He twitched the reins, and Coaley obediently shouldered Rab out of the trail and turned him neatly toward the Douglas ranch. Even Rab was Scotch, it would seem. He laid his ears flat, swung his head unexpectedly, and bared his teeth at Coaley. But Coaley was of the Lorrigans. He did not bare his teeth and threaten; he reached out like a rattler and nipped Rab’s neck so neatly that a spot the size of a quarter showed pink where the hair had been. Rab squealed, whirled and kicked, but Coaley was not there at that particular 116 moment. He came back with the battle light in his eyes, and Rab clattered away in a stiff-legged run. After him went Coaley, loping easily, with high, rabbit jumps that told how he would love to show the speed that was in him, if only Tom would loosen the reins a half inch.
For a mile Tom kept close to Rab’s heels. Then, swinging up alongside, he turned to Mary Hope, that baffling half smile on his lips and the look in his eyes that had never failed to fill her with trepidation.
“I ain’t blaming yuh for being Scotch and stubborn,” he said, “but you notice there’s something beats it four ways from the jack. Yo go on home, now, and don’t yuh go back to that board cullender till the weather warms up. And tell yore folks that Tom Lorrigan broke up yore school for yuh, so they wouldn’t have to break up a case of pneumonia.”
Mary Hope was framing a sentence of defiance when Coaley wheeled and went back the way they had come, so swiftly that even with shouting she could not have made herself heard in that whooping wind. She pulled Rab to a willing stand and stared after Tom, hating him with her whole heart. Hating him for his domination of her from the moment he entered the schoolhouse where he had no business at all to be; hating him because even his bullying had been oddly gentle; hating him most of all because he was so like Lance––and because 117 he was not Lance, who was away out in California, going to college, and had never written her one line in all the time he had been gone.
Had it been Lance who rode up to the schoolhouse door, she would have known how to meet and master the situation. She would not have been afraid of Lance, she told herself savagely. She wouldn’t have been afraid of Tom––but the whole Black Rim was afraid of Tom. Well, just wait until she happened some day to meet Lance! At least she would make him pay! For two years of silence and brooding over his hardihood for taking her to task for her unfriendliness, and for this new and unbearable outrage, she would make Lance Lorrigan pay, if the fates ever let them meet again.
CHAPTER TEN
THE LORRIGAN WAY
The Lorrigan family was dining comfortably in the light of a huge lamp with a rose-tinted shade decorated with an extremely sinuous wreath of morning glories trailing around the lower rim. A clatter of pots and pans told that Riley was washing his “cookin’ dishes” in the lean-to kitchen that had been added to the house as an afterthought, the fall before. Belle had finished her dessert of hot mince pie, and leaned back now with a freshly lighted cigarette poised in her fingers.