Rim o' the World

It was not a pretty fight. Such fights never are pretty. Lance himself was not a pretty sight, when he had finished. There had been shooting–but even in Jumpoff one hesitated to shoot down an unarmed man, so that the bar fixtures suffered most. Lance came out of it with a fragment of shirt hanging down his chest like a baby’s bib, a cut lip that bled all over his chin, a cheek skinned and swelling rapidly, the bad knuckle and the full flavor of victory.

The saloon looked as though cattle had been driven through it. Bill Kennedy lay sprawled over a card table, whimpering inarticulately because he had lost his gun at the dance. The flushed youth who had rashly claimed Mary Hope as his girl was outside with a washbasin trying to stop his nose from bleeding. Others were ministering to their hurts as best they might, muttering the thoughts that they dared not express aloud.

Lance looked up from examination of his knuckle, caressed his cut lip with the tip of his tongue, pulled the fragment of shirt down as far as possible, gently rubbed his swelling cheek, and turned to the bartender.

“I never licked a man yet and sent him home thirsty,” he said. “Set it out for the boys–and give me another highball. Then if you’ll lend me a coat and a pair of gloves, I’ll go home.”

Peace was ratified in whisky drunk solemnly. Lance paid, and turned to go. One of the vanquished wabbled up to him and held out his hand to shake.

“You damn Lorrigans, you got us comin’ and goin’,” he complained, “but shake, anyway. I’m Irish meself, and I know a rale fight when I see it. What we didn’t git at the dance before we left, by heavins you give us when we got into town–so I’m one that’s game to say it was a fine dance and not a dull momint anywhere!”

“That’s something,” Lance grinned wryly and wriggled into the fur overcoat which the bartender generously lent him. He rejected the gloves when he found that his hands were puffed and painful, and went out to find breakfast.

Over a thick white cup of dubious coffee and a plate of sticky hot-cakes he meditated glumly on the general unappreciativeness of the world in general, and of the Black Rim in particular. What had happened at the schoolhouse he could only surmise, but from certain fragmentary remarks he had overheard he guessed that the schoolhouse probably had suffered as much as the saloon. Black Rim, it would seem, was determined that the Lorrigans should go on living up to their reputations, however peacefully inclined the Lorrigans might be.

Two disquieting thoughts he took with him to the stable when he went after the pinto team: Mary Hope would say that it was not a pleasant surprise which he had given her at Cottonwood Spring. And Belle,–he was not at all sure whether he was too big for Belle’s quirt to find the tender places on his legs, but he was very sure that the Irishman spoke the truth. There would still be no dull moments for Lance when he confronted the owner of that pinto team.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

HE TACKLES ANOTHER

Much to the disgust of Rosa and Subrosa, their new driver turned them from the main trail just as they were beginning to climb joyously the first grade of Devil’s Tooth Ridge. Rosa and Subrosa were subdued, plainly resentful of their subjection, and fretting to be in their own stalls. Belle they could and did bully to a certain extent. They loved to fight things out with Belle, they never missed an opportunity for “acting up”–yet this morning they had been afraid to do more than nag at each other with bared teeth; afraid to lope when this big man said, “Hey–settle down, there!” with a grating kind of calm that carried with it a new and unknown menace.

Some one had exuberantly fired the Whipple shack, and the pintos wanted to whirl short around in their tracks when they saw the smoking embers. They had wanted to bolt straight out across the rocky upland and splinter the doubletree, and perhaps smash a wheel or two, and then stand and kick gleefully at the wreck. If head-shakings and flattened ears meant anything, Rosa and Subrosa were two disgruntled pintos that morning. They had not dared do more than cut a small half-circle out of the trail when they passed the blackened spot that had been the Whipple shack.

Now they turned down the rocky, half-formed trail to Cottonwood Spring, reluctantly but with no more than a half-hearted kick from Subrosa to register their disgust. And to that Lance gave no heed whatever. He did not so much as twitch a rein or yell a threat. He drove surely–with one hand mostly because of the broken knuckle, which was painful in the extreme–ignoring the pintos for the most part.

He was meditating rather gloomily upon the innate cussedness of human nature as it was developed in Black Rim Country. He was thinking of Mary Hope–a little; of her eyes, that were so obstinately blue, so antagonistically blue, and then, quite unexpectedly, so wistfully blue; of her voice, that dropped quite as unexpectedly into pure Scottish 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 well and had ended–Lord knew how, except that it ended in a fight. He remembered striking, in that saloon, faces that had been pummeled before ever he sent a jab their way. There had been eyes already closed behind purple, puffy curtains of bruised flesh. He had fought animosity that was none of his creating.

Thinking of the fight, he thought of the wrecked saloon when the fight was over. Thinking of the wrecked saloon led him to think of the probable condition of the nice new schoolhouse. Thinking of that brought him back to Mary Hope,–to her face as it looked when she rode up to the place on Monday morning. Ride up to it she must, if she meant to go on teaching, for there was no more Whipple shack.

“Rotten bunch of rough-necks,” he summed up the men of Black Rim and of Jumpoff. “And they’ll blame the Devil’s Tooth outfit–they’ll say the Lorrigans did it. Oh, well–heck!”

So he drove down into the hollow, tied the pintos to the post where they stood the night before, crawled through the wire fence where Mary Hope had left a small three-cornered fragment of the coat that “wasna” hers at all, and went over to the schoolhouse, standing forlorn in the trampled yard with broken sandwiches and bits of orange peel and empty whisky flasks accentuating the unsightliness and disorder.

The door swung half open. The floor was scored, grimy with dirt tracked in on heedless feet and ground into the wax that had been liberally scattered over it to make the boards smooth for dancing. A window was broken,–by some one’s elbow or by a pistol shot, Lance guessed. The planks placed along the wall on boxes to form seats were pulled askew, the stovepipe had been knocked down and lay disjointed and battered in a corner. It was not, in Lance’s opinion, a pleasant little surprise for the girl with the Scotch blue eyes.

He pulled the door shut, picked up the empty whisky flasks and threw them, one after the other, as far as he could send them into a rocky gulch where Mary Hope would not be likely to go. Then he recrossed the enclosure, crawled through the fence, untied the pintos and drove home.

The bunk house emanated a pronounced odor of whisky and bad air, and much snoring, just as Lance expected. The horses dozed in the corral or tossed listlessly their trampled hay; the house was quiet, deserted looking, with the doors all closed and the blinds down in the windows of 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 Tooth ranch had always slept through the day after a dance, with certain yawning intermissions at mealtimes.

He unhitched the pintos, turned them loose in the corral, caught his own horse, which one of the boys must have led home, and tied it to a post. From the chuck-wagon, standing just where Riley had driven it to a vacant spot beside the woodpile, Lance purloined a can of pork and beans, a loaf of bread, and some butter. These things he put in a bag.

For a minute he stood scowling at the silent house, undecided, wondering just how soundly Belle was sleeping. He was not afraid of Belle; no real Lorrigan was ever afraid of anything, as fear is usually defined. But he wanted to postpone for a time her reckoning with him. He wanted to face her when he had a free mind, when she had slept well, when her temper was not so edgy. He wanted other things, however, and he proceeded to get those things with the least effort and delay.

He wanted soft cloths. On the clothesline dangled three undershirts, three pair of drawers and several mismated socks. The shirts and drawers were of the kind known as fleece-lined–which means that they are fuzzy on the inside. They were Riley’s complete wardrobe so far as underwear went, but Lance did not trouble himself with unimportant details. He took them all, because he had a swift mental picture of the schoolhouse floor which would need much scrubbing before it would be clean.

He was ready to mount and ride away when he remembered something else that he would need. “Lye!” he muttered, and retraced his steps to the house. Now he must go into the kitchen shed for what he wanted, and Riley slept in a little room next the shed. But Riley was snoring with a perfect rhythm that bespoke a body sunk deep in slumber, so Lance searched until he found what he wanted, and added a full box of a much-advertised washing powder for good measure. He was fairly well burdened when he finally started up the trail again, but he believed that he had everything that he would need, even a lump of putty, and a pane of glass which he had carefully removed from a window of the chicken house, and which he hoped would fit.

You may think that he rode gladly upon his errand; that the thought of Mary 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, and there was much glumness amongst the Rim folk that day, let me tell you. He ached from fighting, from dancing, from sleeping on the pool table, from hanging for hours to those darned pintos. His left hand was swollen, and pains from the knuckle streaked like hot wires to his elbow and beyond. His lips were sore–so sore he could not even swear with any comfort–and even the pulling together of his black eyebrows hurt 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 hated the men who had made the scrubbing necessary.

While he went up the Slide trail he wished that he had never thought of giving a dance. He wished he had gone down to Los Angeles for his Easter holiday, as one of his pals had implored him to do. He wished Mary Hope would quit teaching school; what did she want to stay in the Black Rim for, anyway? Why didn’t she get out where she could amount to 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 were apparent 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 forehead and a scratch on his neck, acquired while putting up the stovepipe. He had set his lip to bleeding because he forgot that it was cut, and drew it sharply between his teeth when the stovepipe fell apart just when he was sure it was up to stay. He had invented two new cuss-words. What he had not done was weaken in his determination to make that small schoolhouse a pleasant surprise for Mary Hope.

He did the work thoroughly, though a woman might have pointed out wet corners and certain muddy splashes on the wall. He lost all count of the buckets of water that he carried from the spring, and it occurred to him that Mary Hope would need a new broom, for the one Belle had provided was worn down to a one-sided wisp that reminded him of the beard of a billy goat. He used two cans of condensed lye and all of the washing powder, and sneezed himself too weak too swear over the fine cloud of acrid dust that filled his nostrils when he sprinkled the powder on the floor. But the floor was clean when he finished, and so 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 by some miracle escaped. While the floor was drying he took out the broken windowpane, discovered that the one from the chicken house was too short, and cut his thumb while he chipped off a piece of glass from the other to fill the space. He did not make a very good job of it. To hold the glass in place, he used shingle nails, which he had to hunt for on the ground where they had dropped from the roof during shingling, and when they had been driven into the frame–with the handle of the screwdriver–they showed very plainly from the inside. Then the putty did not seem to want to stick anywhere, but kept crumbling off in little lumps. So Lance threw the putty at a gopher that was standing up nibbling one of Riley’s sandwiches, and went after the desks.

These took some time to unwrap and carry into place. There were only twelve, but Lance would have sworn before a jury that he carried at least fifty single desks into the schoolhouse that afternoon, and screwed them to the floor, and unscrewed them because the darned things did not line up straight when viewed from the teacher’s desk, and he had a vivid impression that blue, blue eyes can be very critical over such things as a crooked line of desks!

Perhaps it was because his head ached splittingly and his injured hand throbbed until it was practically useless; at any rate the cleaning of the schoolhouse, especially the placing of the desks, became fixed afterward in his memory as the biggest, the most disagreeable incident in his whole vacation.

At four-thirty however the task was accomplished. At the spring, Lance scrubbed the water bucket clean, washed the dipper, placed them behind the door. He got wearily into the borrowed fur coat, took a last comprehensive survey of the room from the doorway, went back to erase certain sentences scrawled on the blackboard by some would-be humorist, took another look at the work of his aching hands, and went away with the coffeepot in his hand and the screwdriver showing its battered wooden handle from the top of his pocket. He was too tired to feel any glow of accomplishment, any great joy in the thought of Mary Hope’s pleasure. He was not even sure that she would feel any pleasure.

His chief emotion was a gloomy satisfaction in knowing that the place was once more presentable, that it was ready for Mary Hope to hang up her hat and ring her little bell and start right in teaching. That what the Lorrigans had set out to do, the Lorrigans had done.

At the ranch he found Riley at the bunk house wrangling with the boys over his lost wardrobe. In Riley’s opinion it was a darned poor idea of a darned poor joke, and it took a darned poor man to perpetrate it. Lance’s arrival scarcely interrupted the jangle of voices. The boys had bruises of their own to nurse, and they had scant sympathy for Riley, and they told him so.

Lance went into the house. He supposed he would have to replace Riley’s clothes, which he did, very matter-of-factly and without any comment whatever, restitution being in this case a mere matter of sorting out three suits of his own underwear, which were much better than Riley’s, and placing them on the cook’s bed.

“That you, Lance? Where in the world have you been all this while? I came mighty near going gunning after the man that stole my team, let me tell you–and I would have, if Tom hadn’t found your horse tied up to the fence and guessed you’d gone to take Mary Hope home. But I must say, honey, you never followed any short cut!”

This was much easier than Lance had expected, so he made shift to laugh, 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 through Lance’s closed door. “I didn’t think there was enough left of ’em to lick, 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 you don’t mind if I leave a few days early. I’ve got to stop off anyway to see a fellow in Reno I promised–any hot water handy?”

There was a perceptible pause before Belle answered, and then it was not about the bath water. She would not have been Belle Lorrigan if she had permitted a quiver in her voice, yet it made Lance thoughtful.

“Honey, I don’t blame you for going. I expect we are awful rough–and you’d notice it, coming from civilized folks. But–you know, don’t you, that the Lorrigans never spoiled your party for you? It–it just happened 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, Lance appeared unexpectedly and gathered her into his arms. “If you think I’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 that got as much fun out of that scrap as I did! But I’ve got to go.” He patted her reassuringly on the head, laid his good cheek against hers for a minute and turned abruptly away into his own room. He closed the door and stood absent-mindedly feeling his swollen hand. “I’ve got to go,” he repeated under his breath. “I might get foolish if I stayed. Darned if I’ll make a fool of myself over any girl!”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

ABOUT A PIANO

In the lazy hour just after a satisfying dinner, Lance stood leaning over an end of the piano, watching Belle while she played–he listened and smoked a cigarette and looked as though he hadn’t a thing on his mind.

“I remember you used to sing that a lot for the little Douglas girl,” he observed idly. “She used to sit and look at you–my word, but her eyes were the bluest, the lonesomest eyes I ever saw! She seemed to think you were next to angels when you sang. I saw it in her face, but I was too much of a kid then to know what it was.” He lighted a fresh cigarette, placed it between Belle’s lips so that she need not stop playing while she smoked, and laughed as if he were remembering something funny.

“She always looked so horrified when she saw you smoking,” he said. “And so adoring when you sang, and so lonesome when she had to ride away. She was a queer kid–and she’s just as unexpected now–just as Scotch. Didn’t you find her that way, dad?”

“She was Scotch enough,” Tom mumbled from his chair by the fire. “Humpin’ hyenas! She was like handlin’ a wildcat!”

“The poor kid never did have a chance to be human,” said Belle, and ceased playing for a moment. “Good heavens, how she did enjoy the two hours I gave her at the piano! She’s got the makings of a musician, if she could keep at it.”

“We-ell–” Having artfully led Belle to this point, Lance quite as artfully edged away from it. “You gave her all the chance you could. And she ought to be able to go on, if she wants to. I suppose old Scotty’s human enough to get her something to play on.”

“Him? Human!” Tom shifted in his chair. “If pianos could breed and increase into a herd, and he could ship a carload every fall, Scotty might spend a few dollars on one.”

“It’s a darned shame,” Belle exclaimed, dropping her fingers to the keys again. “Mary Hope just starves for everything that makes life worth living. And that old devil–”

“Say–don’t make me feel like a great, overgrown money-hog,” Lance protested. “A girl starving for music, because she hasn’t a piano to play on. And a piano costs, say, three or four hundred dollars. Of course, we’ve got the money to buy one–I suppose I could dig up the price myself. I was thinking I’d stake our schoolhouse to a library. That’s something it really needs. But a piano–I wish you hadn’t said anything about starving. I know I’d hate to go hungry for music, but–”

“Well, humpin’ hyenas! I’ll buy the girl a piano. I guess it won’t break the outfit to pay out a few more dollars, now we’ve started. We’re outlaws, anyway–might as well add one more crime to the list. Only, it don’t go to the Douglas shack–it goes into the schoolhouse. Lance, you go ahead and pick out some books and ship ’em on to the ranch, and I’ll see they get over there. Long as we’ve started fixin’ up a school, we may as well finish the job up right. By Henry, I’ll show the Black Rim that there ain’t anything small about the Lorrigans, anyway!”

“Dad, I think you’re showin’ yourself a real sport,” Lance laughed. “We-ell, if you’re game to buy a piano, I’m game to buy books. We staked Black Rim to a school, so we’ll do the job right. And by the way, Belle, if you’re going to get me to Jumpoff in time for that evening train, don’t you think it’s about time you started?”

That is how it happened that Mary Hope walked into the schoolhouse one Monday and found a very shiny new piano standing across one corner of the room where the light was best. On the top was a pile of music. In another corner of the room stood a bookcase and fifty volumes; she counted them in her prim, frugal way that she had learned from her mother. They were books evidently approved by some Board of Education for school libraries, and did not interest her very much. Not when a piano stood in the other corner.

She was early, so she opened it and ran her fingers over the keys. She knew well enough who had brought it there, and her mouth was pressed into a straight line, her eyes were troubled.

The Lorrigans–always the Lorrigans! Why did they do these things when no one expected goodness or generosity from them? Why had they built the schoolhouse–and then given a dance where every one got drunk and the whole thing ended in a fight? Every one said it was the Lorrigans who had brought the whisky. Some one told her they had a five-gallon keg of it in the shed behind the schoolhouse, and she thought it must be true, the way all the men had acted. And why had they burned the Whipple shack and all the school books, so that she could not have school until more books were bought?–an expense which the Swedes, at least, could ill afford.

Why had Lance taken her to Jumpoff, away from the fighting, and then gone straight to the saloon and gotten so drunk that he fought every one in town before he left in the morning? Why had he never come near her again? And now that he was back in California, why did he ignore her completely, and never send so much as a picture postal to show that he gave her a thought now and then?

Mary Hope would not play the piano that day. She was more stern than usual with her pupils, and would not so much as answer them when they asked her where the piano and all the books had come from. Which was a foolish thing to do, since the four Boyle children were keen enough to guess, and sure to carry the news home, and to embellish the truth in true range-gossip style.

Mary Hope fully decided that she would have the piano hauled back to the Lorrigans. Later, she was distressed because she could think of no one who would take the time or the trouble to perform the duty, and a piano she had to admit is not a thing you can tie behind the cantle of your saddle, or carry under your arm. The books were a different matter. They were for the school. But the piano–well, the piano was for Mary Hope Douglas, and Mary Hope Douglas did not mean to be patronized in this manner by Lance Lorrigan or any of his kin.

But she was a music-hungry little soul, and that night after she was sure that the children had ridden up over the basin’s brim and were out of hearing, Mary Hope sat down and began to play. When she began to play she began to cry, though she was hardly conscious of her tears. She seemed to hear Lance Lorrigan again, saying, “Don’t be lonely, you girl. Take the little pleasant things that come–” She wondered, in a whispery, heart-achey way, if he had meant the piano when he said that. If he had meant–just a piano, and a lot of books for school!

The next thing that she realized was that the light was growing dim, and that her throat was aching, and that she was playing over and over a lovesong that had the refrain: