Rim o' the World. B. M. Bower
variety came to his ears. Belle’s lickings were distinguished chiefly by their uproar.
“Belle wallops ’em like brandin’ calves,” Tom used to chuckle. “They beller a plenty while it’s going on, and kick up their heels when it’s all over. 27 I wish’t my dad had licked me like that when I was a kid. You can gamble, when I was thrashed, I knowed it!”
Duke grew up to be a very good cowpuncher, however. He knew every draw and dry wash, every creek bottom and every canyon on the Black Rim range; knew almost as well as the owner how many cattle carried every brand. In the Devil’s Tooth round-ups Duke held his place alongside Al as a top hand,––disputing now and then the right of young Lance to compete with him, but never quite daring to bring his dispute to the point where action would take the place of words.
“Duke’s sure enough a bad man––with his face,” Tom once snarled to Belle. “Make it a talking match, and Duke could lick any old woman, in the Black Rim country.”
“There’s been enough fighting Lorrigans, don’t you think?” Belle smiled back at him. “Duke’s dad can fight hard enough for the whole family. I didn’t think you wanted your boys to be fighters.”
“I don’t. But I sure do want ’em to have the fightin’ stuff in ’em, whether it ever comes out or not. Take Lance, there. Lance ain’t a fighter, either; but by the Lord John, it’s there! Once get Lance started, and I’d back him against any three men in the Black Rim. It’s in him, if the play ever come up. And it’s in Al. The Lorrigan is strong in Al. But that Duke––”
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“Honey, I think maybe it’s the Delavan in Duke. I remember an old maid aunt of mine that used to bolt the door and quarrel with my mother through the keyhole. I guess maybe Duke has got a little touch of Aunt Jane.”
“Oh, sure! First I ever heard of Aunt Jane, Belle. Takes you to think up a reason.”
“And the Lorrigan will come out, honey. He’s got the look, now and then. It’s in him, you’ll see.”
So that is how the Lorrigan boys grew up. They thought Belle the most beautiful, the most wonderful woman in the world,––though they never called her mother. Belle would not have it. She refused to become a motherly, middle-aged person, and her boys were growing altogether too big and too masterful to look upon a golden-curled, pink-cheeked, honey-throated Amazon as other Black Rim sons looked upon their faded, too often shrewish maternal parent. She was just Belle. They knew no other like her, no one with whom they might compare her. We do not compare the sun and the moon with other suns and moons. Like Tom, they worshipped her in their hearts, and chummed with her even before they had outgrown her stormy chastisements. They mended her buckboards and her harness; they galloped alongside while she drove careening across the range, her hair flying in the wind, her mouth smiling and showing her white teeth. They danced with 29 her,––and having Belle for a teacher from the time they could toddle, you may guess how the Lorrigan boys could dance. They sang the songs she taught them; they tried to better her record at target practice and never did it; they quarreled with her when her temper was up and dodged her when it became too cyclonic.
They grew up without ever having ridden on the cars, save once or twice to Lava. Black Rim was the rim of the world to them, and their world held all that they yearned for. Belle sheltered them from too much knowledge of that other world, which held the past she hated and tried to forget. Much she taught them of city manners and the little courtesies of life. She would box the ears of the boy who neglected to rise and offer her a chair when she entered a room, and would smoke a cigarette with him afterward. Once she whipped her six-shooter out of its holster and shot a hole through the crown of Al’s hat, as a tactful reminder that gentlemen always remove their hats when they come into a house. Al remembered, after that. At fourteen even the hardiest youth feels a slight shock when a bullet jars through his hat crown two inches above his hair.
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CHAPTER THREE
MARY HOPE DOUGLAS APPEARS
Devil’s Tooth ridge, which gave the Lorrigan ranch its name, was really a narrow hogback with a huge rock spire at one end. Crudely it resembled a lower jaw bone with one lone tooth remaining. Three hundred feet and more the ridge upthrust its barren crest, and the wagon road from the ranch crawled up over it in many switchbacks and sharp turns, using a mile and a half in the climbing. They called it the “dug road.” Which meant that teams and scrapers and dynamite and much toil had been necessary in the making, distinguishing it from most Black Rim roads, which followed the line of least resistance until many passings had worn a definite trail; whereupon that trail became an established thoroughfare legalized by custom and not to be lightly changed for another.
Over in the next valley, beyond Devil’s Tooth ridge, Alexander Douglas had made a ranch for himself and his family. Aleck Douglas was as Scotch as his name. He shaved his long upper lip, so that it looked longer and more uncompromising 31 than was necessary even to match the Aleck Douglas disposition. His hair was wiry and stood up from a forehead that might be called beetling. His eyebrows were heavy and came so near to meeting that Mary Hope used to wish that she dared lay one small finger between father’s eyebrows, just to see if there would be room. His eyes were as close together as his thin beak of a nose would permit, and his ears were long and narrow and set flat against his head. He was tall and he was lank and he was honest to his last bristling hair. He did not swear––though he could wither one with vituperative epithets––and he did not smoke and he did not drink––er––save a wee nip of Scotch “whusky” to break up a cold, which frequently threatened his hardy frame. He was harshly religious, and had there been a church in the Black Rim country you would have seen Aleck Douglas drive early to its door every Sunday morn, and sit straight-backed in a front pew and stare hard at the minister through the longest of sermons,––providing, of course, that church and minister were good Presbyterian.
He loved the dollars, how he did love his dollars! He loved his cattle, because they represented dollars. He nursed them, dollars and animals alike, and to lose one wrung the heart of him.
His wife was a meek little thing in his presence, as the wives of such men as Aleck Douglas usually are. She also was rigidly honest, dogmatically 32 religious and frugal and hard-working and intolerant of the sins of others.
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. Mary Hope wondered, too, what the Lorrigan boys had got from the devil in exchange for their souls. Some magic, perhaps, that would protect them from death and accident. Yet that seemed not true, for Al Lorrigan broke his leg, one spring round-up. The devil ought to have saved his horse from falling down with him, if the devil had Al Lorrigan’s soul.
That had happened when Mary Hope was twelve and Al Lorrigan was eighteen. She heard her father tell her mother about it; and her father had set his whiskered lip against his long, shaven upper lip almost with a smack.
“They’ll come to a bad end, all of them,” he declared sententiously. “Violent deaths had all the Lorrigans before them––all save Tom, and the Lord but stays his hand for a time from that man. The wicked shall flourish as a green bay tree.”
“Father, how can a tree be green and then bay 33 too!” Mary Hope ventured to inquire. “Is it just a Bible tree, or does it flourish somewhere really?”
Aleck Douglas hid his month behind his palm and coughed.