"There are just two things to do," he said, laying the saddle at her feet. "You may ride that livery horse back home, and I'll come along to-morrow and pick him up and take him in with me to Jumpoff; or you can let me go down to the ranch and bring up a gentle horse, and you can ride that home. I can get him when I come out to-morrow with my traps. I advise you to take the gentle horse from the ranch, after the shake-up you've had. This town horse is not easy gaited, by any means. Your horse I'll manage to get down to the ranch and do what I can for him. It's his shoulder, I think, from the way he acts. He may be all right after a while." Mary Hope looked distressfully at Jamie, standing dejected where Lance had left him, his head sagging, every line of him showing how sick of life he was. She glanced swiftly up at Lance, bent her head suddenly and pressed the tips of her fingers along her cheek bones, wiping away tears that came brimming over her eyelids. "You'd better let me bring up a horse and take you home," Lance urged, the caressing note creeping into his voice. "Oh, no! I can't! I--what do I care how I get home? But if your father won't take the money--You don't _know!_ The whole Rim talks and gossips until I wish I were dead! And I can't go on using the schoolhouse--and Tom Lorrigan says if I don't--" She was crying at last, silently, miserably, her face hidden behind her hands. "He'll take the money." Lance, after an indeterminate minute while he watched her, laid his hand lightly on her shoulder. "I'll see that dad takes it. And I'll give you a bill of sale that ought to shut the Black Rim mouths. I'm a Lorrigan and I'm not going to apologize for the blood that's in me, but I want you to know that if I had been home on the night of the Fourth the Lorrigans wouldn't have done the rotten cheap thing they did." Mary Hope heard him tearing a leaf out of his memorandum book, looked up at him while he wrote rapidly. Without any comment whatever he gave her the paper, went up to where the hired horse stood, and coaxed it down through the Slide. Quickly, with the deftness that told of lifelong intimacy with horses and saddles, he set her own saddle on the hired horse, while Mary Hope read the terse bill of sale that set forth the legal "Ten dollars and other valuable considerations," and was signed "Thomas Lorrigan, per L. M. Lorrigan." It all seemed very businesslike, and heartened her so much that she was willing to be nice to Lance Lorrigan. But Lance remained strictly neutral. "I'll lead him up the Slide for you," he said unemotionally when the horse was ready. "After he's over that, I think you'll be all right; you're a good rider. And you need not feel under any obligations then to the Lorrigans. I was practically through with the horse, anyway, and it will be no trouble at all to drive by your place and get him to-morrow."