ation
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 pull