rove the "he-devils" and others quite as devilish,
and risked her bones with perfect equanimity. She drove horses that
had to be thrown before the collar could be buckled on, and
"forefooted" before they would submit to the harness. Indeed, Belle
seemed to prefer that kind of horses. She wanted a team that could
keep pace with Tom,--and she had it. Her buckboard lasted a year,
with luck. She strewed the Devil's Tooth range with wheels and
doubletrees and splinters and hairpins, and scattered sunshiny
smiles and cuss-words and snatches of song wherever she went. And
since she went wherever eight bronco feet could take her, Black
Rim country came to know Belle Lorrigan as it knew Tom. Came to fear
Belle Lorrigan's wrath, which bettered the lightning for searing,
lashing sword-thrusts of venom; came to know her songs well enough
to hum snatches of them; came to laugh when she laughed,--and to
hope that the next laugh would not be aimed at them; came to
recognize her as a better shot than any one save Tom, who taught her.

At the country dances on the various ranches, Belle never missed
quadrille, two-step, waltz or schottische, and she danced by herself
or sang songs during the intervals, while the women of the range sat
stiffly along the walls on benches, stared at Belle and whispered
behind their weather-reddened hands, and tittered. She taught
big-jointed, bashful boys how to waltz, and she slapped a half-drunken
miner who squeezed her too tightly in a square dance. Slapped Tom also
when he came hurrying up to kill the miner, and told him to keep to
his own quarrels and save his powder for something worth while. She
didn't need help to step on a worm, she added, and took a youth by the
arm and led him off to dance. The miner, I may say to the curious, was
next seen in Hailey, heading south. He left a very good prospect up in
the hills and never went back to work out his assessments.

As you have probably guessed, Belle Lorrigan and the women of the
Black Rim country did not get on very well together. Black Rim women
thought that a woman who wore her hair in curls down her back--yellow
hair at that!--could not be any too good if the truth were known. They
declared to one another that a woman who did not talk about her past
life, who never so much as mentioned past illnesses, even, must have a
great deal to cover up. How did Tom Lorrigan get acquainted with her,
anyway? Through some marriage agency, they were willing to