ard cullender till the
weather warms up. And tell yore folks that Tom Lorrigan broke up yore
school for yuh, so they wouldn't have to break up a case of
pneumonia."

Mary Hope was framing a sentence of defiance when Coaley wheeled and
went back the way they had come, so swiftly that even with shouting
she could not have made herself heard in that whooping wind. She
pulled Rab to a willing stand and stared after Tom, hating him with
her whole heart. Hating him for his domination of her from the moment
he entered the schoolhouse where he had no business at all to be;
hating him because even his bullying had been oddly gentle; hating him
most of all because he was so like Lance--and because he was not
Lance, who was away out in California, going to college, and had never
written her one line in all the time he had been gone.

Had it been Lance who rode up to the schoolhouse door, she would have
known how to meet and master the situation. She would not have been
afraid of Lance, she told herself savagely. She wouldn't have been
afraid of Tom--but the whole Black Rim was afraid of Tom. Well, just
wait until she happened some day to meet Lance! At least she would
make him pay! For two years of silence and brooding over his hardihood
for taking her to task for her unfriendliness, and for this new and
unbearable outrage, she would make Lance Lorrigan pay, if the fates
ever let them meet again.

CHAPTER TEN

THE LORRIGAN WAY

The Lorrigan family was dining comfortably in the light of a huge lamp
with a rose-tinted shade decorated with an extremely sinuous wreath of
morning glories trailing around the lower rim. A clatter of pots and
pans told that Riley was washing his "cookin' dishes" in the lean-to
kitchen that had been added to the house as an afterthought, the fall
before. Belle had finished her dessert of hot mince pie, and leaned
back now with a freshly lighted cigarette poised in her fingers.

"What have you got up your sleeve, Tom?" she asked abruptly, handing
Duke her silver matchbox in response to a gestured request for it.

"My arm," Tom responded promptly, pushing back his wristband to give
her the proof.

"Aw, cut out the comedy, Tom. You've been doing something that you're
holding out on us. I know that look in your eye; I ought, having you
and Lance to watch. You're near enough to double in a lead and not
even the manager know which is who. You've been doing something, and
Lance knows what it is