by B. M. Bower
She heard him moving about in his room, heard him go into the kitchen and ask Riley what the chances were for something to eat. She did not follow him, but she waited, expecting that he would come into the living room afterwards. She went to the piano and drummed a few bars of a new dance hit Lance had brought home for her, and with her head turned sidewise listened to the sound of his footsteps in the next room, his occasional, pleasantly throaty tones answering Riley’s high-pitched, nasal twang.
Her eyes blurred with unreasoning tears. He was her youngest. He was so big, so handsome, so like Tom,—yet so different! She did not believe that Tom could really see anything to cavil at in Lance’s presence, in his changed personality. Tom, she thought, was secretly as proud of Lance as she was, and only pretended to sneer at him to hide that pride. The constraint would soon wear off, and Lance would be one of the boys again.
The screen door slammed. With a lump in her throat, Belle went to a window and looked out. Lance, in his new Stetson and a fresh shirt and gray trousers tucked into his riding boots, was on his way to the stable again. She watched him pick up a rope and go into the far corral where a few extra saddle horses dozed through the hot afternoon. She saw him return, leading a chunky little roan. Saw him throw his saddle on the horse. Saw him ride off—the handsomest young fellow in all the Black Rim—but with apparently never a thought that his mother might like a word with him, since he had been gone for two days without any explanation or any excuse. Which was not like Lance, who had always before remembered to be nice to Belle.
Up the Slide trail Lance rode, perhaps two hours behind Tom. The marks of Coaley’s hoofs were still fresh in the trail, but Lance did not appear to see them at all. He let the roan scramble over the shale as he would, let him take his own pace among the boulders and up through the Slide. At the top he put him into an easy lope which did not slacken until he reached the descent on the other side of the Ridge.
Presently, because the roan was an ambitious young horse and eager to reach the end of the trail, and Lance was too preoccupied to care what pace he traveled, they arrived at Cottonwood Spring, circled the wire fence and whipped in through the open gate at a gallop.
The little schoolhouse was deserted. Lance dismounted and looked in, saw it still dismal with the disorder of the last unfortunate dance. It was evident that there had been no school since the Fourth of July.
Then he remembered that Mary Hope’s father had been sick all of the week, and it was now only two days since the funeral. She would not be teaching school so soon after his death.
He closed the door and remounted, his face somber. He had wanted to see Mary Hope. Since the morning after Scotty died he had fought a vague, disquieting sense of her need of him. There had been times when it seemed almost as though she had called to him across the distance; that she wished to see him. Today he had obeyed the wordless call. He still felt her need of him, but since she was not at the school he hesitated. The schoolhouse was in a measure neutral ground. Riding over to the Douglas ranch was another matter entirely. Too keenly had he felt the cold animosity of Mother Douglas, the wild, impotent hate of old Scotty mouthing threats and accusations and vague prophecies of future disaster to the Lorrigans. He rode slowly out through the gate and took the trail made by the Devil’s Tooth team when they hauled down the materials for the schoolhouse. The chunky roan climbed briskly, contentedly rolling the cricket in his bit. The little burring sound of it fitted itself somehow to the thought reiterating through Lance’s tired brain. “She wouldn’t want me—to come. She wouldn’t—want me—to come.”
The roan squatted and ducked sidewise, and Lance raised his head. Down the rough trail rode a big cowpuncher with sun-reddened face and an air of great weariness. His horse plodded wearily, thin-flanked, his black hair sweat-roughened and dingy. The rider looked at Lance with red-veined eyes, the inflamed lids showing sleepless nights.
“How’r yuh?” he greeted perfunctorily, as they passed each other.
“Howdy,” said Lance imperturbably, and rode on.
Lance’s eyebrows pulled together. He had no need of looking back; he had seen a great deal in the one glance he had given the stranger. He scrutinized the trail, measured with his eyes the size and the shape of the horse’s footprints.
After a little he left the wagon road and put the roan to the steep climb up the trail to the great Tooth of the ridge. He still frowned, still rode with bent head, his eyes on the trail. But now he was alert, conscious of his surroundings, thinking of every yard of ground they covered.
At a little distance from the base of the Tooth he dismounted, tying the restive roan to a bush to prevent him from wandering around, nibbling investigatingly at weeds, bushes, all the things that interest a young horse.
Slowly, walking carefully on rocks, Lance approached the Tooth. A new look was in his face now,—a look half tender, half angry because of the tenderness. Several times he had met Mary Hope here at the Tooth, when he was just a long-legged youth with a fondness for teasing, and she was a slim, wide-eyed little thing in short skirts and sunbonnet. Always the meetings had pretended to be accidental, and always Mary Hope had seemed very much interested in the magnificent outlook and very slightly interested in him.
From the signs, some one else was much interested in the view. Lance came upon a place where a man had slipped with one foot and left the deep mark of his boot in the loose, gravelly soil. Sitting on a boulder, he made a leisurely survey of the place and counted three cigarette stubs that had fallen short of the crevice toward which they had evidently been flung. How many had gone into the crevice he could not tell. He slid off the boulder and, walking on a rock shelf that jutted out from the huge upthrust rock, examined the place very thoroughly.
At a certain spot where Mary Hope had been fond of sitting on the rock shelf with her straight little back against the Tooth’s smooth side, a splendid view of the Devil’s Tooth ranch was to be had. The house itself was hidden in a cottonwood grove that Belle had planted when she was a bride, but the corrals, the pastures, the road up the Ridge was plainly visible. And in the shallow crack in the rock was another cigarette end, economically smoked down to a three-quarter-inch stub.
Lance returned by way of the shelf to the outcropping of rocks that would leave no trace of his passing. He untied and mounted the roan and circled the vicinity cautiously. Two hundred yards away, down the slope and on a small level place where the brush grew thick, he found where a horse had stood for hours. He looked at the hoofprints, turned back and rode down the schoolhouse trail again, following the tracks of the fagged black horse.
When another fifty yards would bring the basin in sight, Lance turned off the trail and dismounted, tied the roan again and went forward slowly, his eyes intent on the tops of the trees around Cottonwood Spring. A rattler buzzed suddenly, and he stopped, looked to see where the snake was coiled, saw it withdraw its mottled gray body from under a rabbit weed and drag sinuously away, its ugly head lifted a little, eyes watching him venomously. An unwritten law of the West he broke by letting the snake go. Again he moved forward, from bush to bush, from boulder to boulder. When all of the basin and the grove were revealed to him, he stopped, removed his gray range hat and hung it on a near-by bush. He took his small field glasses from his pocket, dusted the lenses deliberately and, leaning forward across a rock with his elbows steadied on the stone and the glasses to his eyes, he swept foot by foot the grove.
He was some minutes in discovering a black horse well within the outer fringe of the cottonwoods, switching mechanically at the flies and mosquitoes that infested the place, and throwing his head impatiently to his side now and then when the sting was too sharp to ignore. With the glasses he could see the sweat-roughened hide ripple convulsively to dislodge the pestering insects, could see the flaring nostrils as the horse blew out the dust gathered from his hungry nosing amongst the coarse grass and weeds. The man Lance did not at once discover, but after a little he saw him rolled in canvas t
o protect himself from the mosquitoes. He seemed already fast asleep.
“He needs it,” said Lance grimly, with his twisted smile, and went back to the roan.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
LANCE PLAYS THE GAME
That night Lance sauntered into the bunk house, placidly ignoring the fact that Tom was there, and that some sort of intermittent conference was taking place. Cool and clean and silk-shirted and freshly shaved, the contrast was sharp between him and the men sprawled on their beds or sitting listlessly around the table playing keno. Tom lifted an eyebrow at him; Lance sent him a look to match and went over to the card players.
They did not want him in the bunk house. He who had spent nearly all of his life on the Devil’s Tooth ranch knew that he was not wanted. They did not want him to know that he was not wanted, and by their very effort to hide it did they betray themselves.
“Didn’t go to Jumpoff after all, dad,” Lance remarked idly, a rising inflection turning the phrase into a question.
Tom grunted and got up to go. His men cast furtive glances at one another, looked at Lance from under their brows, noted the silk shirt and the low, tan Oxfords, and the texture and cut of his gray trousers with the tan leather belt that had a small silver buckle. Plain as it was they knew that buckle was silver. They saw how clean-cut was the hairline at the back of his head and over his ears—sure sign that he was “citified.” And toward the man who is citified your purely range-bred product cherishes a distinct if secret grudge. His immaculate presence made them all feel frowsy and unwashed and ill-clad. And to hide how conscious he was of his own deficiencies, the man who sat nearest Lance lifted his hat and rumpled his hair still more.
“Duke and Al didn’t get in yet, eh?” Lance picked up an extra deck of cards and began to shuffle them absent-mindedly but nevertheless dexterously.
“Nope—they stayed out,” replied a blond man named Winters. They called him “Chilly.”
“Hot weather for working cattle,” Lance observed indifferently.
“Yeah—sure is,” responded Ed Moran, who was low-browed and dark and had an ugly jaw.
“Yeah—damn hot,” testified Jim Bloom. “How’s Californy for weather?”
“Oh-h—it has all kinds, same as here.” Lance did not want to talk about California just then, but he followed the lead easily enough. “You can get anything you want in California. In two hours you can go from twenty-five feet of snow to orange groves. You can have it all green, fruit trees and roses blooming in midwinter, or you can hit into desert worse than anything Idaho can show.”
“Yep—that’s right, all right. Great place, Californy,” Chilly tried to make his voice sound enthusiastic, and failed. “Great place.”
“Speaking about climate—” Lance sat down on a corner of the table, eased his trousers over his knees, crossed his tan Oxfords and began a story. It was a long story, and for some time it was not at all apparent that he was getting anywhere with it. He shuffled the deck of cards while he talked, and the keno game, interrupted when he began, trailed off into “Who’s play is it?” and finally ceased altogether. That was when Lance’s Jewish dialect began to be funny enough to make even Chilly Winters laugh. At the end there was a general cachinnation.
“But that’s only a sample of the stuff they pull out there, on tourists,” said Lance, when the laughter had subsided to a few belated chuckles. “There’s another one. It isn’t funny—but I’m going to make it funny. You’ll think it’s funny—but it isn’t, really.”
He told that one and made them think it was funny. At least they laughed, and laughed again when he had finished.
“Now here’s another. This one really is funny—but you won’t feel like laughing at it. I’ll tell it so you won’t.”
He told that story and saw it fall flat. “You see?” He flipped the cards, tossed them on the table with a whimsical gesture. “It isn’t what you do in this world—it’s how you do it that counts. I’m sitting on your keno game, am I? All right, I’ll get off.”
He went out as abruptly as he had entered, and he paused long enough outside to know that a silence marked his going. Then he heard Ed Koran’s voice depreciating him. Frankly he listened, lighting a cigarette.
“Aw—his mother was an actress, wasn’t she? That guy ain’t going to cut no ice around here whatever.”
“Looks an awful darn lot like Tom,” ventured Chilly. “I dunno—you take a Lorrigan—”
“Him? Lorrigan? Why, say! He may look like a Lorrigan, but he ain’t one. Tom’s damn right. He don’t set in. Why, like as not he’d—”
“Aw, cut out the gabbling!” Ed’s voice growled again. “It’s yore play, Bob.”
Stepping softly, Lance went on to the house. “I just—look like one!” he repeated under his breath. “Fine! At any rate,” he added dryly, “I’ve proved that I can go into the bunk house now and then.”
He went up and sang songs with Belle then, until after ten o’clock. He would have sung longer, but it happened that in the middle of a particularly pleasing “Ah-ee, oh-ee, hush-a-bye-ba-by” yodel, Tom put his head out of the bedroom and implored Lance to for-the-Lord-sake go up on the Ridge to howl. So Lance forbore to finish the “ah-ee, oh-ee,” much to Belle’s disappointment.
“But you know Tom’s been out riding hard and not getting much sleep, so I guess maybe we better cut out the concert, honey,” she told Lance, getting up and laying her plump, brown arms across his shoulders. “My heavens, Lance, you kinda make me think the clock’s set back thirty years, when I look at you. You’re Tom, all over—and I did think you were going to be like me.”
Lance scowled just a little. “No, I’m not Tom all over—I’m Lance all over.”
“You’re Lorrigan all over,” Belle persisted. “And you’re just like Tom when he was your age. Good Lord, how time does slip away! Tom used to be so full of fun and say such funny things—and now it’s just ride and ride and work, and eat and sleep. Honey, I want you to know that I’m glad you learned something a little different. What’s the use of having a million, if you work yourself to death getting it? Look at the boys—look at Al and Duke. They’re like old men, the last year or two. We used to have such good times on the ranch, but we don’t any more—nobody ever thinks of anything but work.”
She lowered her voice to a whisper, her arms still lying on Lance’s shoulders, her clouded blue eyes looking up into his. “That trouble with Scotty Douglas kind of—changed Tom and the boys. You went away. You’ve changed too, but in a different way. It soured them, just a little. Tom wants to make his million quick and get outa here. I was glad when you stirred things up a little, last spring, and gave that dance. Or I was glad, till it ended up the way it did. It was the first dance we’d been to since you left, Lance! And I thought it would kind of patch up a little more friendliness with the folks around here. But it didn’t. It just made a lot of talk and trouble—and, Lance, honey, I’m awfully darn sorry about that piano. It’s down in the chicken house this minute. Tom wouldn’t even have it in the house. And now, I don’t suppose there ever will be any chance to make friends with any one. Tom—well, all of us were so darn mad to think she never even asked us—”
“Don’t care any more about that, Belle. Please don’t. And by the way, I took the money Mary Hope wanted to give dad for the schoolhouse. Perhaps he didn’t tell you, but he threatened to burn the house down if she left the money, so I took it and gave her a bill of sale in his name. I wish you’d keep the money. And some day, maybe dad will take it.”
“Tom never told me a word about it,” Belle whispered pitifully, dropping her forehead on Lance’s broad chest. “Honey, it never used to be this way. He used to tell me things. But now, he doesn’t—much. Last spring, when he built the schoolhouse and all, I was so glad! It was more like old times, and I thought—but the fight turned him and the boys again, and now they’re just as far off as ever. Lance, I don’t whine. You never heard Belle whine in your life, did you, honey? But I�
��ll tell you this: The only things that haven’t changed, on the Devil’s Tooth, are Riley and the pintos. And even they let you drive ’em to Jumpoff and back last spring without busting things up. They’re getting old, I guess. Maybe we’re all getting old. Still, Rosa and Subrosa are only ten past, and I haven’t had a birthday for years—
“It’s—Lance, do you mind if Belle lets go and tells you things, just this once? You’ve changed, some, but not like the rest. Please, Lance, I want to lean against you and—and feel how strong you are—”
A great tenderness, a great, overwhelming desire to comfort his mother, who had never let him call her mother, seized Lance. His arms closed around her and he backed to an armchair and sat down on it, holding her close.
“Don’t care, Belle—it’s all right. It’s going to be all right. I’m just Lance, but I’m a man—and men were made to take care of their women. Talk to me—tell me what’s been eating your heart out, lately. It’s in your eyes. I saw it when I came home last spring, and I see it now every time I look at you.”
“You’ve seen it, honey?” Belle’s whisper was against his ear. She did not look at his face. “There’s nothing to see, but—one feels it. Tom’s good to me—but he isn’t close to me, any more. The boys are good to me—but they’re like strangers. They don’t talk about things, the way they used to do. They come and go.”