She was baiting him, tempting him to quarrel with her over the old grudge. Because she expected a reply, Lance made no answer whatever. He happened to have a dozen or so of nails in his coat pocket, left-overs from his assiduous carpentry on the house being builded for her comfort. The screws he possessed were too large, and he had no hammer. But no man worries over a missing hammer where rocks are plentiful, and Lance was presently pounding the lock into place, his back to Mary Hope, his thoughts swinging from his prospective party to the possible religious scruples of the Douglas family.
Mary Hope used to dance––a very little––he remembered, though she had not attended many dances. He recalled suddenly that a Christmas tree or a Fourth of July picnic had usually been the occasions when Mary Hope, with her skirts just hitting her shoe tops in front and sagging in an ungainly fashion behind, had teetered solemnly through a “square” dance with him. Mother Douglas herself had always sat very straight and prim on a bench, her hands folded in her lap and her eyes blinking disapprovingly at the ungodly ones who let out an exultant little yip now and then when they started exuberantly through the mazes of the “gran’-right-n-left.”
Would Mary Hope attend the party? Should he tell her about it and ask her to come? Naturally, he could not peacefully escort her partyward,––the 140 feud was still too rancorous for that. Or was it? At the Devil’s Tooth they spoke of old Scotty as an enemy, but they had cited no particular act of hostility as evidence of his enmity. At the Devil’s Tooth they spoke of the whole Black Rim country as enemy’s country. Lance began to wonder if it were possible that the Lorrigans had adopted unconsciously the role of black sheep, without the full knowledge or concurrence of the Black Rimmers.
He did what he could to make a workable lock of one that had been ready to fall to pieces before his father heaved against it; hammered in the loosened screws in the hinges, tossed the rock out into the scuffed sod before the shack, and picked up his hat. He had not once looked toward Mary Hope, but he turned now as if he were going to say good-by and take himself off; as if mending the lock had really been his errand, and no further interest held him there.
He surprised a strange, wistful look in Mary Hope’s eyes, a trembling of her lips. She seemed to be waiting, fearing that he meant to go without any further overtures toward friendship.
The Whipple shack was not large. Ten feet spanned the distance between them. Impulsively Lance covered that distance in three steps. At the table he stopped, leaned toward her with his palms braced upon the table, and stared full into Mary Hope’s disturbed eyes.
“Girl,” he said, drawing the word softly along a vibrant note in his voice that sent a tremor through her, “Girl, you’re more lonesome than Scotch, and you’re more Scotch than the heather that grows in your front yard to make your mother cry for the Highlands she sees when her eyes blur with homesickness. You were crying when I came––crying because you’re lonely. It’s a big, wild country––the Black Rim. It’s a country for men to ride hell-whooping through the sage and camas grass, with guns slung at their hips, but it’s no country for a little person like you to try and carry on a feud because her father made one. You’re––too little!”
He did not touch her, his face did not come near her face. But in his eyes, in his voice, in the tender, one-sided little smile, there was something,––Mary Hope caught her breath, feeling as if she had been kissed.
“You little, lonesome girl! There’s going to be a party at Cottonwood Spring, a week from Friday night. It’s a secret––a secret for you. And you won’t tell a soul that you were the first to know––and you’ll come, you girl, because it’s your party. And not a soul will know it’s your party. If your father’s Scotch is too hard for dancing––you’ll come just the same. You’ll come, because the secret is for you. And––” He thought that he read something in her eyes and hastened to forestall her intention “––and you 142 won’t go near Cottonwood Spring before the time of the party, because that wouldn’t be playing fair.