Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 5, 2025
Why had Lance taken her to Jumpoff, away from the fighting, and then gone straight to the saloon and gotten so drunk that he fought every one in town before he left in the morning? Why had he never come near her again? And now that he was back in California, why did he ignore her completely, and never send so much as a picture postal to show that he gave her a thought now and then?
The next morning, when he arrived rather early, he learned from Mary Hope that her father had died just before daylight, and that Hugh had not come back, and the doctor wanted to be taken to Jumpoff, and she could not leave her mother there alone, and a coffin must be ordered, and she did not know what to do. She was past tears, it seemed to Lance.
Ten minutes past the hour, and he was snapping orders to the telegraph operator. The storm, happily, had swept on down the canyon and had given Jumpoff little more than a wetting and a few lightning flashes. "And order out a special engine and coach, what do I care what it will cost? I'll pay. Wire your Lava chief that the money is here.
"Looks to me as if there aren't many wasted opportunities here," Bud answered with some irony. "Is there an honest man in the whole country, Ed? I'd just like to know." Eddie hesitated, his eyes anxiously trying to read Bud's meaning and his mood. "Not right around the Sinks, I guess," he replied truthfully. "Up at Crater there are some, and over to Jumpoff.
The Swedes were present, sitting together in the corner by the water bucket, and the Conleys, who lived over by Camas Creek beyond the AJ, had come. The Conleys had sheep, and were not firmly settled in the Black Rim, sheepmen being looked at askance. There were families from nearer Jumpoff, one really did wonder where they all came from, when the country seemed so wide and unpeopled.
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.
By following the easy slope around the point of the main trail from Jumpoff to the Lorrigan ranch, no road-building was necessary, and in summer the cottonwoods looked very cool and inviting though at certain times they harbored buffalo gnats and many red ants that would bite, which rendered the shade less grateful than it looked. But to the Lorrigans it seemed an ideal site for a schoolhouse.
With his arms folded and his eyebrows pulled together and his lip between his teeth, Lance stared down at her face, studying it in the flicker of the distant firelight and the two lanterns. If her combativeness roused in him any resentment, he did not permit it to show in his voice. "Some of the fellows from Jumpoff brought a bottle or two.
Mary Hope would never admit to herself that this small detail interested her, but she thought of it the moment Jim Boyle suggested the old Whipple shack as a schoolhouse. Tom Lorrigan, riding home from Jumpoff after two days spent in Lava, pulled his horse down to a walk and then stopped him in the trail while he stared hard at the Whipple shack.
"No, mom, we ain't takin' any cakes or nothin' off nobody. Lance, he wanted to give this dance an' give it right. Ain't goin' to cost nobody a thing but sore corns, t'night!" Lance had hired an Italian violinist and his boy who played a harp much taller than himself and people coming from Jumpoff had brought them out. The Millers had come, with all their outfit. The AJ outfit was there to a man.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking