Excerpt
CHAPTER ONE THE RIM AND WHAT LAY BENEATH IT
Not all of the West is tamed and trained to run smoothly on pneumatic tires and to talk more enthusiastically of the different “makes” of cars than of bits and saddles. There are still wide stretches unknown of tourists and movie men hunting locations for Western melodrama where men live in the full flavor of adventure and romance and never know it, because they have never known any other way to live.
In the Black Rim country there is such a place,––a wide, rough, sage-grown expanse where cattle and horses and sheep scarce know the look of barbed wire, and where brands are still the sole mark of ownership. Set down between high mountain ranges, remote, sufficient unto itself, rudely prosperous, the Black Rim country has yet to be tamed.
Black Rim country is called bad. The men from Black Rim are eyed askance when they burr their spur rowels down the plank sidewalks of whatever little town they may choose to visit. A town dweller will not quarrel with one of them. He will treat him politely, straightway seek some acquaintance whom he wishes to impress, and jerk a thumb toward the departing Black Rim man, and say importantly: “See that feller I was talking with just now? That’s one of them boys from the Black Rim. Man, he’d kill yuh quick as look at yuh! He’s bad. Yep. You want to walk ’way round them birds from the Rim country. They’re a hard-boiled bunch up that way.” And he would be as nearly correct in his estimate as such men usually are.
Tom Lorrigan’s father used to carry a rifle across his thighs when he rode up the trail past Devil’s Tooth Ridge to the benchland beyond, where his cattle fed on the sweet bunch grass. He never would sit close to a camp-fire at night save when his back was against a huge boulder and he could keep the glare of the fire from his eyes. Indians he killed as he killed rattlers, on the range theory that if they did not get him then they might some other time, and that every dead Indian counted one less to beware of. Tom Lorrigan’s father was called a bad man even in Black Rim country,––which meant a good deal. Hard-bitted men of the Black Rim chose their words wisely when they spoke to Tom’s father; chose wisely their words when they spoke of him, unless they had full faith in the listener’s loyalty and discretion.
Tom Lorrigan’s father lived to be sixty,––chiefly because he was “quick on the draw” and because he never missed anything that he shot at. But at sixty, when he was still hated by many, loved by a very few and feared by every one, he died,––crushed under his horse when it fell on the Devil’s Tooth trail one sleety day in midwinter.
Young Tom Lorrigan learned to shoot when he learned to ride, and he was riding pitching horses before he could be certain which was p and which was q in his dad’s old spelling book. Which does not by any means prove that young Tom was an ignoramus. Tom once had three brothers, but these were somehow unlucky and one by one they dropped out of the game of life....