CHAPTER FIFTEEN

HE TACKLES ANOTHER

Much to the disgust of Rosa and Subrosa, their new driver turned them
from the main trail just as they were beginning to climb joyously the
first grade of Devil's Tooth Ridge. Rosa and Subrosa were subdued,
plainly resentful of their subjection, and fretting to be in their own
stalls. Belle they could and did bully to a certain extent. They loved
to fight things out with Belle, they never missed an opportunity for
"acting up"--yet this morning they had been afraid to do more than nag
at each other with bared teeth; afraid to lope when this big man said,
"Hey--settle down, there!" with a grating kind of calm that carried
with it a new and unknown menace.

Some one had exuberantly fired the Whipple shack, and the pintos
wanted to whirl short around in their tracks when they saw the smoking
embers. They had wanted to bolt straight out across the rocky upland
and splinter the doubletree, and perhaps smash a wheel or two, and
then stand and kick gleefully at the wreck. If head-shakings and
flattened ears meant anything, Rosa and Subrosa were two disgruntled
pintos that morning. They had not dared do more than cut a small
half-circle out of the trail when they passed the blackened spot that
had been the Whipple shack.

Now they turned down the rocky, half-formed trail to Cottonwood
Spring, reluctantly but with no more than a half-hearted kick from
Subrosa to register their disgust. And to that Lance gave no heed
whatever. He did not so much as twitch a rein or yell a threat. He
drove surely--with one hand mostly because of the broken knuckle,
which was painful in the extreme--ignoring the pintos for the most
part.

He was meditating rather gloomily upon the innate cussedness of human
nature as it was developed in Black Rim Country. He was thinking of
Mary Hope--a little; of her eyes, that were so obstinately blue, so
antagonistically blue, and then, quite unexpectedly, so wistfully
blue; of her voice, that dropped quite as unexpectedly into pure
Scottish melody; of her primness, that sometimes was not prim at all,
but quaintly humorous, or wistfully shy.

He was thinking more often of the dance that had started out so well
and had ended--Lord knew how, except that it ended in a fight. He
remembered striking, in that saloon, faces that had been pummeled
before ever he sent a jab their way. There had been eyes already
closed behind purple, puffy curtains of bruised flesh. He had