The B. M. Bower Megapack

by B. M. Bower

  He saw her cheeks were reddening, saw too that her face gave evidence of no particular bodily pain. She had probably fainted from fright, more than anything else, he decided, and her fright was now forgotten in her animosity. He slid off the bank, went down to where Jamie lay, took him by the bridle and urged him to stand. Which Jamie, after one or two scrambling attempts, managed to do. But the horse was hurt. He could scarcely hobble to the trail.

  Without paying any visible attention to Mary Hope, Lance removed her saddle from Jamie, and brought it up to where she sat dispiritedly watching him. His manner was brisk, kind enough, but had an aloofness which made her keenly aware that he accepted her adherence to the feud and tacitly took his own place with the Lorrigans. Over this emergency she felt that he had unspokenly set a flag of truce. His attitude depressed her.

  “There are just two things to do,” he said, laying the saddle at her feet. “You may ride that livery horse back home, and I’ll come along tomorrow and pick him up and take him in with me to Jumpoff; or you can let me go down to the ranch and bring up a gentle horse, and you can ride that home. I can get him when I come out tomorrow with my traps. I advise you to take the gentle horse from the ranch, after the shake-up you’ve had. This town horse is not easy gaited, by any means. Your horse I’ll manage to get down to the ranch and do what I can for him. It’s his shoulder, I think, from the way he acts. He may be all right after a while.”

  Mary Hope looked distressfully at Jamie, standing dejected where Lance had left him, his head sagging, every line of him showing how sick of life he was. She glanced swiftly up at Lance, bent her head suddenly and pressed the tips of her fingers along her cheek bones, wiping away tears that came brimming over her eyelids.

  “You’d better let me bring up a horse and take you home,” Lance urged, the caressing note creeping into his voice.

  “Oh, no! I can’t! I—what do I care how I get home? But if your father won’t take the money—You don’t know! The whole Rim talks and gossips until I wish I were dead! And I can’t go on using the schoolhouse—and Tom Lorrigan says if I don’t—” She was crying at last, silently, miserably, her face hidden behind her hands.

  “He’ll take the money.” Lance, after an indeterminate minute while he watched her, laid his hand lightly on her shoulder. “I’ll see that dad takes it. And I’ll give you a bill of sale that ought to shut the Black Rim mouths. I’m a Lorrigan and I’m not going to apologize for the blood that’s in me, but I want you to know that if I had been home on the night of the Fourth the Lorrigans wouldn’t have done the rotten cheap thing they did.”

  Mary Hope heard him tearing a leaf out of his memorandum book, looked up at him while he wrote rapidly. Without any comment whatever he gave her the paper, went up to where the hired horse stood, and coaxed it down through the Slide. Quickly, with the deftness that told of lifelong intimacy with horses and saddles, he set her own saddle on the hired horse, while Mary Hope read the terse bill of sale that set forth the legal “Ten dollars and other valuable considerations,” and was signed “Thomas Lorrigan, per L. M. Lorrigan.” It all seemed very businesslike, and heartened her so much that she was willing to be nice to Lance Lorrigan. But Lance remained strictly neutral.

  “I’ll lead him up the Slide for you,” he said unemotionally when the horse was ready. “After he’s over that, I think you’ll be all right; you’re a good rider. And you need not feel under any obligations then to the Lorrigans. I was practically through with the horse, anyway, and it will be no trouble at all to drive by your place and get him tomorrow.”

  “I can lead him up—” Mary Hope began, but Lance had already turned the horse and started him up the Slide, so there was nothing for her to do but follow.

  At the top she gave him the money bag, which he took without any words whatever on the subject. He held the horse until she had mounted, made sure that she was all right, chilled by his perfect politeness her nervous overture toward a more friendly parting, lifted his hat and turned immediately to go back down the Slide.

  Mary Hope glanced back over her shoulder and saw his bobbing hat crown. “Ah, he’s just a Lorrigan, and I hate them all. But he let me pay—I’m quits with them now—and I’ll never in my life speak to one of them again!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  AS HE LIVED, SO HE DIED

  Belle Lorrigan, with Lance beside her on the one seat of the swaying buckboard, swung through the open gate of the Douglas yard and drove to the sun-baked, empty corral. In the doorway of the house, as they dashed past, the bent body of Mother Douglas appeared. She stood staring after them, her eyes blurred with tears. “It’s that huzzy, the Lorrigan woman,” she said flatly, wiping her face on her checked apron, stiffly starched and very clean. “Do you go, Mary Hope, and get them the horse they’ve come for. If Hugh were here—”

  From somewhere within the house the voice of Aleck Douglas rose 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 t
he 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 ho
rsefly 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.”