The B. M. Bower Megapack

by B. M. Bower

  “Belle wallops ’em like brandin’ calves,” Tom used to chuckle. “They beller a plenty while it’s going on, and kick up their heels when it’s all over. I wish’t my dad had licked me like that when I was a kid. You can gamble, when I was thrashed, I knowed it!”

  Duke grew up to be a very good cowpuncher, however. He knew every draw and dry wash, every creek bottom and every canyon on the Black Rim range; knew almost as well as the owner how many cattle carried every brand. In the Devil’s Tooth round-ups Duke held his place alongside Al as a top hand,—disputing now and then the right of young Lance to compete with him, but never quite daring to bring his dispute to the point where action would take the place of words.

  “Duke’s sure enough a bad man—with his face,” Tom once snarled to Belle. “Make it a talking match, and Duke could lick any old woman, in the Black Rim country.”

  “There’s been enough fighting Lorrigans, don’t you think?” Belle smiled back at him. “Duke’s dad can fight hard enough for the whole family. I didn’t think you wanted your boys to be fighters.”

  “I don’t. But I sure do want ’em to have the fightin’ stuff in ’em, whether it ever comes out or not. Take Lance, there. Lance ain’t a fighter, either; but by the Lord John, it’s there! Once get Lance started, and I’d back him against any three men in the Black Rim. It’s in him, if the play ever come up. And it’s in Al. The Lorrigan is strong in Al. But that Duke—”

  “Honey, I think maybe it’s the Delavan in Duke. I remember an old maid aunt of mine that used to bolt the door and quarrel with my mother through the keyhole. I guess maybe Duke has got a little touch of Aunt Jane.”

  “Oh, sure! First I ever heard of Aunt Jane, Belle. Takes you to think up a reason.”

  “And the Lorrigan will come out, honey. He’s got the look, now and then. It’s in him, you’ll see.”

  So that is how the Lorrigan boys grew up. They thought Belle the most beautiful, the most wonderful woman in the world,—though they never called her mother. Belle would not have it. She refused to become a motherly, middle-aged person, and her boys were growing altogether too big and too masterful to look upon a golden-curled, pink-cheeked, honey-throated Amazon as other Black Rim sons looked upon their faded, too often shrewish maternal parent. She was just Belle. They knew no other like her, no one with whom they might compare her. We do not compare the sun and the moon with other suns and moons. Like Tom, they worshipped her in their hearts, and chummed with her even before they had outgrown her stormy chastisements. They mended her buckboards and her harness; they galloped alongside while she drove careening across the range, her hair flying in the wind, her mouth smiling and showing her white teeth. They danced with her,—and having Belle for a teacher from the time they could toddle, you may guess how the Lorrigan boys could dance. They sang the songs she taught them; they tried to better her record at target practice and never did it; they quarreled with her when her temper was up and dodged her when it became too cyclonic.

  They grew up without ever having ridden on the cars, save once or twice to Lava. Black Rim was the rim of the world to them, and their world held all that they yearned for. Belle sheltered them from too much knowledge of that other world, which held the past she hated and tried to forget. Much she taught them of city manners and the little courtesies of life. She would box the ears of the boy who neglected to rise and offer her a chair when she entered a room, and would smoke a cigarette with him afterward. Once she whipped her six-shooter out of its holster and shot a hole through the crown of Al’s hat, as a tactful reminder that gentlemen always remove their hats when they come into a house. Al remembered, after that. At fourteen even the hardiest youth feels a slight shock when a bullet jars through his hat crown two inches above his hair.

  CHAPTER THREE

  MARY HOPE DOUGLAS APPEARS

  Devil’s Tooth ridge, which gave the Lorrigan ranch its name, was really a narrow hogback with a huge rock spire at one end. Crudely it resembled a lower jaw bone with one lone tooth remaining. Three hundred feet and more the ridge upthrust its barren crest, and the wagon road from the ranch crawled up over it in many switchbacks and sharp turns, using a mile and a half in the climbing. They called it the “dug road.” Which meant that teams and scrapers and dynamite and much toil had been necessary in the making, distinguishing it from most Black Rim roads, which followed the line of least resistance until many passings had worn a definite trail; whereupon that trail became an established thoroughfare legalized by custom and not to be lightly changed for another.

  Over in the next valley, beyond Devil’s Tooth ridge, Alexander Douglas had made a ranch for himself and his family. Aleck Douglas was as Scotch as his name. He shaved his long upper lip, so that it looked longer and more uncompromising than was necessary even to match the Aleck Douglas disposition. His hair was wiry and stood up from a forehead that might be called beetling. His eyebrows were heavy and came so near to meeting that Mary Hope used to wish that she dared lay one small finger between father’s eyebrows, just to see if there would be room. His eyes were as close together as his thin beak of a nose would permit, and his ears were long and narrow and set flat against his head. He was tall and he was lank and he was honest to his last bristling hair. He did not swear—though he could wither one with vituperative epithets—and he did not smoke and he did not drink—er—save a wee nip of Scotch “whusky” to break up a cold, which frequently threatened his hardy frame. He was harshly religious, and had there been a church in the Black Rim country you would have seen Aleck Douglas drive early to its door every Sunday morn, and sit straight-backed in a front pew and stare hard at the minister through the longest of sermons,—providing, of course, that church and minister were good Presbyterian.

  He loved the dollars, how he did love his dollars! He loved his cattle, because they represented dollars. He nursed them, dollars and animals alike, and to lose one wrung the heart of him.

  His wife was a meek little thing in his presence, as the wives of such men as Aleck Douglas usually are. She also was rigidly honest, dogmatically religious and frugal and hard-working and intolerant of the sins of others.

  Early she taught Mary Hope that beyond Devil’s Tooth ridge lived those wicked Lorrigans, whose souls were bartered to the devil and whose evil ways were a stench in the nostrils of God. Mary Hope used to wonder if God turned up his nose when there was a stench in his nostrils,—for instance, when Belle Lorrigan hurtled past with her bronks and her buckboard and her yellow hair flying. Mary Hope wondered, too, what the Lorrigan boys had got from the devil in exchange for their souls. Some magic, perhaps, that would protect them from death and accident. Yet that seemed not true, for Al Lorrigan broke his leg, one spring round-up. The devil ought to have saved his horse from falling down with him, if the devil had Al Lorrigan’s soul.

  That had happened when Mary Hope was twelve and Al Lorrigan was eighteen. She heard her father tell her mother about it; and her father had set his whiskered lip against his long, shaven upper lip almost with a smack.

  “They’ll come to a bad end, all of them,” he declared sententiously. “Violent deaths had all the Lorrigans before them—all save Tom, and the Lord but stays his hand for a time from that man. The wicked shall flourish as a green bay tree.”

  “Father, how can a tree be green and then bay too!” Mary Hope ventured to inquire. “Is it just a Bible tree, or does it flourish somewhere really?”

  Aleck Douglas hid his month behind his palm and coughed. “’Tis not bay like a horse, child. ’Tis not the color that I’m speaking of.”

  “That painted Jezebel, Belle Lorrigan, drove past the house today within a stone’s throw,” Mrs. Douglas informed her husband. “I wush, Aleck, that ye would fence me a yard to keep the huzzy from driving over my very doorstep. She had that youngest brat of hers in the seat with her—that Lance. And as they went past on the keen gallop—and the horses both in a lather of sweat—the boy impudently shook his fist at me where I was glancing from
my window. And his mother lookit and laughed, the Jezebel!”

  “Mother, Lance only waved his hand.”

  “And why should Lance be waving his hand when he should pass the house? Did he think that a Douglas would come so low as to wave at a Lorrigan?”

  Mary Hope ducked her sleek little pig-tailed head outside the door and shooed vehemently at a dingy black hen that happened to be passing. Mary Hope knew that a Douglas had stooped so low as to wave back at Lance Lorrigan, but it seemed unwise to tell her mother so.

  When Mary Hope was permitted to have a gentle old cow-pony of her own, she rode as often as she dared to Devil’s Tooth ridge. By short cuts down certain washes which the trail avoided with many winding detours, she could lope to the foot of the ridge in forty minutes by the old alarm clock which she carried one day in her arms to time the trip. She could climb by another shortcut trail, to the Devil’s Tooth in twenty minutes. She could come down in fifteen, she discovered. In a three-hour ride she could reach the-Devil’s Tooth, spend a whole hour looking down upon the ranch house of the wicked Lorrigans, and ride home again. And by choosing the short cuts she practically eliminated the chance of being observed.

  If she could see Belle go tearing down the trail with her bronks and her buckboard she would be horrifiedly happy. The painted Jezebel fascinated Mary Hope, who had read all about that wicked woman in the Bible, and had shivered in secret at her terrible fate. Belle Lorrigan might never be eaten by dogs, since dogs are few in cattleland and are kept strictly at home, but if Mary Hope’s mother was any true prophetess, the painted Jezebel’s final doom would be quite as horrible.

  At the infrequent parties which the Douglas household countenanced,—such as Christmas trees and Fourth of July picnics, Mary Hope would sit and stare fixedly at Belle Lorrigan and wonder if all painted Jezebels were beautiful and happy and smiling. If so, why was unadorned virtue to be commended? Mary tried not to wish that her hair was yellow and hung in curls, and that she had even white teeth and could sing and dance so wonderfully that everything stopped and every one looked and listened from the minute she began until she stopped.

  More than anything else in her starved young life, Mary Hope wanted to see the inside of the Lorrigan house. The painted Jezebel had a real piano, and she could play it, people said. She played ungodly songs, but Mary Hope had a venturesome spirit. She wanted to see an instrument of the devil, hear the painted Jezebel play on it and sing her ungodly songs.

  One day when she had ridden to the top of the Devil’s Tooth a great, daring plan came to her. She wanted to ride down there—a half mile down the bluff, a mile and a half by the road—but she would never dare take that trail deliberately. Her father might hear of it, or her mother. Nor could she ask the Lorrigans not to tell of her visit. But if her horse ran away with her and took her down the ridge, she could ask them to please not tell her father, because if he knew that her horse ran away he would not let her ride again. It seemed to Mary Hope that all the Lorrigans would sympathize with her dilemma. They would probably ask her into the house. She would see the piano, and she could ask the painted Jezebel to play on it. That would be only polite. It did seem a shame that a girl thirteen years old, going on fourteen, should never have seen or heard a piano. Mary Hope looked at the sun and made breathless calculation. Having just arrived at the Devil’s Tooth, she had an hour to spend. And if she took the steep, winding trail that the Lorrigans rode, the trail where old man Lorrigan’s horse had fallen down with him, she could be at the house in a very few minutes.

  “Ye look little enough like a runaway horse, ye wind-broken, spavined old crow-bait, you!” she criticized Rab as he stood half asleep in the sun. “I shall have to tell a lee about you, and for that God may wither the tongue of me. I shall say that a rattler buzzed beneath your nose—though perhaps I should say it was behind ye, Rab, else they will wonder that ye didna run away home. If ye could but lift an ear and roll the eye of you, wild-like, perhaps they will believe me. But I dinna ken—I wouldna believe it mesel!”

  Rab waggled an ear when she mounted, switched his tail pettishly when she struck him with the quirt, reluctantly obeyed the rein, and set his feet on the first steep pitch of the Devil’s Tooth trail. Old as he was, Rab had never gone down that trail and he chose his footing circumspectly. It was no place for a runaway, as Mary Hope speedily discovered when she had descended the first dip and entered the cleft which the Lorrigans called the Slide.

  A slide it was, and down it Rab slid on his rump. An old watercourse, with sheer rock walls that formed the base of the Tooth itself. Had there been room Mary Hope would have turned back. But the cleft was so narrow that a pack horse must be adept at squeezing past protuberances and gauging the width of its pack if it would travel the trail. A sharp turn presently showed her the end of the cleft, and they emerged thankfully upon a sage-grown shelf along which the trail proceeded more gently.

  Then came another cleft, with great boulders at the end, which a horse must negotiate carefully if he would not break a leg or two. It was here that old Tom Lorrigan had died under his horse before help came that way. But Rab had covered many rough trails, and he picked his way over the boulders safely,—though not as a runaway horse should have traveled.

  After that there came a treacherous bit of shale, across which Mary Hope thought it best to lead her runaway steed which refused for a time to venture farther. Being a Douglas she was obstinate. Being obstinate, she would not turn back, especially since the trail would be even worse in the climbing than it was in the descent. Rab, she realized worriedly, could not slide up that narrow, rock-bottomed cleft down which he had coasted so readily.

  “They must be devil horses that ride this way, Rab,” she sighed when she had remounted on the lower margin of the shale. “And the Lorrigans na doot have magic. But I dinna think that even they could run away down it.”

  She struck Rab sharply with the quirt and dug in her heels. If Rab was to run it must be immediately, for the level valley lay just below and the Lorrigan house was around the next point of the hill.

  Rab would not run. He stopped abruptly and kicked with both feet. Mary Hope struck him again, a little harder, and Rab kicked again, more viciously. The trail was much better for kicking than for running, but Mary Hope would not accept the compromise, and at last Rab yielded to the extent of loping cautiously down the last steep declivity. When he reached level ground he laid back his ears and galloped as fast as his stiffened shoulders would let him. So Mary Hope very nearly achieved a dashing pace as she neared the corrals of the wicked Lorrigans.

  “Well! Yuh traveling, or just goin’ somewhere?” A young voice yelled at her as she went past the stable.

  “My horse—is—he rinned away wi’ me!” screamed Mary Hope, her pigtails snapping as Rab slowed up and stopped.

  “He rinned away wi’ you? When? You musta been purty young for riding when that horse rinned away!” Lance came toward her, grinning and slapping his hat against his fringed chaps before he set it upon his head; an uncommonly handsome head, by the way, with the Lorrigan’s dark eyes and hair and his mother’s provocative mouth. “Well, seeing your horse ain’t going to rin no further, you might as well git down and stay awhile.”

  “I will not. I didna come to visit, if you please.”

  Mary Hope’s cheeks were hot but confusion could not break her Scotch spirit.

  “Want to borrow something?” Lance stood looking at her with much enjoyment. A girl in short skirts was fair game for any one’s teasing, especially when she blushed as easily as did Mary Hope. “Want to borrow a horse that will rin away wi’ you.”

  “Lance, you devil, get out and leave the girl alone. I’m ashamed of you! Haven’t you got any manners at all?—after all the willows and the good powder I’ve wasted on you! Get back to that pasture fence before I take a club to you for such acting!”

  Before Belle’s wrath Lance retreated, and Mary Hope found the courage to wrinkle her nose at him when he glanced he
r way. “He rinned away to save himself a whupping,” she commented, and made sure that he heard it, and hoped that he would realize that she spoke “Scotchy” just for his special benefit.

  “All right for you, Belle Lorrigan!” Lance called back, retaliating for Mary Hope’s grimace by a kiss thrown brazenly in the expectation of seeing her face grow redder; which it did immediately. “Careful of that horse—he might rinned away again!”

  “That’ll do for you, young man!” Whereupon Belle picked up a small stone and threw it with such accurate aim that Lance’s hat went off. “Good thing for you that I haven’t got a gun on me, or I’d dust your heels for you!” Then she turned to Mary Hope, who was listening with titillating horror to the painted Jezebel’s unorthodox method of reproving her offspring. “Get right down, honey, and come in and rest. And don’t mind Lance; he’s an awful tease, especially when he likes a person. Tie your horse to the fence—or turn him in the corral, if he’ll let you catch him again.”

  “I—I don’t believe I could stop. I—I only came by because I—my horse—” Mary Hope stammered and blushed so red that her freckles were invisible. After all, it was very hard to tell a lie, she discovered.

  “There’s something I like about this horse,” said Belle, running her plump white hand down the nose of Rab. “He’s neighborly, anyway. He brought you here against your will, I can see that. And now he’s here he sort of takes it for granted you’ll be friendly and stop a while. Don’t you think you ought to be as friendly as your horse, honey?”

  “I—I am friendly. I—I always wished I could come and see you. But mother—mother doesna visit much among the neighbors; she—she’s always busy.”

  “I don’t visit much, myself,” said Belle dryly. “But that ain’t saying I can’t be friendly. Come on in, and we’ll have some lemonade.”