HE TACKLES ANOTHER
Much to the disgust of Rosa and Subrosa, their new driver turned them from the main trail just as they were beginning to climb joyously the first grade of Devil’s Tooth Ridge. Rosa and Subrosa were subdued, plainly resentful of their subjection, and fretting to be in their own stalls. Belle they could and did bully to a certain extent. They loved to fight things out with Belle, they never missed an opportunity for “acting up”––yet this morning they had been afraid to do more than nag at each other with bared teeth; afraid to lope when this big man said, “Hey––settle down, there!” with a grating kind of calm that carried with it a new and unknown menace.
Some one had exuberantly fired the Whipple shack, and the pintos wanted to whirl short around in their tracks when they saw the smoking embers. They had wanted to bolt straight out across the rocky upland and splinter the doubletree, and perhaps smash a wheel or two, and then stand and 181 kick gleefully at the wreck. If head-shakings and flattened ears meant anything, Rosa and Subrosa were two disgruntled pintos that morning. They had not dared do more than cut a small half-circle out of the trail when they passed the blackened spot that had been the Whipple shack.
Now they turned down the rocky, half-formed trail to Cottonwood Spring, reluctantly but with no more than a half-hearted kick from Subrosa to register their disgust. And to that Lance gave no heed whatever. He did not so much as twitch a rein or yell a threat. He drove surely––with one hand mostly because of the broken knuckle, which was painful in the extreme––ignoring the pintos for the most part.
He was meditating rather gloomily upon the innate cussedness of human nature as it was developed in Black Rim Country. He was thinking of Mary Hope––a little; of her eyes, that were so obstinately blue, so antagonistically blue, and then, quite unexpectedly, so wistfully blue; of her voice, that dropped quite as unexpectedly into pure Scottish melody; of her primness, that sometimes was not prim at all, but quaintly humorous, or wistfully shy.
He was thinking more often of the dance that had started out so well and had ended––Lord knew how, except that it ended in a fight. He remembered striking, in that saloon, faces that had been pummeled before ever he sent a jab their way. 182 There had been eyes already closed behind purple, puffy curtains of bruised flesh. He had fought animosity that was none of his creating.
Thinking of the fight, he thought of the wrecked saloon when the fight was over. Thinking of the wrecked saloon led him to think of the probable condition of the nice new schoolhouse. Thinking of that brought him back to Mary Hope,––to her face as it looked when she rode up to the place on Monday morning. Ride up to it she must, if she meant to go on teaching, for there was no more Whipple shack.
“Rotten bunch of rough-necks,” he summed up the men of Black Rim and of Jumpoff. “And they’ll blame the Devil’s Tooth outfit––they’ll say the Lorrigans did it. Oh, well––heck!”
So he drove down into the hollow, tied the pintos to the post where they stood the night before, crawled through the wire fence where Mary Hope had left a small three-cornered fragment of the coat that “wasna” hers at all, and went over to the schoolhouse, standing forlorn in the trampled yard with broken sandwiches and bits of orange peel and empty whisky flasks accentuating the unsightliness and disorder.
The door swung half open. The floor was scored, grimy with dirt tracked in on heedless feet and ground into the wax that had been liberally scattered over it to make the boards smooth for dancing. A window was broken,––by some one’s 183 elbow or by a pistol shot, Lance guessed. The planks placed along the wall on boxes to form seats were pulled askew, the stovepipe had been knocked down and lay disjointed and battered in a corner. It was not, in Lance’s opinion, a pleasant little surprise for the girl with the Scotch blue eyes.