is
elbow and beyond. His lips were sore--so sore he could not even swear
with any comfort--and even the pulling together of his black eyebrows
hurt his puffed cheek. And he never had scrubbed a floor in his life,
and knew that he was going to hate the work even worse than he hated
the men who had made the scrubbing necessary.

While he went up the Slide trail he wished that he had never thought
of giving a dance. He wished he had gone down to Los Angeles for his
Easter holiday, as one of his pals had implored him to do. He wished
Mary Hope would quit teaching school; what did she want to stay in the
Black Rim for, anyway? Why didn't she get out where she could amount
to something?

If there were any caressing cadences in the voice of Lance Lorrigan,
any provocative tilt to his eyebrows, any tenderness in his smile,
anything enigmatical in his personality, none of these things were
apparent when he set the first bucket of water on the stove to heat.
He had added to his charms a broad streak of soot across his forehead
and a scratch on his neck, acquired while putting up the stovepipe. He
had set his lip to bleeding because he forgot that it was cut, and
drew it sharply between his teeth when the stovepipe fell apart just
when he was sure it was up to stay. He had invented two new
cuss-words. What he had not done was weaken in his determination to
make that small schoolhouse a pleasant surprise for Mary Hope.

He did the work thoroughly, though a woman might have pointed out wet
corners and certain muddy splashes on the wall. He lost all count of
the buckets of water that he carried from the spring, and it occurred
to him that Mary Hope would need a new broom, for the one Belle had
provided was worn down to a one-sided wisp that reminded him of the
beard of a billy goat. He used two cans of condensed lye and all of
the washing powder, and sneezed himself too weak too swear over the
fine cloud of acrid dust that filled his nostrils when he sprinkled
the powder on the floor. But the floor was clean when he finished, and
so was the platform outside.

Of Riley's underwear there was left the leg of one pair of drawers,
which Lance reserved for dusting the desks and the globe that had by
some miracle escaped. While the floor was drying he took out the
broken windowpane, discovered that the one from the chicken house was
too short, and cut his thumb while he chipped off a piece of glass
from the other to fill the space. He