re of the fire from his eyes. Indians
he killed as he killed rattlers, on the range theory that if they did
not get him then they might some other time, and that every dead
Indian counted one less to beware of. Tom Lorrigan's father was called
a bad man even in Black Rim country,--which meant a good deal.
Hard-bitted men of the Black Rim chose their words wisely when they
spoke to Tom's father; chose wisely their words when they spoke of
him, unless they had full faith in the listener's loyalty and
discretion.

Tom Lorrigan's father lived to be sixty,--chiefly because he was
"quick on the draw" and because he never missed anything that he shot
at. But at sixty, when he was still hated by many, loved by a very few
and feared by every one, he died,--crushed under his horse when it
fell on the Devil's Tooth trail one sleety day in midwinter.

Young Tom Lorrigan learned to shoot when he learned to ride, and he
was riding pitching horses before he could be certain which was p and
which was q in his dad's old spelling book. Which does not by any
means prove that young Tom was an ignoramus. Tom once had three
brothers, but these were somehow unlucky and one by one they dropped
out of the game of life. The oldest brother died with the smell of
burnt black powder in his nostrils, and Tom's father stood over the
body and called his dead son a fool for wearing his gun so it could
stick in the holster. "If I ever ketch yuh doin' a trick like that,
I'll thrash yuh till yuh can't stand," he admonished young Tom
sternly. Young Tom always remembered how his dad had looked when
brother Bill was shot.

The second brother was overtaken while riding a big sorrel horse that
did not happen to carry the Lorrigan brand. So he too died with the
smell of powder smoke in his nostrils, taking three of his pursuers
with him into the Dark Land. Him Tom's father cursed for being
caught.

So young Tom learned early two lessons of the Black Rim book of
wisdom: His gun must never stick in the holster; he must never get
caught by the law.

He was twenty when Brother Jim was drowned while trying to swim his
horse across the Snake in flood time on a dare. Young Tom raced along
the bank, frantically trying to cast his forty-foot rope across sixty
feet of rushing current that rolled Jim and his horse along to the
boil of rapids below. Young Tom was a long, long while forgetting the
terror in Jim's eyes, the helplessness of Jim's gloved hand which he