Black Rim folk, who always knew so much of their neighbors’ affairs, once more talked and chortled and surmised, and never came within a mile of the truth. The young college rooster had come home to the Devil’s Tooth, they gossiped, and had a row with Al; so Al left home, and Duke too. The Lorrigans always had been hard to get along with, but that Lance––he sure must be a caution to cats, the way he’d cleaned off the ranch.
Marrying the Douglas girl, and taking that paralyzed old lady right to the ranch, had probably had a lot to do with it. Lance might be willing to forget that old trouble with Scotty, but the rest of the 349 Lorrigans sure never would. And it was queer, too, how all that rustling talk petered out. Mebby there hadn’t been much in it, after all.
Not even Mary Hope guessed why she and Lance were left so completely in charge of the ranch. Sometimes, when the invalid was captious and showed too plainly that she preferred Belle’s playing and singing to the musical efforts of her own daughter, and scrawled impatient questions about Belle’s return, Mary Hope would wonder if Tom Lorrigan really hated her, and if her coming had practically driven him out of his own home. She would cry a little, then,––unless Lance happened to be somewhere near. If he were, there was no crying for Mary Hope.
“He’s a good son,” Mother Douglas once wrote, “I wish Aleck was alive, to see how the Lord has changed the Lorrigans.”
THE END
