or break every bone in their bodies. I’m willing to get behind any horse you’ve got; but to get on their backs––excuse me!” She limped painfully to the house with her yellow hair blowing around her shoulders and across her lips that would smile in spite of her mishap.
After that Belle drove the “he-devils” and others quite as devilish, and risked her bones with perfect equanimity. She drove horses that had to be thrown before the collar could be buckled on, and “forefooted” before they would submit to the harness. Indeed, Belle seemed to prefer that kind of horses. She wanted a team that could keep pace with Tom,––and she had it. Her buckboard lasted a year, with luck. She strewed the Devil’s Tooth range with wheels and doubletrees and splinters and hairpins, and scattered sunshiny smiles and cuss-words and snatches of song wherever she went. And since she went wherever eight bronco feet could take her, Black Rim country came to know Belle Lorrigan as it knew Tom. Came to fear Belle Lorrigan’s wrath, which bettered 19 the lightning for searing, lashing sword-thrusts of venom; came to know her songs well enough to hum snatches of them; came to laugh when she laughed,––and to hope that the next laugh would not be aimed at them; came to recognize her as a better shot than any one save Tom, who taught her.
At the country dances on the various ranches, Belle never missed quadrille, two-step, waltz or schottische, and she danced by herself or sang songs during the intervals, while the women of the range sat stiffly along the walls on benches, stared at Belle and whispered behind their weather-reddened hands, and tittered. She taught big-jointed, bashful boys how to waltz, and she slapped a half-drunken miner who squeezed her too tightly in a square dance. Slapped Tom also when he came hurrying up to kill the miner, and told him to keep to his own quarrels and save his powder for something worth while. She didn’t need help to step on a worm, she added, and took a youth by the arm and led him off to dance. The miner, I may say to the curious, was next seen in Hailey, heading south. He left a very good prospect up in the hills and never went back to work out his assessments.
As you have probably guessed, Belle Lorrigan and the women of the Black Rim country did not get on very well together. Black Rim women thought that a woman who wore her hair in curls 20 down her back––yellow hair at that!––could not be any too good if the truth were known. They declared to one another that a woman who did not talk about her past life, who never so much as mentioned past illnesses, even, must have a great deal to cover up. How did Tom Lorrigan get acquainted with her, anyway? Through some marriage agency, they were willing to bet. And how did a decent woman happen to have all the fancy clothes which Belle Lorrigan possessed? And jewelry enough to stock a store with! Three rings on one finger at one time and the same time was going it pretty strong, in the opinion of the Black Rim ladies. They also believed that she used paint and powder, which damned her beyond all hope of redemption.
Poor Belle Lorrigan (Black Rim country spoke of her always as Belle Lorrigan without in the least understanding why she remained an individual personality to them instead of becoming merely Mrs. Lorrigan––Mrs. Tom, even, since many of the Black Rim women were designated by the nicknames of their husbands)! She would have been glad to be friendly, simply because friendliness was in her blood and would out. She would have been glad to receive them at the Devil’s Tooth ranch for one of those all-day visits which were the custom of the country. But for a long while they did not come. Sometimes she would meet a family bundled to the eyes against the chill 21 winds of Idaho, bumping over the rough roads on their way to visit some near neighbor who lived only ten or fifteen miles away. She would flash them a smile while she pulled up her bronco team out of the trail to make a generous room for their passing, and she would shout something pleasant as they went by. And after they had gone on she would shrug her fine, broad shoulders and call them cats, going out to a scratching, with all the kittens mewing along. She would flap a hand––providing the bronco team left her a hand free to flap––and shake her head, and say, “Not for mine, thank you!” And would be hurt down deep in her heart where it did not show, because they never stopped at her door.
But when the boys began to come, then came the neighbor women, making formal two-hour calls upon the new mother, eager to see and to hear and to go away and compare notes afterward. They talked much of the names that Belle Lorrigan called her children. The first one she named for the hero in her first play; wanting, I suppose, a souvenir of the time when she was fifteen and had her first speaking part on the stage. She called her first-born Algernon Adelbert. Algernon Adelbert Lorrigan, grandson of old Tom Lorrigan! Think of that!
But Algernon Adelbert no sooner outgrew his cradle than he was known to all and sundry as Al Lorrigan, so that no harm was done him in 22 giving him such a name. He grew up lusty and arrogant, a good deal of a bully, six feet tall, a good rider––though, not so good a rider as his dad––a good shot, willing to help gather that million together on the chance that he might have a share in the spending.
Al was a youth who hunted trouble for the thrill of meeting it more than half-way, but since Tom Lorrigan happened to be his father, Al rode off the Devil’s Tooth ranch before he became the rampant young trouble-hunter. Belle had some anxious hours during the time Al was gone, but she never once betrayed her anxiety; which is doing pretty well for a mother.
The second was Marmaduke LeRoy, and the third and last she recklessly christened Lancelot Montgomery. Marmaduke never learned to spell his name correctly, and sometimes complained that Belle had gone and named him after a mess of preserves,––meaning marmalade, I suppose. But as he grew older he forgot his grievance. Belle was the only person who could remember offhand his full name, and she never called him by it except when she was very angry; when she usually attached so many adjectives that Marmaduke LeRoy was quite submerged. Commonly he was called Duke, which did well enough.
Tom used to study Duke through half-closed lids and the smoke of a cigarette, and wonder which side of the family had a yellow streak; not 23 the Lorrigan side, so far as Tom could judge. Nor the Delavan side either, if Belle lived true to type. To be sure, Belle refused to ride a horse; but then Belle was a woman and women had whims. There was no yellow about Belle, except her hair which was pure golden.
Duke would invariably lie to dodge punishment. According to his own theory, Duke was always blameless, always the injured party, the boy who does right and never is given credit for his virtues. Even Belle, who would fight for her boys as a tigress fights for its young, looked askance at Duke while she tried, motherlike, to cover his faults from the keen eyes of Tom.
“I’d just like to know how you come by it,” she once exclaimed exasperatedly, when Duke was ten and Lance eight. “I’d sure chop one limb off the family tree, if I knew which one gave you the gall to lie to me and Tom. Duke, for heaven’s sake take a licking just once without trying to lay the blame on Al or Lance––and see how proud you’ll feel afterwards!”
“Aw––lickins hur-rt!” Duke had protested, rubbing the arm Belle had gripped none too gently, and sidled away from her.
With her hands to her hips––gracefully posed there, as became an actress––Belle regarded him fixedly. “My Gawd!” she whispered, owning defeat before that invulnerable selfishness of Duke’s.
Her tone stung even his young crocodile-hided 24 sensibility. “You’re always blamin’ me. You’n Tom think I do everything mean on this ranch! You think Lance is an angel! He’s your pet and you let him pick on me an’ you never say a word. Lance can do any darn thing he pleases, an’ so can Al. I’m goin’ to run away, first thing you know. You can have your sweet little angel pet of a doggone ole cowardly-calf Lance!” Then he whined, “Aw––you lemme go! I never done it, I tell yuh! It was Lance!”
Belle gritted her teeth while she shook him. “You yellow-hearted little whelp. I saw you chasing that colt around the corral till he broke the fence! If Tom was to know about it he’d lick you good! Duke, why can’t you be a man and take the blame yourself, just once? I’d
