fought
animosity that was none of his creating.

Thinking of the fight, he thought of the wrecked saloon when the fight
was over. Thinking of the wrecked saloon led him to think of the
probable condition of the nice new schoolhouse. Thinking of that
brought him back to Mary Hope,--to her face as it looked when she rode
up to the place on Monday morning. Ride up to it she must, if she
meant to go on teaching, for there was no more Whipple shack.

"Rotten bunch of rough-necks," he summed up the men of Black Rim and
of Jumpoff. "And they'll blame the Devil's Tooth outfit--they'll say
the Lorrigans did it. Oh, well--heck!"

So he drove down into the hollow, tied the pintos to the post where
they stood the night before, crawled through the wire fence where Mary
Hope had left a small three-cornered fragment of the coat that "wasna"
hers at all, and went over to the schoolhouse, standing forlorn in the
trampled yard with broken sandwiches and bits of orange peel and empty
whisky flasks accentuating the unsightliness and disorder.

The door swung half open. The floor was scored, grimy with dirt
tracked in on heedless feet and ground into the wax that had been
liberally scattered over it to make the boards smooth for dancing. A
window was broken,--by some one's elbow or by a pistol shot, Lance
guessed. The planks placed along the wall on boxes to form seats were
pulled askew, the stovepipe had been knocked down and lay disjointed
and battered in a corner. It was not, in Lance's opinion, a pleasant
little surprise for the girl with the Scotch blue eyes.

He pulled the door shut, picked up the empty whisky flasks and threw
them, one after the other, as far as he could send them into a rocky
gulch where Mary Hope would not be likely to go. Then he recrossed the
enclosure, crawled through the fence, untied the pintos and drove
home.

The bunk house emanated a pronounced odor of whisky and bad air, and
much snoring, just as Lance expected. The horses dozed in the corral
or tossed listlessly their trampled hay; the house was quiet, deserted
looking, with the doors all closed and the blinds down in the windows
of the room that had been the birthplace of Belle's three boys.

Lance knew that every one would be asleep to-day. The Devil's Tooth
ranch had always slept through the day after a dance, with certain
yawning intermissions at mealtimes.

He unhitched the pintos, turned them loose in the corral, caught his
own horse, whi