United States or Bahamas ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
You can stop the horses surely you can stop them and let me out. But please, please do not take me home to-night, in this party dress and a coat that isna mine at all!" "I'm not taking you home, girl. I'm taking you to Jumpoff. And it won't matter to you whether Bill Kennedy is licked sober or not. And to-morrow I'll find out who owns the coat. I'll say I found it on the road somewhere.
What really held Jumpoff on the time-table in those days before it became a real town were the stockyards, where the Black Rim cattle came to start their journey to market. The trail over the mountains to the main line was rough, with a two-day drive without water.
She forthwith consented to become the very first school-teacher in the Devil's Tooth neighborhood, which hoped some day to become a real school district. She would have to ride five miles every morning and evening, and her morning ride would carry her five miles nearer the Lorrigan ranch, two of them along their direct trail to Jumpoff.
For days until Friday, to be explicit she had been quite determined not to go near Cottonwood Spring. Then she had suddenly changed her mind, dismissed school half an hour early, put old Rab in a lather on the way home, dressed herself and announced to her mother that she must ride into Jumpoff for school supplies, and that she would stay all night with the Kennedys.
Cottonwood Spring was a dished-out oasis just under the easy slope of Devil's Tooth Ridge. From no part of the Jumpoff trail could it be seen, and the surrounding slope did not offer much inducement to cattle in March, when water was plentiful; wherefore riders would scarcely wander into the saucer-like hollow that contained the cottonwoods and the spring.
That's where I've seen a lot of them heading. Come on, boys; it takes just as much nerve not to fight as it does to kill off a dozen men. Isn't that right, dad?" "More," said Tom laconically. "No, boys, we don't want no trouble here. Come on in and dance. That's yore job to keep 'er moving peaceable. I'll fire any man I ketch drinking Jumpoff booze. We've got better at the ranch. Come on!"
Mary Hope had no faith in poultices, and she was on the point of riding to Jumpoff and telegraphing for a doctor when her father cannily read her mind and forbade her so sternly that she quailed before him. There was another thing, which she must do. She must take the money she had gotten from the dance and with it pay Tom Lorrigan for the schoolhouse, or stop the school altogether.
She saddled him now and hurried away, thankful to be gone with her package and her guilty conscience before her father arrived. She was very good friends with the Kennedys, at the section house. If there was a dance within forty miles, the Kennedys might be counted upon to attend; and that is how Mary Hope arrived at the schoolhouse with a load from Jumpoff.
The train's conductor, who had the misfortune to be considered a humorist, liked to say that Jumpoff was a knot at the end of the road to keep the track from unraveling. He had told the girl that, on the long, jolty ride from the junction. The girl replied that at any rate she liked the name.
The train that had brought her panted upon a siding, deserted, its boiler cooling, its engineer, fireman, conductor and brakeman leaning over a bar in the shack that called itself a saloon. To-morrow it would rattle back to the junction, if all went well and the rails held fast to the ties, which was not certain. The station's name was Jumpoff.
Word Of The Day