More than anything else in her starved young life, Mary Hope wanted to
see the inside of the Lorrigan house. The painted Jezebel had a real
piano, and she could play it, people said. She played ungodly songs,
but Mary Hope had a venturesome spirit. She wanted to see an
instrument of the devil, hear the painted Jezebel play on it and sing
her ungodly songs.

One day when she had ridden to the top of the Devil's Tooth a great,
daring plan came to her. She wanted to ride down there--a half mile
down the bluff, a mile and a half by the road--but she would never
dare take that trail deliberately. Her father might hear of it, or her
mother. Nor could she ask the Lorrigans not to tell of her visit. But
if her horse ran away with her and took her down the ridge, she could
ask them to please not tell her father, because if he knew that her
horse ran away he would not let her ride again. It seemed to Mary Hope
that all the Lorrigans would sympathize with her dilemma. They would
probably ask her into the house. She would see the piano, and she
could ask the painted Jezebel to play on it. That would be only
polite. It did seem a shame that a girl thirteen years old, going on
fourteen, should never have seen or heard a piano. Mary Hope looked at
the sun and made breathless calculation. Having just arrived at the
Devil's Tooth, she had an hour to spend. And if she took the steep,
winding trail that the Lorrigans rode, the trail where old man
Lorrigan's horse had fallen down with him, she could be at the house
in a very few minutes.

"Ye look little enough like a runaway horse, ye wind-broken, spavined
old crow-bait, you!" she criticized Rab as he stood half asleep in the
sun. "I shall have to tell a lee about you, and for that God may
wither the tongue of me. I shall say that a rattler buzzed beneath
your nose--though perhaps I should say it was behind ye, Rab, else
they will wonder that ye didna run away home. If ye could but lift an
ear and roll the eye of you, wild-like, perhaps they will believe me.
But I dinna ken--I wouldna believe it mesel!"

Rab waggled an ear when she mounted, switched his tail pettishly when
she struck him with the quirt, reluctantly obeyed the rein, and set
his feet on the first steep pitch of the Devil's Tooth trail. Old as
he was, Rab had never gone down that trail and he chose his footing
circumspectly. It was no place for a runaway, as Mary Hope speedily
discovered when she had descended the first d