spot. You can suit yourself—it’s up to you.”

  Mary Hope looked at him, opened her lips to defy him, and instead gave a small sob. Her Scotch blood chilled at the threat of such wanton destruction of property and money, but it was not that which made her afraid at that moment of Tom Lorrigan,—held her silent, glaring impotently.

  She trembled while he tied the money to the saddle fork again, using a knot she had never seen tied before. She wanted to tell him how much she hated him, how much she hated the whole Lorrigan family, how she would die before she ever entered the door of that schoolhouse again unless it was paid for and she could be free of obligation to him.

  But when his head was bent, hiding all of his face but the chin, she had a wild fleeting notion that he was Lance, and that he would lift his head and smile at her. Yet when he lifted his head he was just Tom Lorrigan, with a hardness in his face
which Lance did not have, and a glint in his eye that told her his will was inexorable, that he would do exactly what he said he would do, and perhaps more, if she opposed him.

  Without a word she turned back, crushed under the sense of defeat. Useless destruction of property and money did not seem to mean anything at all to a Lorrigan, but to her the thought was horrible. She could not endure the thought of what he would do if she refused to use the schoolhouse. Much less could she endure the thought of entering the place again while it remained a Lorrigan gift.

  Blindly fighting an hysterical impulse to cry aloud like a child over her hurt, she reined Jamie into the shortcut trail of the Slide. Coming down she had followed the wagon road, partly because the longer trail postponed a dreaded meeting, and partly because Jamie, being uncertain in his temper and inclined to panicky spells when things did not go just right with him, could not safely be trusted on the Slide trail, which was strange to him.

  Until she reached the narrow place along the shale side hill she did not realize what trail she was taking. Then, because she could not leave the trail and take the road without retracing her steps almost to the stable, she went on, giving Jamie an impatient kick with her heel and sending him snorting over the treacherous stuff in a high canter.

  “Go on and break your neck and mine too, if ye like,” she sobbed. “Ye needn’t think I’ll give an inch to you; it’s bad enough.” When Jamie, still snorting, still reckless with his feet, somehow managed to pass over the boulder-strewn stretch without breaking a leg, Mary Hope choked back the obstreperous lump in her throat and spoke again in a quiet fury of resentment. “Burn it he may if he likes; I shall not put my foot again inside a house of the Lorrigans!”

  Whereat Jamie threw up his head, shied at a white rock on the steep slope beneath, loped through the sagebrush where the trail was almost level, scrambled up a steep, deep-worn bit of trail, turned the sharp corner of the switch-back and entered that rift in the cap-rock known as the Slide.

  Mary Hope had traveled that trail many times on Rab, a few years ago. She had always entered the Slide with a little thrill along her spine, knowing it for a place where Adventure might meet her face to face—where Danger lurked and might one day spring out at her. Today she thought nothing about it until Jamie squatted and tried to whirl back. Then she looked up and saw Adventure, Danger and Lance Lorrigan just ahead, where the Slide was steepest.

  Lance pulled up his hired horse, his thoughts coming back with a jerk from the same disagreeable subject that had engrossed Mary Hope. The hired horse jumped, tried his best not to sit down, lunged forward to save himself, found himself held back with a strength that did not yield an inch, and paused wild-eyed, his hind feet slipping and scraping the rock.

  Jamie in that moment was behaving much worse. Jamie, finding that he could not turn around, was backing down the Slide, every step threatening to land him in a heap. Mary Hope turned white, her eyes staring up at Lance a little above her. In that instant they both remembered the short turn of the switch-back, and the twelve-foot bank with the scrambling trail down which no horse could walk backwards and keep his legs under him.

  “Loosen the reins and spur him!” Lance’s voice sounded hollow, pent within that rock-walled slit. In the narrow space he was crowding his own horse against the right wall so that he might dismount.

  Mary Hope leaned obediently forward, the reins hanging loose. “He always backs up when he’s scared,” she panted, when Jamie paid no attention.

  Instinctively Lance’s hand felt for his rope. On the livery saddle there did happen to be a poor sort of grass-rope riata, cheap and stiff and clumsily coiled, but fortunately with a loop in the end.

  “Don’t lasso Jamie! He always fights a rope. He’ll throw himself!” Mary Hope’s voice was strained and unnatural.

  Lance flipped a kink out of the rope. In that narrow space the loop must be a small one; he had one swift, sickening vision of what might happen if the little loop tightened around her neck. “Put up your hands—close to your head,” he commanded her. “It’s all right. Don’t be afraid—it’s all right, girl—”

  He shot the loop straight out and down at her, saw it settle over her head, slip over her elbows, her shoulders. “It’s all right—can you get off!”

  She tried, but the space was too narrow to risk it, with Jamie still going backward in a brainless panic. He would have trampled her beneath him had she done so.

  “Stay on—but be all ready to jump when he leaves the Slide. Don’t be afraid—it’s all right. He won’t hurt you; he won’t hurt you at all.” He was edging closer to the horse, holding the rope taut in his right hand, his left ready to catch Jamie by the bridle once he came near enough. His one fear was that the horse might fall before he was out of the gash, and in falling might crush Mary Hope against the rocks.

  As Lance came on, Jamie backed faster, his haunches dropped, his feet slipping under him. Lance dared not crowd him, dared not reach for the bridle, still more than an arm’s length away. So Jamie came out of the Slide backwards, saw with a sudden panic-stricken toss of his head that he had open daylight all around him, whirled short and gave one headlong leap away from the place that had terrified him so.

  Lance jumped, reaching for Mary Hope as the horse went over the bank. By the length of his hand he missed her, but the rope pulled her free from Jamie, and she fell prone on the trail and lay still.

  “Are you hurt? Good God! are you hurt?” Lance gathered her in his arms and carried her to where the rock wall made a shady band across the steep slope.

  Mary Hope was very white, very limp, and her eyes were closed. On her cheeks he saw where tears had lately been. Her mouth had a pitiful little droop. He sat down, still holding her like a child, and felt tentatively of her arms, her shoulders, vaguely prepared to feel the crunch of a broken bone. There was no water nearer than the ranch. Jamie, having rolled over twice, was lying on his side near a scraggly buck-brush, looking back up the hill, apparently wondering whether it would be worth while to get up. The hired horse, having found a niche wherein to set his hind feet, stood staring down through the Slide, afraid to come farther, unable to retreat.

  One side of Mary Hope’s face was dusty, the skin roughened with small scratches where she had fallen. With his handkerchief Lance very gently wiped away the dust, took off her hat and fanned her face, watching absently two locks of hair that blew back and forth across her forehead with the breeze made by the swaying hat brim.

  She was not dead! She could not be dead, with that short fall. Then he saw that she was breathing faintly, unevenly, and in another minute he saw her lashes quiver against her tanned cheek. But her eyes did not open, the color did not flow back into her face.

  “Oh, girl—girl, wake up!” With a little shake he pulled her close to him. “Open your eyes. I want to see your eyes. I want to see if they are just as blue as ever. Girl—oh, you poor little girl!”

  He had been hating her, furious at the insult she had given his family. Angry as he was with the Lorrigans, resenting fiercely what they had done, he had hated Mary Hope Douglas more, because the hurt was more personal, struck deep into a part of his soul that had grown tender. But he could not hate her now—not when she lay there in his arms with her tear-stained cheek against his heart, her eyes shut, and with that pathetic droop to her lips. Gently he tucked back the locks of hair that kept blowing across her forehead. Very tenderly, with a whimsical pretense at self-pity, he upbraided her for the trouble she was giving him.

  “Must I go clear down to the ranch and pack up water in my hat, and slosh it on your face? I’ll do that, girl, if you don’t open your eyes and look at me. You’re not hurt; are you hurt? You’d better wake up and tell me, or I’ll have to take you right up in my arms and carry you all the way down to the house, and ride like heck for a doctor, and—”

  “Ye will not!” she retorted faintly, and unexpectedly he was looking into her eyes, bluer than he had remembered them; troubled, questioning�
��but stubborn against his suggestion. She moved uneasily, and he lifted her to the bank beside him and put one arm behind her, so that she leaned against him.

  “Oh, very well—then I will not. You’ll walk with me to the house, and we’ll let Belle—”

  “I will not! Never in my life will I enter the house of a Lorrigan!” Mary Hope brushed a palm against her forehead, straightened herself as if she resented her weakness, wished to hold herself aloof from him. She did not look at Lance, but stared across the narrow valley to the sage-clothed bluff beyond.

  “Why not? You’ve just come from the Lorrigans, haven’t you?” Lance studied her face. “You must have, or you wouldn’t be on this trail.”

  “I went down to pay for the schoolhouse, since your father took the piano away.—And he would not take the money, and he said he would burn the house if I don’t teach in it—and I’ll die before ever I’ll open the door again, unless he takes the money. And he said if I left the money he would throw it down the crevice yonder—and he would do it! And do you think I’ll be under any obligation to Tom Lorrigan? You called my father hard, but your father is the hardest man that ever lived. The Lorrigans shall not—”

  Lance laughed, set her hat wrong side before on her head, tucked the elastic band under her chin, laughed again when she pettishly removed it and set the hat straight. “I wouldn’t worry over the schoolhouse right now—nor Tom Lorrigan either,” he said. “Look at your horse down there. If you’re all right, I’ll go down and see how many bones he’s broken. You had a chance for a nasty pile-up. Do you know that?”

  “I’m grateful,” said Mary Hope soberly. “But it was Lorrigan meanness brought me here; it was a Lorrigan got me into the trouble now, and a Lorrigan got me out of it. It’s always the Lorrigans.”

  “Yes, and a Lorrigan’s got to see you a little farther before you’re through with them, so cheer up.” Lance laughed again, an amused little chuckle that was calculated to take the droop out of Mary Hope’s lips, and failed completely.