Tom Lorrigan, riding home from Jumpoff after two days spent in Lava, pulled his horse down to a walk and then stopped him in the trail while he stared hard at the Whipple shack. Five horses walked uneasily around inside the corral, manes and tails whipping in the gale that blew cold from out the north. From the bent stovepipe of the shack a wisp of smoke was caught and bandied here and there above the pole-and-dirt roof. It seemed incredible to Tom that squatters could have come in and taken possession of the place in his short absence, but there was no other explanation that seemed at all reasonable. Squatters were not welcome on the Devil's Tooth range. Tom rode up to the shack, dismounted and let Coaley's reins drop to the ground. He hesitated a minute before the door, in doubt as to the necessity for knocking. Then his knuckles struck the loose panel twice, and he heard the sound of footsteps. Tom pulled his hat down tighter on his forehead and waited. When Mary Hope Douglas pulled open the door, astonishment held them both dumb. He had not seen the girl for more than a year,--he was not certain at first that it was she. But there was no mistaking those eyes of hers, Scotch blue and uncompromisingly direct in their gaze. Tom pulled loose and lifted the hat that he had just tightened, and as she backed from the doorway he entered the shack without quite knowing why he should do so. Comprehensively he surveyed the mean little room, bare of everything save three benches with crude shelves before them, a kitchen table and a yellow-painted chair with two-thirds of the paint worn off under the incessant scrubbing of mother Douglas. The three Swedes, their rusty overcoats buttoned to their necks, goggled at him round-eyed over the tops of their new spelling books, then ducked and grinned at one another. The four Boyle children, also bundled in wraps, exchanged sidelong glances and pulled themselves up alert and expectant in their seats. "School, eh?" Tom observed, turning as Mary Hope pushed the door shut against the wind that rattled the small shack and came toward him shivering and pulling her sweater collar closer about her neck. "When did this happen?" "When I started teaching here, Mr. Lorrigan." Then, mindful of her manners, she tempered the pertness with a smile. "And that was yesterday. Will you sit down?" "No, thanks--I just stopped to see who was livin' here, and--" He broke off to look up at the dirt roof. A clod the size of his fist had been loosened by the shaking of the wind, and plumped down in the middle of the teacher's desk. With the edge of his palm he swept clod and surrounding small particles of dirt into his hat crown, and carried them to the door. "There's an empty calf shed over at the ranch that would make a better schoolhouse than this," he observed. "It's got a shingle roof."