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Updated: May 2, 2025
He was not afraid of Belle; no real Lorrigan was ever afraid of anything, as fear is usually defined. But he wanted to postpone for a time her reckoning with him. He wanted to face her when he had a free mind, when she had slept well, when her temper was not so edgy. He wanted other things, however, and he proceeded to get those things with the least effort and delay. He wanted soft cloths.
Mary Hope ducked her sleek little pig-tailed head outside the door and shooed vehemently at a dingy black hen that happened to be passing. Mary Hope knew that a Douglas had stooped so low as to wave back at Lance Lorrigan, but it seemed unwise to tell her mother so. When Mary Hope was permitted to have a gentle old cow-pony of her own, she rode as often as she dared to Devil's Tooth ridge.
Tom Lorrigan would go "over the road"; for how long they could only guess according to their secret hopes. Some predicted a fifteen-year term for Tom. Others thought that he might get off lightly say with five or six years. They based their opinion on the fact that men have been sent to the penitentiary for fifteen years, there to repent of stealing a calf not yet past the age of prime veal.
Douglas had gone back the next day after it, and it had been missing. It was not until several days later that he had found it in the crevice. Why assume that Tom Lorrigan had removed it? "If I'd set out to caché that hide," Tom here interposed, "I'd have buried it. Only a darn fool would leave evidence like that laying around in sight."
Of the three boys, Lance was his favorite, and it hurt him to think that Lance had so little of the Lorrigan pride that he would ride a foot out of his way to speak to any one of the Douglas blood. Up the Slide went Coaley, his head held proudly erect upon his high, arched neck, his feet choosing daintily the little rough places in the rock where long experience had taught him he would not slip.
He seemed to be smiling not with his mouth, exactly, but away inside of his mind and the smile showed just a little bit, at the corner of his lips. His chin was the Lorrigan chin absolutely; a nice chin to look at, with a little, long dimple down the middle. A chin that one would not want to oppose, would not want to see when the man who owned it was very angry.
There's music and room to dance, and plenty of chuck and plenty of coffee, and the dance is going right on without any fuss whatever. "This poor boob here who thinks he wants to fight me just because I'm a Lorrigan, I never saw before. It wouldn't be a fair fight, because he's too drunk to do anything but make a fool of himself. There's nothing to fight about, anyway.
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.
A dozen brands were represented in that foregathering: The NL brand of Tom Lorrigan on most, with its various amendments which differentiated the property of other members of the family, since all of the Lorrigans owned cattle.
Early she taught Mary Hope that beyond Devil's Tooth ridge lived those wicked Lorrigans, whose souls were bartered to the devil and whose evil ways were a stench in the nostrils of God. Mary Hope used to wonder if God turned up his nose when there was a stench in his nostrils, for instance, when Belle Lorrigan hurtled past with her bronks and her buckboard and her yellow hair flying.
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