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Updated: June 21, 2025
He knew Coaley, and he knew that never yet had Coaley been pushed to the actual limit of his endurance. But the girl Lance loved ah, it was a Lorrigan who loved! was back there alone, and she would be counting the minutes. It might be that he might return to find her weeping over her dead. So Lance counted miles and a horse's strength, and bent to the storm and rode.
In the kitchen Lance sat and watched her, and made love to her with his big eyes, with his voice that made of the most commonplace remark a caress. But that night, when Mary Hope was asleep and Belle was dozing beside the stricken woman, Lance saddled Jamie and led Coaley home.
After him went Coaley, loping easily, with high, rabbit jumps that told how he would love to show the speed that was in him, if only Tom would loosen the reins a half inch. For a mile Tom kept close to Rab's heels. Then, swinging up alongside, he turned to Mary Hope, that baffling half smile on his lips and the look in his eyes that had never failed to fill her with trepidation.
"Don't get caught out," she said apathetically. "I won't." Lance lifted the lace frill of the cap and kissed her temple lightly. "Go back to bed. It's too early for you to be up." At the stable Sam Pretty Cow looked a question, grunted and went on with his stall cleaning. Lance saddled Coaley, tied on an emergency ration of grub. "Fishin's good t'day. Storm's coming.
"It's going to set hard, now I'm tellin' yuh, to throw my saddle on some plain, ordinary cayuse. But it's a bet I can't afford to overlook; they made that plain enough." Coaley pricked up his ears and looked, his big, bright eyes taking in the shadow of a horse beside a clump of wild currant bushes that grew in the very base of the Devil's Tooth.
That there AJ man swore to the horse when he wouldn't never have swore to me, but they all took it as a cinch it was me he saw, because nobody else ever rides Coaley. And by the Lord John, Al, that's the last time any man's going to swear to me in the dark by the horse I'm ridin'. The Devil's Tooth outfit is going to have a lot more saddle horses broke gentle than what they've got now.
"The horse and the hat; he thought it was dad he was trailing!" he said to himself, with his teeth clamped tight together. "Oh, well, when it comes to that kind of a game " He went out and down to the corral, watered Coaley and mounted again, taking the trail across pastures to Squaw Creek.
"Pretty good-looking bunch, dad," said Al, reining up beside Tom. "We had to ride some to get 'em in they're sure snuffy. What you going to do with 'em? Break out a few?" "Some. Did yuh take notice, Al, that Coaley come within an ace of sending me over the road?
They were hungrily nosing fresh piles of hay, and scarcely looked up when Coaley trotted eagerly up to join them. Six of them a little more than half of the outfit that had ridden away the other night. "Well! I see you helped yourself to a new saddle horse," Tom observed significantly, coming up behind Lance. "Yes. Coaley acted lonesome, shut up in the box stall.
Now, with Mary Hope loving him, there was all the more reason why he should do them. The ranch seemed deserted, though of course it was late and he knew that every one would be in bed. He found a lantern, put Coaley into the box stall again, and spent a long time rubbing him down and carrying him fresh hay and water.
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