Rim o' the World

by B. M. Bower

He pulled the door shut, picked up the empty whisky flasks and threw them, one after the other, as far as he could send them into a rocky gulch where Mary Hope would not be likely to go. Then he recrossed the enclosure, crawled through the fence, untied the pintos and drove home.

The bunk house emanated a pronounced odor of whisky and bad air, and much snoring, just as Lance expected. The horses dozed in the corral or tossed listlessly their trampled hay; the house was quiet, deserted looking, with the doors all closed and the blinds down in the windows of the room that had been the birthplace of Belle’s three boys.

Lance knew that every one would be asleep to-day. The Devil’s Tooth ranch had always slept through the day after a dance, with certain yawning intermissions at mealtimes.

He unhitched the pintos, turned them loose in the corral, caught his own horse, which one of the boys must have led home, and tied it to a post. From the chuck-wagon, standing just where Riley had driven it to a vacant spot beside the woodpile, Lance purloined a can of pork and beans, a loaf of 184 bread, and some butter. These things he put in a bag.

For a minute he stood scowling at the silent house, undecided, wondering just how soundly Belle was sleeping. He was not afraid of Belle; no real Lorrigan was ever afraid of anything, as fear is usually defined. But he wanted to postpone for a time her reckoning with him. He wanted to face her when he had a free mind, when she had slept well, when her temper was not so edgy. He wanted other things, however, and he proceeded to get those things with the least effort and delay.

He wanted soft cloths. On the clothesline dangled three undershirts, three pair of drawers and several mismated socks. The shirts and drawers were of the kind known as fleece-lined––which means that they are fuzzy on the inside. They were Riley’s complete wardrobe so far as underwear went, but Lance did not trouble himself with unimportant details. He took them all, because he had a swift mental picture of the schoolhouse floor which would need much scrubbing before it would be clean.

He was ready to mount and ride away when he remembered something else that he would need. “Lye!” he muttered, and retraced his steps to the house. Now he must go into the kitchen shed for what he wanted, and Riley slept in a little room next the shed. But Riley was snoring with 185 a perfect rhythm that bespoke a body sunk deep in slumber, so Lance searched until he found what he wanted, and added a full box of a much-advertised washing powder for good measure. He was fairly well burdened when he finally started up the trail again, but he believed that he had everything that he would need, even a lump of putty, and a pane of glass which he had carefully removed from a window of the chicken house, and which he hoped would fit.

You may think that he rode gladly upon his errand; that the thought of Mary Hope turned the work before him into a labor of love. It did not. Lance Lorrigan was the glummest young man in the whole Black Rim, and there was much glumness amongst the Rim folk that day, let me tell you. He ached from fighting, from dancing, from sleeping on the pool table, from hanging for hours to those darned pintos. His left hand was swollen, and pains from the knuckle streaked like hot wires to his elbow and beyond. His lips were sore––so sore he could not even swear with any comfort––and even the pulling together of his black eyebrows hurt his puffed cheek. And he never had scrubbed a floor in his life, and knew that he was going to hate the work even worse than he hated the men who had made the scrubbing necessary.

While he went up the Slide trail he wished that he had never thought of giving a dance. He 186 wished he had gone down to Los Angeles for his Easter holiday, as one of his pals had implored him to do. He wished Mary Hope would quit teaching school; what did she want to stay in the Black Rim for, anyway? Why didn’t she get out where she could amount to something?

If there were any caressing cadences in the voice of Lance Lorrigan, any provocative tilt to his eyebrows, any tenderness in his smile, anything enigmatical in his personality, none of these things were apparent when he set the first bucket of water on the stove to heat. He had added to his charms a broad streak of soot across his forehead and a scratch on his neck, acquired while putting up the stovepipe. He had set his lip to bleeding because he forgot that it was cut, and drew it sharply between his teeth when the stovepipe fell apart just when he was sure it was up to stay. He had invented two new cuss-words. What he had not done was weaken in his determination to make that small schoolhouse a pleasant surprise for Mary Hope.