250
XXI LANCE TRAILS A MYSTERY 258
XXII LANCE RIDES ANOTHER TRAIL 272
XXIII LANCE PLAYS THE GAME 283
XXIV WHEN A LORRIGAN LOVES 297
XXV BELLE LORRIGAN WINS 312
XVI THE DOPE 323
XXVII HOW ONE TRAIL ENDED 336
XXVIII THE MAKING OF NEW TRAILS 345

RIM O' THE WORLD

CHAPTER ONE

THE RIM AND WHAT LAY BENEATH IT

Not all of the West is tamed and trained to run smoothly on pneumatic
tires and to talk more enthusiastically of the different "makes" of
cars than of bits and saddles. There are still wide stretches unknown
of tourists and movie men hunting locations for Western melodrama
where men live in the full flavor of adventure and romance and never
know it, because they have never known any other way to live.

In the Black Rim country there is such a place,--a wide, rough,
sage-grown expanse where cattle and horses and sheep scarce know the
look of barbed wire, and where brands are still the sole mark of
ownership. Set down between high mountain ranges, remote, sufficient
unto itself, rudely prosperous, the Black Rim country has yet to be
tamed.

Black Rim country is called bad. The men from Black Rim are eyed
askance when they burr their spur rowels down the plank sidewalks of
whatever little town they may choose to visit. A town dweller will not
quarrel with one of them. He will treat him politely, straightway seek
some acquaintance whom he wishes to impress, and jerk a thumb toward
the departing Black Rim man, and say importantly: "See that feller I
was talking with just now? That's one of them boys from the Black Rim.
Man, he'd kill yuh quick as look at yuh! He's bad. Yep. You want to
walk 'way round them birds from the Rim country. They're a hard-boiled
bunch up that way." And he would be as nearly correct in his estimate
as such men usually are.

Tom Lorrigan's father used to carry a rifle across his thighs when he
rode up the trail past Devil's Tooth Ridge to the benchland beyond,
where his cattle fed on the sweet bunch grass. He never would sit
close to a camp-fire at night save when his back was against a huge
boulder and he could keep the gla