Chapter 9

A LITTLE SCOTCH

In the Black Rim country March is a month of raw winds and cold rains, with sleet and snow and storm clouds tumbling high in the West and spreading to the East, where they hang lowering at the earth and then return to empty their burden of moisture upon the shrinking live things below.

In the thinly settled places March is also the time when children go shivering to school, harried by weather that has lost a little of its deadliness. In January and February their lives would not be safe from sudden blizzards, but by the middle of March they may venture forth upon the quest of learning.

Black Rim country was at best but scantily supplied with schools, and on the Devil’s Tooth range seven young Americans––three of them adopted from Sweden––were in danger of growing up in deplorable ignorance of what learning lies hidden in books. A twelve-mile stretch of country had neither schoolhouse, teacher nor school officers empowered to establish a school. Until the Swedish family moved into a shack on the AJ ranch there had not been children enough to make a teacher worth while. But the Swedish family thirsted for knowledge of the English language, and their lamenting awoke the father of four purely range-bred products to a sense of duty toward his offspring.

Wherefore Mary Hope Douglas, home from two winters in Pocatello, where she had lived with a cousin twice removed and had gone to school and had learned much, was one day invited to teach a school in the Devil’s Tooth neighborhood.

True, there was no schoolhouse, but there was a deserted old shack on the road to Jumpoff. A few benches and a stove and table would transform it into a seat of learning, and there were an old shed and corral where the pupils might keep their saddle horses during school hours. She would be paid five dollars a month per head, Jim Boyle of the AJ further explained. Seven “heads” at five dollars each would amount to thirty-five dollars a month, and Mary Hope felt her heart jump at the prospect of earning so much money of her own. Moreover, to teach school had long been her secret ambition, the solid foundation of many an air castle. 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. 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. Five horses walked uneasily around inside the corral, manes and tails whipping in the gale that blew cold from out the north. From the bent stovepipe of the shack a wisp of smoke was caught and bandied here and there above the pole-and-dirt roof. It seemed incredible to Tom that squatters could have come in and taken possession of the place in his short absence, but there was no other explanation that seemed at all reasonable.

Squatters were not welcome on the Devil’s Tooth range. Tom rode up to the shack, dismounted and let Coaley’s reins drop to the ground. He hesitated a minute before the door, in doubt as to the necessity for knocking. Then his knuckles struck the loose panel twice, and he heard the sound of footsteps. Tom pulled his hat down tighter on his forehead and waited.

When Mary Hope Douglas pulled open the door, astonishment held them both dumb. He had not seen the girl for more than a year,––he was not certain at first that it was she. But there was no mistaking those eyes of hers, Scotch blue and uncompromisingly direct in their gaze. Tom pulled loose and lifted the hat that he had just tightened, and as she backed from the doorway he entered the shack without quite knowing why he should do so. Comprehensively he surveyed the mean little room, bare of everything save three benches with crude shelves before them, a kitchen table and a yellow-painted chair with two-thirds of the paint worn off under the incessant scrubbing of mother Douglas. The three Swedes, their rusty overcoats buttoned to their necks, goggled at him round-eyed over the tops of their new spelling books, then ducked and grinned at one another. The four Boyle children, also bundled in wraps, exchanged sidelong glances and pulled themselves up alert and expectant in their seats.

“School, eh?” Tom observed, turning as Mary Hope pushed the door shut against the wind that rattled the small shack and came toward him shivering and pulling her sweater collar closer about her neck. “When did this happen?”

“When I started teaching here, Mr. Lorrigan.” Then, mindful of her manners, she tempered the pertness with a smile. “And that was yesterday. Will you sit down?”

“No, thanks––I just stopped to see who was livin’ here, and––” He broke off to look up at the dirt roof. A clod the size of his fist had been loosened by the shaking of the wind, and plumped down in the middle of the teacher’s desk. With the edge of his palm he swept clod and surrounding small particles of dirt into his hat crown, and carried them to the door.

“There’s an empty calf shed over at the ranch that would make a better schoolhouse than this,” he observed. “It’s got a shingle roof.”

Mary Hope was picking small lumps of dirt out of her hair, which she wore in a pompadour that disclosed a very nice forehead. “I just love a roof with shingles on it,” she smiled.

“H’m.” Tom looked up at the sagging poles with the caked mud showing in the cracks between where the poles had shrunken and warped under the weight. A fresh gust of wind rattled dust into his eyes, and the oldest Swede chortled an abrupt “Ka-hugh!” that set the other six tittering.

“Silence! Shame on you!” Mary Hope reproved them sternly, rapping on the kitchen table with a foot rule of some soft wood that blazoned along its length the name of a Pocatello hardware store. “Get to work this instant or I shall be compelled to keep you all in at recess.”

“You better haze ’em all home at recess, and get where it’s warm before you catch your death of cold,” Tom advised, giving first aid to his eye with a corner of his white-dotted blue handkerchief. “This ain’t fit for cattle, such a day as this.”

“A north wind like this would blow through anything,” Mary Hope loyally defended the shack. “It was quite comfortable yesterday.”

“I wouldn’t send a dog here to school,” said Tom. “Can’t they dig up any better place than this for you to teach in?”

“The parents of these children are paying out of their own pockets to have them taught, as it is.”

“They’ll be paying out of their own pockets to have them planted, if they ain’t careful,” Tom predicted dryly. “How’re you fixed for firewood? Got enough to keep warm on a hot day?”

Mary Hope smiled faintly. “Mr. Boyle hauled us a load of sage brush, and the boys chop wood mornings and noons––it’s a punishment when they don’t behave, or if they miss their lessons. But––the stove doesn’t seem to draw very well, in this wind. It smokes more than it throws out heat.” She added hastily, “It drew all right yesterday. It’s this wind.”

“What you going to do if this wind keeps up? It’s liable to blow for a week or two, this time of year.”

“Why––we’ll manage to get along all right. They’d probably be out playing in it anyway, if they weren’t in school.”

“Oh. And what about you?” Tom looked at her, blinking rapidly with his left eye that was growing bloodshot and watery.

“I? Why, I’ve lived here all my life, and I ought to be used to a little bad weather.”

“Hunh.” Tom shivered in the draught. “So have I lived here all my life; but I’ll be darned if I would want to sit in this shack all day, the way the wind whistles through it.”

“You might do it, though––if it was your only way of earning money,” Mary Hope suggested shrewdly.

“Well, I might,” Tom admitted, “but I sure would stop up a few cracks.”

“We’ve hardly got settled yet,” said Mary Hope. “I intend to stuff the cracks with rags just as soon as possible. Is your eye still paining? That dirt is miserable stuff to stick in a person’s eye. Shall I try and get it out? Yesterday I got some in mine, and I had an awful time.”

She dismissed the children primly, with a self-conscious dignity and some chagrin at their boorish clatter, their absolute ignorance of discipline. “I shall ring the bell in ten minutes,” she told them while they scuffled to the door. “I shall give you two minutes after the bell rings to get into your seats and be prepared for duty. Every minute after that must be made up after school.”

“Ay skoll go home now, sen you skoll not keep me by school from tan minootes,” the oldest of the Swedes stopped long enough to bellow at her from the doorway. “Ole og Helge skoll go med. Ve got long way from school, og ve don’t be by dark ven ve come by home!”

He seized the square tobacco boxes, originally made to hold a pound of “plug cut,” and afterwards dedicated to whatever use a ranch man might choose to put them. Where schools flourished, the tobacco boxes were used for lunch. The Swedes carried three tied in flour sacks and fastened to the saddles. The wind carried them at a run to the corral. The two smaller boys, Ole and Helge, rode, one behind the other, on one horse, a flea-bitten gray with an enlarged knee and a habit of traveling with its neck craned to the left. Christian, the leader of the revolt, considered himself well-mounted on a pot-bellied bay that could still be used to round up cattle, if the drive was not more than a couple of miles. Looking after them from the window that faced the corral, Tom could not wonder that they were anxious to start early.

“You better let the rest go, too,” he advised the perturbed teacher, looking out at the four Boyle children huddled in the shelter of the shack, the skirts of the girl whipping in the wind like a pillowslip on a clothesline in a gale. “There ain’t any sense trying to teach school in a place like this, in such weather. Don’t you know them kids have got all of twelve miles to ride, facing this wind most of the way? And you’ve got to ride five miles; and when the sun drops it’s going to be raw enough to put icicles on your ribs under the skin. Tell ’em to go home. Pore little devils, I wouldn’t ask a cow-critter to face this wind after sundown.”

“You do not understand that I must have discipline in this school, Mr. Lorrigan. To-morrow I shall have to punish those Swedes for leaving school without permission. I shall make an example of Christian, for his impudence. I do not think he will want to disobey me again, very soon!” Mary Hope took her handkerchief from her pocket, refusing to consider for one moment the significance of its flapping in the wind while the windows and doors were closed.

“You’re just plain stubborn,” Tom said bluntly. “You’ve no business hanging out in a place like this!”

“I’ve the business of teaching school, Mr. Lorrigan. I suppose that is as important to me as your business is to you. And I can’t permit my pupils to rebel against my authority. You would not let your men dictate to you, would you?”

“They would have a right to call for their time if I asked them to do some damfool thing like sitting in this shack with the wind blowing through it at forty miles an hour.”

“I am sorry, Mr. Lorrigan, that I must remind you that gentlemen do not indulge in profanity before a lady.”

“Oh, hell! What have I said that was outa the way? I wasn’t cussing; I was telling you what your father and mother ought to tell you, and what they would if they didn’t think more of a few dollars than they do of their kid’s health. But I don’t reckon it’s my put-in; only it’s any man’s business to see that women and kids don’t freeze to death. And by the humpin’ hyenas––”

With her lips in a straight line, her eyes very hard and bright and with a consciousness of heaping coals of fire on the head of an enemy of her house, Mary Hope had twisted a corner of her handkerchief into a point, moistened it by the simple and primitive method of placing the point between her lips, and was preparing to remove the dirt from Tom’s watering eye, the ball of which was a deep pink from irritation. But Tom swung abruptly away from her, went stilting on his high heels to the door, pulled it open with a yank and rounded the corner where the four Boyle children stood leaning against the house, their chilled fingers clasped together so that two hands made one fist, their teeth chattering while they discussed the Swedes and tried to mimic Christian’s very Swedish accent.

“Og is and,” said Minnie Boyle. “And skoll is shall. Swede’s easy. And med means with––”

“Aw, it’s just the way they try to say it in English,” Fred Boyle contradicted. “It ain’t Swede––but gee, when the Scotch and the Swede goes in the air to-morrow, I bet there’ll be fun. If Mary Hope tries to lick Chris––”

“You kids straddle your cayuses and hit for home,” Tom interrupted them. “There ain’t going to be any more school to-day. Them your horses in the shed? Well, you hump along and saddle up and beat it. Go!”

He did not speak threateningly, at least he did not speak angrily. But the four Boyle children gave him one affrighted glance and started on a run for the corral, looking back over their shoulders now and then as if they expected a spatter of bullets to follow them.

At the corral gate Minnie Boyle stopped and turned as though she meant to retrace her steps to the house, but Tom waved her back. So Minnie went home weeping over the loss of a real dinner-bucket and a slate sponge which she was afraid the Swedes might steal from her if they came earlier to school than she.

When Tom turned to reënter the shack for a final word with Mary Hope, and to let her give first aid to his eye if she would, he found that small person standing just behind him with set lips and clenched fists and her hair blowing loose from its hairpins.

“Mr. Tom Lorrigan, you can just call those children back!” she cried, her lips bluing in the cold gale that beat upon her. “Do you think that with all your lawlessness you can come and break up my school? You have bullied my father––”

“I’d do worse than bully him, if I had him in handy reach right now,” Tom drawled, and took her by the shoulder and pushed her inside. “Any man that will let a woman sit all day in a place like this––and I don’t care a damn if you are earning money doing it!––oughta have his neck wrung. I’m going to saddle your horse for yuh while you bundle up. And then you’re going home, if I have to herd yuh like I would a white heifer. I always have heard of Scotch stubbornness––but there’s something beats that all to thunder. Git yore things on. Yore horse will be ready in about five minutes.”

He bettered his estimate, returning in just four minutes to find the door locked against him. “Don’t you dare come in here!” Mary Hope called out, her voice shrill with excitement. “I––I’ll brain you!”

“Oh, you will, will yuh?” Whereupon Tom heaved himself against the door and lurched in with the lock dangling.

Mary Hope had a stick of wood in her two hands, but she had not that other essential to quick combat, the courage to swing the club on the instant of her enemy’s appearance. She hesitated, backed and threatened him futilely.

“All right––fine! Scotch stubbornness––and not a damn thing to back it up! Where’s your coat? Here. Git into it.” Without any prelude, any apology, he wrested the stick of wood from her, pulled her coat off a nail near by, and held it outspread, the armholes convenient to her hands. With her chin shivering, Mary Hope obeyed the brute strength of the man. She dug her teeth into her lip and thrust her arms spitefully into the coat sleeves.

“Here’s yo’re hat. Better tie it on, if yuh got anything to tie it with. Here.”

He twitched his big silk neckerchief from his neck, pulled her toward him with a gentle sort of brutality, and tied the neckerchief over her hat and under her chin. He did it exactly as though he was handling a calf that he did not wish to frighten or hurt.

“Got any mittens? Gloves? Put ’em on.”

Standing back in the corner behind the door, facing Tom’s bigness and his inexorable strength, Mary Hope put on her Indian tanned, beaded buckskin gloves that were in the pockets of her coat. Tom waited until she had tucked the coatsleeves inside the gauntlets. He took her by the arm and pulled her to the door, pushed her through it and held her with one hand, gripping her arm while he fastened the door by the simple method of pulling it shut so hard that it jammed in the casing. He led her to where her horse stood backed to the wind and tail whipping between his legs, and his eyes blinking half shut against the swirls of dust dug out of the dry sod of the grassland. Without any spoken command, Tom took the reins and flipped them up over Rab’s neck, standing forward and close to the horse’s shoulder. Mary Hope knew that she must mount or be lifted bodily into the saddle. She mounted, tears of wrath spilling from her eyes and making her cheeks cold where they trickled down.

The Boyle children, kicking and quirting their two horses––riding double, in the Black Rim country, was considered quite comfortable enough for children––were already on their way home. Mary Hope looked at their hurried retreat and turned furiously, meaning to overtake them and order them back. Tom Lorrigan, she reminded herself, might force her to leave the schoolhouse, but he would scarcely dare to carry his abuse farther.

She had gone perhaps ten rods when came a pounding of hoofs, and Coaley’s head and proudly arched neck heaved alongside poor, draggle-maned old Rab.

“You’re headed wrong. Have I got to haze yuh all the way home? Might as well. I want to tell yore dad a few things.”

He twitched the reins, and Coaley obediently shouldered Rab out of the trail and turned him neatly toward the Douglas ranch. Even Rab was Scotch, it would seem. He laid his ears flat, swung his head unexpectedly, and bared his teeth at Coaley. But Coaley was of the Lorrigans. He did not bare his teeth and threaten; he reached out like a rattler and nipped Rab’s neck so neatly that a spot the size of a quarter showed pink where the hair had been. Rab squealed, whirled and kicked, but Coaley was not there at that particular moment. He came back with the battle light in his eyes, and Rab clattered away in a stiff-legged run. After him went Coaley, loping easily, with high, rabbit jumps that told how he would love to show the speed that was in him, if only Tom would loosen the reins a half inch.

For a mile Tom kept close to Rab’s heels. Then, swinging up alongside, he turned to Mary Hope, that baffling half smile on his lips and the look in his eyes that had never failed to fill her with trepidation.

“I ain’t blaming yuh for being Scotch and stubborn,” he said, “but you notice there’s something beats it four ways from the jack. Yo go on home, now, and don’t yuh go back to that board cullender till the weather warms up. And tell yore folks that Tom Lorrigan broke up yore school for yuh, so they wouldn’t have to break up a case of pneumonia.”

Mary Hope was framing a sentence of defiance when Coaley wheeled and went back the way they had come, so swiftly that even with shouting she could not have made herself heard in that whooping wind. She pulled Rab to a willing stand and stared after Tom, hating him with her whole heart. Hating him for his domination of her from the moment he entered the schoolhouse where he had no business at all to be; hating him because even his bullying had been oddly gentle; hating him most of all because he was so like Lance––and because he was not Lance, who was away out in California, going to college, and had never written her one line in all the time he had been gone.

Had it been Lance who rode up to the schoolhouse door, she would have known how to meet and master the situation. She would not have been afraid of Lance, she told herself savagely. She wouldn’t have been afraid of Tom––but the whole Black Rim was afraid of Tom. Well, just wait until she happened some day to meet Lance! At least she would make him pay! For two years of silence and brooding over his hardihood for taking her to task for her unfriendliness, and for this new and unbearable outrage, she would make Lance Lorrigan pay, if the fates ever let them meet again.