approval of them all, her deliberate omission of the Lorrigans
from her list of invited guests, and toward that picture he felt a
keen resentment.

The whole thing maddened him. The more, because he was in a sense
responsible for it all. Just because he had not wanted that lonely
look to cloud the blue eyes of her, just because he had not wanted her
to be unhappy in her isolation, he had somehow brought to the surface
all those boorish qualities which he had begun to hate in his family.

"Cheap--cheap as dirt!" he gritted once, and he included them all in
the denunciation.

Furiously he wished that he had gone straight home, had not stopped in
Reno for the fight. But on the heels of that he knew that he would
have made the trouble worse, had he been at the Devil's Tooth on the
day of the Fourth. He would have quarreled with Tom, but there was
scant hope that he could have prevented the piano-moving. Tom
Lorrigan, as Lance had plenty of memories to testify, was not the man
whom one could prevent from doing what he set out to do.

At a little junction Lance changed to the branch line, still dwelling
fiercely upon his heritage, upon the lawless environment in which that
heritage of violence had flourished. He was in the mood to live up to
the Lorrigan reputation when he swung off the train at Jumpoff, but no
man crossed his trail.

So Lance carried with him the full measure of his rage against Mary
Hope and the Devil's Tooth, when he rode out of Jumpoff on a
lean-flanked black horse that rolled a wicked eye back at the rider
and carried his head high, looking for trouble along the trail.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

MARY HOPE HAS MUCH TROUBLE

Mary Hope, still taking her own point of view, had troubles in plenty
to bear. In her own way she was quite as furious as was Lance, felt
quite as injured as did the Devil's Tooth outfit, had all the
humiliation of knowing that the Black Rim talked of nothing but her
quarrel with the Lorrigans, and in addition had certain domestic
worries of her own.

Her mother harped continually on the piano quarrel and the indignity
of having been "slappit" by the painted Jezebel. But that was not what
worried Mary Hope most, for she was long accustomed to her mother's
habit of dwelling tearfully on some particular wrong that had been
done her. Mary Hope was worried over her father.

On the day of the Fourth he had stayed at home, tinkering up his
machinery, making ready for haying that w