LANCE RIDES AHEAD

At fifteen minutes to four on a certain Tuesday afternoon, the first really pleasant day after the day of tearing, whooping wind that had blown Tom into the rôle of school bully, Lance loped out upon the trail that led past the Whipple shack a mile and a quarter farther on. Ostensibly his destination was the town of Jumpoff, although it was not the time of day when one usually started from the Devil’s Tooth ranch to the post-office, with three unimportant letters as an excuse for the trip.

As he rode Lance sang lustily a love song, but he was not thinking especially of Mary Hope. In two years more than one California girl had briefly held his fancy, and memory of Mary Hope had slightly dimmed. In his pocket were two letters, addressed to two California towns. One letter had Miss Helene Somebody inscribed upon it, and on the other was Miss Mildred Somebody Else. The love song, therefore, had no special significance, save that Lance was young and perfectly normal and liked the idea of love, without being hampered by any definite form of it concentrated upon one girl.

For all that he had timed his trip so as to arrive at the Whipple shack just about the time when Mary Hope would be starting home. He was curious to see just how much or how little she had changed; to know whether she still had that funny little Scotch accent that manifested itself in certain phrasings, certain vowel sounds at variance with good English pronunciation. He wanted to know just how much Pocatello had done to spoil her. Beneath all was the primal instinct of the young male dimly seeking the female whom his destiny had ordained to be his mate.

As a young fellow shut in behind the Rim, with the outside world a vast area over which his imagination wandered vaguely, Mary Hope had appealed to him. She was the one girl in the Black Rim country whom he would ride out of his way to meet, whose face, whose voice, lingered with him pleasantly for days after he had seen her and talked with her. He reflected, between snatches of song, that he might have thought himself in love with Mary Hope, might even have married her, had Belle not suddenly decided that he should go beyond the Rim and learn the things she could not teach him. Belle must have wanted him, her youngest, to be different from the rest. He wondered with a sudden whimsical smile, whether she was satisfied with the result of his two years of exile. Tom, he suspected, was not, nor were Duke and Al. The three seemed to hold themselves apart from him, to look upon him as a guest rather than as one of the family returned after an absence. They did not include him in their talk of range matters and the business of the ranch. He had once observed in them a secret embarrassment when he appeared unexpectedly, had detected a swift change of tone and manner and subject.

Surely they could not think he had changed sufficiently to make him an outsider, he meditated. Aside from his teasing of Belle, he had dropped deliberately into the range vernacular, refraining only from certain crudities of speech which grated on his ears. He had put on his old clothes, he had tried to take his old place in the ranch work. He had driven a four-horse team up the Ridge trail with lumber for the schoolhouse, and had negotiated the rock descent to Cottonwood Spring with a skill that pleased him mightily because it proved to him and to Tom and the boys that his range efficiency had not lessened during his absence. He had done everything the boys had done, except ride out with them on certain long trips over the range. He had not gone simply because they had made it quite plain that they did not want him.

Nor did the hired cowboys want him with them, ten of them in the bunk house with a cook of their own, and this only the middle of March! In two years the personnel of the bunk house had changed almost completely. They were men whom he did not know, men who struck him as “hard-boiled,” though he could not have explained just wherein they differed from the others. Sam Pretty Cow and Shorty he could hobnob with as of yore, Sam in particular giving him much pleasure with his unbroken reserve, his unreadable Indian eyes and his wide-lipped grin. The others were like Duke, Tom and Al, slightly aloof, a bit guarded in their manner.

“And I suppose Mary Hope will be absolutely spoiled, with small-town dignity laid a foot deep over her Scotch primness. Still, a girl that has the nerve to lift a club and threaten to brain Tom Lorrigan ”

He had forgotten the love song he was singing, and before he reached farther in his musings he met the Swedes, who stared at him round-eyed and did not answer his careless hello. A little farther, the Boyle children rode up out of a dry wash, grinned bashfully at him and hurried on.

A saddlehorse was tied to a post near the Whipple shack. With long legs swinging slightly with the stride of his horse, reins held high and loose in one hand, his big hat tilted over his forehead, Lance rode up and dismounted as if his errand, though important, was not especially urgent. The door stood open. He walked up, tapped twice with his knuckles on the unpainted casing, and entered, pulling off his hat and turning it round and round in his gloved fingers while he ducked his head, pressed his lips together with a humorous quirk, shuffled his spurred feet on the dirty floor and bowed again as awkwardly as he could. In this manner he hoped to draw some little spark of individuality from Mary Hope, who sat behind her yellow-painted table and stared at him over her folded arms. But Mary Hope, he observed, had been crying, and compunction seized him suddenly.

“Well, what is it?” she asked him curtly, rubbing a palm down over one cheek, with the motion obliterating a small rivulet of tears.

“If you please, ma’am, I was sent to mend a lock on a door.”

“What lock? On what door?” Mary Hope passed a palm down her other cheek, thus obliterating another rivulet that had ceased to flow tears and was merely wet and itchy.

“If you please, ma’am, you can search me.” Lance looked at her innocently. “I didn’t bring any lock with me, and I didn’t bring any door with me. But I’ve got some screws and three nails and lots of good intentions.”

“Good intentions are very rare in this country,” said Mary Hope, and made meaningless marks on the bare tabletop with a blunt pencil.

Lance heard a twang of Scotch in the “very rare” which pleased him. But he kept his position by the doorway, and he continued bashfully turning his big hat round and round against his chest, though the action went oddly with the Lorrigan look and the athletic poise of him. “Yes, ma’am. Quite rare,” he agreed.

“In fact, I don’t believe there is such a thing in the whole Black Rim country,” stated Mary Hope, plainly nonplussed at his presence and behavior.

“Could I show you mine?” Lance advanced a step. He was not sure, at that moment, whether he wanted to go with the play. Mary Hope was better looking than when he had seen her last. She had lost a good deal of the rusticity he remembered her to have possessed, but she was either too antagonistic to carry on the farce, or she was waiting for him to show his hand, to betray some self-consciousness. But the fact that she looked at him straight in the eyes and neither frowned nor giggled, set her apart from the ordinary range-bred girl.

“You talk like a country peddler. I’m willing to accept a sample, and see if they are durable. Though I can’t for the life of me see why you’d be coming here with good intentions.”

“I’d be mending a lock on a door. Is this the door, ma’am? And is this the lock?”

Since the door behind him was the only door within five miles of them, and since the lock dangled from a splintered casing, Mary Hope almost smiled. “It is a door,” she informed him. “And it is a lock that has been broken by a Lorrigan.”

She was baiting him, tempting him to quarrel with her over the old grudge. Because she expected a reply, Lance made no answer whatever. He happened to have a dozen or so of nails in his coat pocket, left-overs from his assiduous carpentry on the house being builded for her comfort. The screws he possessed were too large, and he had no hammer. But no man worries over a missing hammer where rocks are plentiful, and Lance was presently pounding the lock into place, his back to Mary Hope, his thoughts swinging from his prospective party to the possible religious scruples of the Douglas family.

Mary Hope used to dance a very little he remembered, though she had not attended many dances. He recalled suddenly that a Christmas tree or a Fourth of July picnic had usually been the occasions when Mary Hope, with her skirts just hitting her shoe tops in front and sagging in an ungainly fashion behind, had teetered solemnly through a “square” dance with him. Mother Douglas herself had always sat very straight and prim on a bench, her hands folded in her lap and her eyes blinking disapprovingly at the ungodly ones who let out an exultant little yip now and then when they started exuberantly through the mazes of the “gran’-right-n-left.”

Would Mary Hope attend the party? Should he tell her about it and ask her to come? Naturally, he could not peacefully escort her partyward, the feud was still too rancorous for that. Or was it? At the Devil’s Tooth they spoke of old Scotty as an enemy, but they had cited no particular act of hostility as evidence of his enmity. At the Devil’s Tooth they spoke of the whole Black Rim country as enemy’s country. Lance began to wonder if it were possible that the Lorrigans had adopted unconsciously the rôle of black sheep, without the full knowledge or concurrence of the Black Rimmers.

He did what he could to make a workable lock of one that had been ready to fall to pieces before his father heaved against it; hammered in the loosened screws in the hinges, tossed the rock out into the scuffed sod before the shack, and picked up his hat. He had not once looked toward Mary Hope, but he turned now as if he were going to say good-by and take himself off; as if mending the lock had really been his errand, and no further interest held him there.

He surprised a strange, wistful look in Mary Hope’s eyes, a trembling of her lips. She seemed to be waiting, fearing that he meant to go without any further overtures toward friendship.

The Whipple shack was not large. Ten feet spanned the distance between them. Impulsively Lance covered that distance in three steps. At the table he stopped, leaned toward her with his palms braced upon the table, and stared full into Mary Hope’s disturbed eyes.

“Girl,” he said, drawing the word softly along a vibrant note in his voice that sent a tremor through her, “Girl, you’re more lonesome than Scotch, and you’re more Scotch than the heather that grows in your front yard to make your mother cry for the Highlands she sees when her eyes blur with homesickness. You were crying when I came crying because you’re lonely. It’s a big, wild country the Black Rim. It’s a country for men to ride hell-whooping through the sage and camas grass, with guns slung at their hips, but it’s no country for a little person like you to try and carry on a feud because her father made one. You’re too little!”

He did not touch her, his face did not come near her face. But in his eyes, in his voice, in the tender, one-sided little smile, there was something, Mary Hope caught her breath, feeling as if she had been kissed.

“You little, lonesome girl! There’s going to be a party at Cottonwood Spring, a week from Friday night. It’s a secret a secret for you. And you won’t tell a soul that you were the first to know and you’ll come, you girl, because it’s your party. And not a soul will know it’s your party. If your father’s Scotch is too hard for dancing you’ll come just the same. You’ll come, because the secret is for you. And ” He thought that he read something in her eyes and hastened to forestall her intention “ and you won’t go near Cottonwood Spring before the time of the party, because that wouldn’t be playing fair.

“Don’t be lonely, girl. The world is full of pleasant things, just waiting to pop out at you from behind every bush. If you’re good and kind and honest with life, the Fates are going to give you the best they’ve got. Don’t be lonely! Just wait for the pleasant things in to-morrow and to-morrow in all the to-morrows. And one of them, girl, is going to show you the sweetest thing in life. That’s love, you girl with the tears back of your Scotch blue eyes. But wait for it and take the little pleasant things that minutes have hidden away in the to-morrows. And one of the pleasant times will be hidden at Cottonwood Spring, a week from Friday night. Wonder what it will be, girl. And if any one tries to tell it, put your hands over your ears, so that you won’t hear it. Wait and keep wondering, and come to Cottonwood Spring next Friday night. Adios, girl.”

He looked into her eyes, smiling a little. Then, turning suddenly, he left her without a backward glance. Left her with nothing to spoil the haunting cadence of his voice, nothing to lift the spell of tender prophecy his words had laid upon her soul. When he was quite gone, when she heard the clatter of his horse’s hoofs upon the arid soil that surrounded the Whipple shack, Mary Hope still stared out through the open doorway, seeing nothing of the March barrenness, seeing only the tender, inscrutable, tantalizing face of Lance Lorrigan, tantalizing because she could not plumb the depths of his eyes, could not say how much of the tenderness was meant for her, how much was born of the deep music of his voice, the whimsical, one-sided smile.

And Lance, when he had ridden a furlong from the place, had dipped into a shallow draw and climbed the other side, turned half around in the saddle and looked back.

“Now, why did I go off and leave her like that? Like an actor walking off the stage to make room for the other fellow to come on and say his lines. There’s no other fellow thank heck! And here are two miles we might be riding together and me preaching to her about taking the little, pleasant things that come unexpectedly!” He swung his horse around in the trail, meaning to ride back; retraced his steps as far as the hollow, and turned again, shaking his head.

“Anybody could stop at the schoolhouse just as school’s out, and ride a couple of miles down the road with the schoolma’am if she let him do it! Anybody could do that. But that isn’t the reason, why I’m riding on ahead. What the hell is the reason?”

He stopped again on the high level where he could look back and see the Whipple shack squatted forlornly in the gray stretch of sage with wide, brown patches of dead grass between the bushes.

“Lonesome,” he named the wild expanse of unpeopled range land. “She’s terribly lonely and sweet. Too lonely and sweet for me to play with, to ride a few miles with and leave her lonelier than I found her. I couldn’t. There’s enough sadness now in those Scotch blue eyes. Damned if I’ll add more!”

He saw Mary Hope come from the shack, pause a minute on the doorstep, then walk out to where her horse was tied to the post. He lifted the reins, pricked his horse gently with the spurs and galloped away to Jumpoff, singing no more.