At the corral, that time-honored conference ground of all true range men, the three Lorrigans leaned their backs against the rails and talked things over in true range style: laconic phrases that stated their meaning without frills or mental reservations, and silences that carried their thoughts forward to the next utterance.

“Al can take the outfit and drift,” said Tom, as though he were discussing some detail of the round-up. “He knows where––and they can scatter, I’ll give ’em a horse apiece as a––a kinda bonus. I’ll have to stay, looks like. Fall round-up’s coming on.”

“Wel-ll,” said Lance, throwing an arm over a rail and drumming with his fingers, “I was raised on round-ups. I don’t suppose I’ve forgotten all about it. You might turn the management over to me for a year or so, and take a trip. Belle needs it, dad. I think I could keep things riding along, all right.”

“Sounds kinda like you had that idea for a 346 joker up your sleeve,” Al observed meaningly. “Are you plumb sure of that dope, Lance?”

Lance removed his arm from the corral rail, and reached into his pocket. “I didn’t think you had it in you, Al, to be that big a fool. But since you’ve said it, here’s the dope. Take it, dad. I said I’d turn it in, but I didn’t say who’d receive it. The stock detective that’s been camping on your trail for the last few weeks was killed on the Lava Beds to-day. I found him. He’s at Conley’s, now, waiting for the coroner. You might ride over, Al, and see for yourself. And on the way, you might ride up the Slide trail and take a look around the Tooth. You’ll see signs where he’s watched the ranch from up there. And you can go on down and find where he camped several times at Cottonwood Spring.

“The coroner won’t get on the job before to-morrow or next day, and it will take a little time, I suppose, for Brownlee’s employers to wake up and wonder what became of the evidence he was sent to collect. You’ll have, perhaps, a week in which to make your getaway. They’re waiting outside the Rim for the evidence this Burt Brownlee was collecting, so that they could make one big clean-up.

“I’m not setting myself up as a judge, or anything like that––but––well, the going’s good, right now. It may not be so good if you wait.”

He lighted a match and held it up so that Tom 347 could glance at the maps and skim the contents of the memorandum book. By the blaze of the match Lance’s face still looked rather hard, determined to see the thing through.

“You’d better burn that stuff, dad. And in the morning––how would it be if we went to town and got the legal end of my new job straightened out! I’ll want a Power of Attorney. You may be gone for some time. I suppose you know,” he added, “that Mary Hope and I are going to be married. So you and Belle can take a trip somewhere. They say it’s worth while going down to the big cattle country in the Argentine––South America, you know.”

Tom did not reply. He had lighted a second match and was studying attentively the data in Burt Brownlee’s book. The third match told him enough to convince him. He gave a snort when darkness enveloped them again.

“I sharpened my pencil pretty darn fine when I made out my bill against the Black Rim a few years ago––and by the humpin’ hyenas, these figures here kinda go to show I overcharged ’em. Some. Not so damn much, either, if you look at my side. Better get up the horses, Al, and you’n the boys take the trail. The kid’s right. The goin’s dern good, right now. Better’n what it will be.”

In the scuffed sand before the corral gate Tom made a small fire, with a few crumpled papers and 348 one small book, which he tore apart and fed, leaf by leaf, to the flames. The light showed him grimly smiling, when he tilted his head and looked up at Lance who watched him.

“So you’n the Douglas kid is figuring on getting hitched! Well, don’t ever try to eye her down like you done to yore dad. She’ll brain yuh, likely––if you wait long enough for her to make up her mind.”

Lance laughed. Up at the house Belle heard him and caught her breath. She stared hard at the three forms silhouetted like Rembrandt figures around the little fire, started toward them and stopped. She was a wise woman, was Belle. Some things a woman may know––and hide the knowledge deep in her heart, and in the hiding help her mate.

Black Rim folk, who always knew so much of their neighbors’ affairs, once more talked and chortled and surmised, and never came within a mile of the truth. The young college rooster had come home to the Devil’s Tooth, they gossiped, and had a row with Al; so Al left home, and Duke too. The Lorrigans always had been hard to get along with, but that Lance––he sure must be a caution to cats, the way he’d cleaned off the ranch.

Marrying the Douglas girl, and taking that paralyzed old lady right to the ranch, had probably had a lot to do with it. Lance might be willing to forget that old trouble with Scotty, but the rest of the 349 Lorrigans sure never would. And it was queer, too, how all that rustling talk petered out. Mebby there hadn’t been much in it, after all.

Not even Mary Hope guessed why she and Lance were left so completely in charge of the ranch. Sometimes, when the invalid was captious and showed too plainly that she preferred Belle’s playing and singing to the musical efforts of her own daughter, and scrawled impatient questions about Belle’s return, Mary Hope would wonder if Tom Lorrigan really hated her, and if her coming had practically driven him out of his own home. She would cry a little, then,––unless Lance happened to be somewhere near. If he were, there was no crying for Mary Hope.

“He’s a good son,” Mother Douglas once wrote, “I wish Aleck was alive, to see how the Lord has changed the Lorrigans.”

THE END