“It wasn’t her tongue that was hurt,” Lance observed, and barely saved the buckboard from upsetting on a rock as Rosa and Subrosa shied violently and simultaneously at a rabbit scuttling from a bush before them.
He swung the pintos to the right, jounced down into some sort of trail, and let them go loping along at their usual pace.
“Belle has her own ideas about horse-training,” Lance chuckled, steadying Subrosa with a twitch of the rein. “They’ll hit this gait all the way to your ranch.”
Mary Hope gave a gasp and caught him by the arm, shaking it a little as if she were afraid that otherwise he would not listen to her. “Oh, but I canna go home! I’ve a horse and my riding clothes in Jumpoff, and I must go for them and come home properly on horseback to-morrow! It’s because of the lie I told my mother, so that I could come to the dance with the Kennedys. Set me down here anywhere, Lance Lorrigan, and let me walk until the Kennedys overtake me! They’ll be coming soon, now––as soon as Bill Kennedy gets licket sober. You can stop the horses––surely you can stop them and let me out. But please, please do not take me home to-night, in this party dress––and a coat that isna mine at all!”
“I’m not taking you home, girl. I’m taking you to Jumpoff. And it won’t matter to you whether Bill Kennedy is licked sober or not. And to-morrow I’ll find out who owns the coat. I’ll say I found it on the road somewhere. Who’s to prove I didn’t? Or if you disapprove of lying about it, I’ll bring it back and leave it beside the road.”
“It’s a lot of trouble I’m making for you,” said Mary Hope quite meekly, and let go his arm. “I should not have told the lie and gone to the dance. 169 And I canna wear my own coat home, because it’s there in the pile behind the door, and some one else will take it. So after all it will be known that I lied, and you may as well take me home now and let me face it.”
To this Lance made no reply. But when the pintos came rattling down the hill to where the Douglas trail led away to the right, he did not slow them, did not take the turn.
Mary Hope looked anxiously toward home, away beyond the broken skyline. A star hung big and bright on the point of a certain hill that marked the Douglas ranch. While she watched it, the star slid out of sight as if it were going down to warn Hugh Douglas that his daughter had told a lie and had gone to a forbidden place to dance with forbidden people, and was even now driving through the night with one of the Lorrigans,––perchance the wickedest of all the wicked Lorrigans, because he had been away beyond the Rim and had learned the wickedness of the cities.
She looked wistfully at the face of this wickedest of the Lorrigans, his profile seen dimly in the starlight. He did not look wicked. Under his hat brim she could see his brows, heavy and straight and lifted whimsically at the inner points, as though he were thinking of something amusing. His nose was fine and straight, too,––not at all like a beak, though her father had always maintained that the Lorrigans were but human vultures. 170 His mouth,––there was something in the look of his mouth that made her catch her breath; something tender, something that vaguely disturbed her, made her feel that it could be terribly stern if it were not so tender. He seemed to be smiling––not with his mouth, exactly, but away inside of his mind––and the smile showed just a little bit, at the corner of his lips. His chin was the Lorrigan chin absolutely; a nice chin to look at, with a little, long dimple down the middle. A chin that one would not want to oppose, would not want to see when the man who owned it was very angry.