there been a church in the Black Rim country you
would have seen Aleck Douglas drive early to its door every Sunday
morn, and sit straight-backed in a front pew and stare hard at the
minister through the longest of sermons,--providing, of course, that
church and minister were good Presbyterian.

He loved the dollars, how he did love his dollars! He loved his
cattle, because they represented dollars. He nursed them, dollars and
animals alike, and to lose one wrung the heart of him.

His wife was a meek little thing in his presence, as the wives of such
men as Aleck Douglas usually are. She also was rigidly honest,
dogmatically religious and frugal and hard-working and intolerant of
the sins of others.

Early she taught Mary Hope that beyond Devil's Tooth ridge lived those
wicked Lorrigans, whose souls were bartered to the devil and whose
evil ways were a stench in the nostrils of God. Mary Hope used to
wonder if God turned up his nose when there was a stench in his
nostrils,--for instance, when Belle Lorrigan hurtled past with her
bronks and her buckboard and her yellow hair flying. Mary Hope
wondered, too, what the Lorrigan boys had got from the devil in
exchange for their souls. Some magic, perhaps, that would protect them
from death and accident. Yet that seemed not true, for Al Lorrigan
broke his leg, one spring round-up. The devil ought to have saved his
horse from falling down with him, if the devil had Al Lorrigan's
soul.

That had happened when Mary Hope was twelve and Al Lorrigan was
eighteen. She heard her father tell her mother about it; and her
father had set his whiskered lip against his long, shaven upper lip
almost with a smack.

"They'll come to a bad end, all of them," he declared sententiously.
"Violent deaths had all the Lorrigans before them--all save Tom, and
the Lord but stays his hand for a time from that man. The wicked shall
flourish as a green bay tree."

"Father, how can a tree be green and then bay too!" Mary Hope
ventured to inquire. "Is it just a Bible tree, or does it flourish
somewhere really?"

Aleck Douglas hid his month behind his palm and coughed. "'Tis not bay
like a horse, child. 'Tis not the color that I'm speaking of."

"That painted Jezebel, Belle Lorrigan, drove past the house to-day
within a stone's throw," Mrs. Douglas informed her husband. "I wush,
Aleck, that ye would fence me a yard to keep the huzzy from driving
over my very doorstep. She had that youngest brat o