sure. I'll take you home, girl." He was leading her by
the arm to the fence behind the house. "Wait, I'll lift a wire; can
you crawl under?"

"Now, I've torn it! I heard it rip. And it isn't my coat at all," said
Mary Hope. "Oh, they're murdering one another! I should think you'd be
ashamed, having a dance like--"

"Coats can be bought--and murdered men don't swear like that. I'll
have to borrow Belle's pintos, but we don't care, do we? Come on. Here
they are. Don't get in until I get them untied and turned around. And
when I say get in, you'd better make it in one jump. Are you game?"

"No Lorrigan will ever cry shame on a Douglas for a coward! You must
be crazy, taking this awful team."

"I am. I'm crazy to get you away from here before they start shooting,
back there." He spoke to the team gruffly and with a tone of authority
that held them quiet, wondering at his audacity perhaps. He untied
them, got the lines, stepped in and turned them around, the pintos
backing and cramping the buckboard, lunging a little but too surprised
to misbehave in their usual form.

"Get in--and hang on. There's no road much--but we'll make it, all
right."

Like the pintos, Mary Hope was too astonished to rebel. She got in.

The team went plunging up the hill, snorting now and then, swerving
sharply away from rock or bush that threatened them with vague horrors
in the clear starlight. Behind them surged the clamor of many voices
shouting, the confused scuffling of feet, a revolver shot or two, and
threading the whole the shrill, upbraiding voice of a woman.

"That's Mrs. Miller," Mary Hope volunteered jerkily. "She's the one
that was scalded."

"It wasn't her tongue that was hurt," Lance observed, and barely saved
the buckboard from upsetting on a rock as Rosa and Subrosa shied
violently and simultaneously at a rabbit scuttling from a bush before
them.

He swung the pintos to the right, jounced down into some sort of
trail, and let them go loping along at their usual pace.

"Belle has her own ideas about horse-training," Lance chuckled,
steadying Subrosa with a twitch of the rein. "They'll hit this gait
all the way to your ranch."

Mary Hope gave a gasp and caught him by the arm, shaking it a little
as if she were afraid that otherwise he would not listen to her. "Oh,
but I canna go home! I've a horse and my riding clothes in Jumpoff,
and I must go for them and come home properly on horseback to-morrow!
It's because of the