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Updated: June 14, 2025
And it is not so long since men were hanged for stealing a horse; witness Tom's brother, who would surely have been lynched had he not been shot. Witness also divers other Lorrigans whose careers had been shortened by their misdeeds. Much of the talk was peddled to Tom and the boys under the guise of friendship.
"You've done a heap of chawin' around about the Lorrigans, Scotty. Don't think I ain't heard it. Maybe it's your religion to backbite yore neighbors and say what you wouldn't dare to say to their face with a gun on you so we'd be equal. I've passed it up. I've considered the source and let it go.
Rab, she realized worriedly, could not slide up that narrow, rock-bottomed cleft down which he had coasted so readily. "They must be devil horses that ride this way, Rab," she sighed when she had remounted on the lower margin of the shale. "And the Lorrigans na doot have magic. But I dinna think that even they could run away down it." She struck Rab sharply with the quirt and dug in her heels.
Mary Hope, still taking her own point of view, had troubles in plenty to bear. In her own way she was quite as furious as was Lance, felt quite as injured as did the Devil's Tooth outfit, had all the humiliation of knowing that the Black Rim talked of nothing but her quarrel with the Lorrigans, and in addition had certain domestic worries of her own.
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.
Mary Hope's party and her evident intention to slight the Lorrigans was not mentioned again for days. But Tom's wrath was smoldering. He was not hasty. He waited. He himself met Mary Hope in the trail one day, lifted his hat to her without a word and rode on. Mary Hope let him go with a chilly nod and a murmured greeting which was no more than an empty form.
"Well, I never knew it to fail what's in the blood will come out. They've lived there for three generations now. They're killers, thieves at heart human birds of prey, and it don't matter if it is all under the surface. I say it's there." At that moment, Lance had the hunger to kill, to stop forever the harsh voice that talked on and on of the Lorrigans and their ingrained badness.
"Burn it he may if he likes; I shall not put my foot again inside a house of the Lorrigans!" Whereat Jamie threw up his head, shied at a white rock on the steep slope beneath, loped through the sagebrush where the trail was almost level, scrambled up a steep, deep-worn bit of trail, turned the sharp corner of the switch-back and entered that rift in the cap-rock known as the Slide.
"I'm not packing a gun, but I'd like to lick a few of you fellows that tried to rough-house the dance I gave. Didn't cost you a cent; music, supper, everything furnished for you folks to have a good time and the way you had it was to wreck the place like the rotten-souled hoodlums you are. Now, who is it wants to fix the damn Lorrigans?"
The sheriff had taken two deputies along with him, because he fully expected that the Lorrigans would "go on the warpath" as Belle had done. He was vastly astonished and somewhat chagrined when Tom gave a snort, handed over his gun, and turned to one of his boys. "Al," said Tom, "you go ahead with the round-up while I go in and fix this up.
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