calm her father. Scotty, it would seem, wanted to
drive the Lorrigans off his land because they were thieves and
cutthroats and had come there to rob him boldly in the broad light of
day.

"Bat him on the head if you have to, Lance," Belle called, cold-eyed
but capable. "He'll get sunstroke out here in this heat. And if you
can get him into the house you had better tie him down till a doctor
comes." Then she left, with the pintos circling in a lope to get out
through the gate and into the trail.

The last she saw of them, Lance and Mary Hope were both struggling
with the old man, forcing him foot by foot to the house, where Mother
Douglas stood on the doorstep crying, with her apron to her face.

She had the tough little team in a white lather, with their stubborn
heads hanging level with their knees, when she stopped at the little
railroad station and sent a peremptory wire to the Lava doctor who was
most popular in the Black Rim. She waited until he arrived on the
train which he luckily had time to catch, and then, the pintos
having somewhat recovered under the solicitous rubbing-down of a
hollow-chested stableman, she hustled the doctor and his black case
into the buckboard and made the return drive in one hour and fifty
minutes, which was breaking even her own record, who was called the
hardest driver in the whole Rim country.

They found Lance with his coat off and the perspiration streaming
down his face, battling with Aleck Douglas who was raving still of the
Lorrigans and threatening to kill this one who would not leave him
alone to die in peace. Mary Hope and her mother were in the hot little
kitchen where the last of the sunlight streamed through the faded
green mosquito netting that sagged in and out as the breeze of sundown
pushed through lazily.

The Lava doctor did not say much. He quieted the raving with his
hypodermic needle, removed the amateurish bandage from the hand and
the arm, looked at the wound, applied a cooling lotion, and
dexterously wound on a fresh bandage. It seemed very little, Mary Hope
thought dully, for a doctor to come all the way from Lava to do.

He would stay all night, he said. And the Lorrigans went home silent,
depressed, even Belle finding nothing to say.

"I'll ride over in the morning and see how he is," Lance observed, as
the tired little team climbed the Devil's Tooth Ridge. "I'll have to
get the horse, anyway."

The next morning, when he arrived rather early, he