With her lips in a straight line, her eyes very hard and bright and with a consciousness of heaping coals of fire on the head of an enemy of her house, Mary Hope had twisted a corner of her handkerchief into a point, moistened it by the simple and primitive method of placing the point between her lips, and was preparing to remove the dirt from Tom’s watering eye, the ball of which was a deep pink from irritation. But Tom swung abruptly away from her, went stilting on his high heels to the door, pulled it open with a yank and rounded the corner where the four Boyle children stood leaning against the house, their chilled fingers clasped together so that two hands made one fist, their teeth chattering while they discussed the Swedes and tried to mimic Christian’s very Swedish accent.
“Og is and,” said Minnie Boyle. “And skoll is shall. Swede’s easy. And med means with––”
“Aw, it’s just the way they try to say it in English,” Fred Boyle contradicted. “It ain’t Swede––but gee, when the Scotch and the Swede goes in the air to-morrow, I bet there’ll be fun. If Mary Hope tries to lick Chris––”
“You kids straddle your cayuses and hit for home,” Tom interrupted them. “There ain’t going to be any more school to-day. Them your 112 horses in the shed? Well, you hump along and saddle up and beat it. Go!”
He did not speak threateningly, at least he did not speak angrily. But the four Boyle children gave him one affrighted glance and started on a run for the corral, looking back over their shoulders now and then as if they expected a spatter of bullets to follow them.
At the corral gate Minnie Boyle stopped and turned as though she meant to retrace her steps to the house, but Tom waved her back. So Minnie went home weeping over the loss of a real dinner-bucket and a slate sponge which she was afraid the Swedes might steal from her if they came earlier to school than she.
When Tom turned to reënter the shack for a final word with Mary Hope, and to let her give first aid to his eye if she would, he found that small person standing just behind him with set lips and clenched fists and her hair blowing loose from its hairpins.
“Mr. Tom Lorrigan, you can just call those children back!” she cried, her lips bluing in the cold gale that beat upon her. “Do you think that with all your lawlessness you can come and break up my school? You have bullied my father––”
“I’d do worse than bully him, if I had him in handy reach right now,” Tom drawled, and took her by the shoulder and pushed her inside. “Any man that will let a woman sit all day in a place like 113 this––and I don’t care a damn if you are earning money doing it!––oughta have his neck wrung. I’m going to saddle your horse for yuh while you bundle up. And then you’re going home, if I have to herd yuh like I would a white heifer. I always have heard of Scotch stubbornness––but there’s something beats that all to thunder. Git yore things on. Yore horse will be ready in about five minutes.”
He bettered his estimate, returning in just four minutes to find the door locked against him. “Don’t you dare come in here!” Mary Hope called out, her voice shrill with excitement. “I––I’ll brain you!”