"Dad, I think you're showin' yourself a real sport," Lance laughed. "We-ell, if you're game to buy a piano, I'm game to buy books. We staked Black Rim to a school, so we'll do the job right. And by the way, Belle, if you're going to get me to Jumpoff in time for that evening train, don't you think it's about time you started?" That is how it happened that Mary Hope walked into the schoolhouse one Monday and found a very shiny new piano standing across one corner of the room where the light was best. On the top was a pile of music. In another corner of the room stood a bookcase and fifty volumes; she counted them in her prim, frugal way that she had learned from her mother. They were books evidently approved by some Board of Education for school libraries, and did not interest her very much. Not when a piano stood in the other corner. She was early, so she opened it and ran her fingers over the keys. She knew well enough who had brought it there, and her mouth was pressed into a straight line, her eyes were troubled. The Lorrigans--always the Lorrigans! Why did they do these things when no one expected goodness or generosity from them? Why had they built the schoolhouse--and then given a dance where every one got drunk and the whole thing ended in a fight? Every one said it was the Lorrigans who had brought the whisky. Some one told her they had a five-gallon keg of it in the shed behind the schoolhouse, and she thought it must be true, the way all the men had acted. And why had they burned the Whipple shack and all the school books, so that she could not have school until more books were bought?--an expense which the Swedes, at least, could ill afford. Why had Lance taken her to Jumpoff, away from the fighting, and then gone straight to the saloon and gotten so drunk that he fought every one in town before he left in the morning? Why had he never come near her again? And now that he was back in California, why did he ignore her completely, and never send so much as a picture postal to show that he gave her a thought now and then? Mary Hope would not play the piano that day. She was more stern than usual with her pupils, and would not so much as answer them when they asked her where the piano and all the books had come from. Which was a foolish thing to do, since the four Boyle children were keen enough to guess, and sure to carry the news home, and to embellish the truth in true range-gossip style. Mary Hope fully decided that she would have the piano hauled back to the Lorrigans. Later, she was distressed because she could think of no one who would take the time or the trouble to perform the duty, and a piano she had to admit is not a thing you can tie behind the cantle of your saddle, or carry under your arm. The books were a different matter. They were for the school. But the piano--well, the piano was for Mary Hope Douglas, and Mary Hope Douglas did not mean to be patronized in this manner by Lance Lorrigan or any of his kin.