Rim o' the World

by B. M. Bower

He did the work thoroughly, though a woman might have pointed out wet corners and certain muddy splashes on the wall. He lost all count of the buckets of water that he carried from the spring, and it occurred to him that Mary Hope would need a new broom, for the one Belle had provided was worn down to a one-sided wisp that reminded him of the beard of a billy goat. He used 187 two cans of condensed lye and all of the washing powder, and sneezed himself too weak too swear over the fine cloud of acrid dust that filled his nostrils when he sprinkled the powder on the floor. But the floor was clean when he finished, and so was the platform outside.

Of Riley’s underwear there was left the leg of one pair of drawers, which Lance reserved for dusting the desks and the globe that had by some miracle escaped. While the floor was drying he took out the broken windowpane, discovered that the one from the chicken house was too short, and cut his thumb while he chipped off a piece of glass from the other to fill the space. He did not make a very good job of it. To hold the glass in place, he used shingle nails, which he had to hunt for on the ground where they had dropped from the roof during shingling, and when they had been driven into the frame––with the handle of the screwdriver––they showed very plainly from the inside. Then the putty did not seem to want to stick anywhere, but kept crumbling off in little lumps. So Lance threw the putty at a gopher that was standing up nibbling one of Riley’s sandwiches, and went after the desks.

These took some time to unwrap and carry into place. There were only twelve, but Lance would have sworn before a jury that he carried at least fifty single desks into the schoolhouse that afternoon, and screwed them to the floor, and unscrewed 188 them because the darned things did not line up straight when viewed from the teacher’s desk, and he had a vivid impression that blue, blue eyes can be very critical over such things as a crooked line of desks!

Perhaps it was because his head ached splittingly and his injured hand throbbed until it was practically useless; at any rate the cleaning of the schoolhouse, especially the placing of the desks, became fixed afterward in his memory as the biggest, the most disagreeable incident in his whole vacation.

At four-thirty however the task was accomplished. At the spring, Lance scrubbed the water bucket clean, washed the dipper, placed them behind the door. He got wearily into the borrowed fur coat, took a last comprehensive survey of the room from the doorway, went back to erase certain sentences scrawled on the blackboard by some would-be humorist, took another look at the work of his aching hands, and went away with the coffeepot in his hand and the screwdriver showing its battered wooden handle from the top of his pocket. He was too tired to feel any glow of accomplishment, any great joy in the thought of Mary Hope’s pleasure. He was not even sure that she would feel any pleasure.

His chief emotion was a gloomy satisfaction in knowing that the place was once more presentable, that it was ready for Mary Hope to hang up her 189 hat and ring her little bell and start right in teaching. That what the Lorrigans had set out to do, the Lorrigans had done.

At the ranch he found Riley at the bunk house wrangling with the boys over his lost wardrobe. In Riley’s opinion it was a darned poor idea of a darned poor joke, and it took a darned poor man to perpetrate it. Lance’s arrival scarcely interrupted the jangle of voices. The boys had bruises of their own to nurse, and they had scant sympathy for Riley, and they told him so.

Lance went into the house. He supposed he would have to replace Riley’s clothes, which he did, very matter-of-factly and without any comment whatever, restitution being in this case a mere matter of sorting out three suits of his own underwear, which were much better than Riley’s, and placing them on the cook’s bed.

“That you, Lance? Where in the world have you been all this while? I came mighty near going gunning after the man that stole my team, let me tell you––and I would have, if Tom hadn’t found your horse tied up to the fence and guessed you’d gone to take Mary Hope home. But I must say, honey, you never followed any short cut!”

This was much easier than Lance had expected, so he made shift to laugh, though it hurt his lip cruelly. “Had to take her to Jumpoff, Belle. Then I had to clean up that crowd of toughs that––”