Ben Blair. Will Lillibridge
this man, and, scarcely realizing the action, he rushed at him.
"She's dead and you killed her!" he screamed. "Mamma's dead, dead!" and the little doubled fists struck at the man's legs again and again.
Oblivious to the onslaught, Tom Blair strode over to the bunk.
"Jennie," he said, not unkindly, "Jennie, what's the matter?"
Again there was no response, and a shade of awe crept into the man's voice.
"Jennie! Jennie! Answer me!" A hand fell upon the woman's shoulder and shook it, first gently, then roughly. "Answer me, I say!"
With the motion, the head of the dead shifted upon the pillow and turned toward the man, and involuntarily he loosened his grasp. He had not eaten for twenty-four hours, and in sudden weakness he made his way to one of the rough chairs, and sat down, his face buried in his hands.
Behind him the boy Benjamin, his sudden hot passion over, stood watching intently,—his face almost uncanny in its lack of childishness.
For a time there was absolute silence, the hush of a death-chamber; then of a sudden the boy was conscious that the man was looking at him in a way he had never looked before. Deep down below our consciousness, far beneath the veneer of civilization, there is an instinct, relic of the vigilant savage days, that warns us of personal danger. By this instinct the lad now interpreted the other's gaze, and knew that it meant ill for him. For some reason which he could not understand, this man, this big animal, was his mortal enemy; and, in the manner of smaller animals, he began to consider an avenue of escape.
"Ben," spoke the man, "come here!"
Tom Blair was sober now, and wore a look of determination upon his face that few had ever seen there before; but to his surprise the boy did not respond. He waited a moment, and then said sharply:
"Ben, I'm speaking to you. Come here at once!"
For answer there was a tightening of the lad's blue eyes and an added watchfulness in the incongruously long childish figure; but that was all.
Another lagging minute passed, wherein the two regarded each other steadily. The man's eyes dropped first.
"You little devil!" he muttered, and the passion began showing in his voice. "I believe you knew what I was thinking all the time! Anyway, you'll know now. You said awhile ago that I was to blame for your mother being—as she is. You're liable to say that again." A horror greater than sudden passion was in the deliberate explanation and in the slow way he rose to his feet. "I'm going to fix you so you can't say it again, you old-man imp!"
Then a peculiar thing happened. Instead of running away, the boy took a step forward, and the man paused, scarcely believing his eyes. Another step forward, and yet another, came the diminutive figure, until almost within the aggressor's reach; then suddenly, quick as a cat, it veered, dropped upon all fours to the floor, and head first, scrambling like a rabbit, disappeared into the open mouth of the dog-kennel.
Too late the man saw the trick, and curses came to his lips,—curses fit for a fiend, fit for the irresponsible being he was. He himself had built that kennel. It extended in a curve eight feet into the solid sod foundation, and to get at the spot where the boy now lay he would have to tear down the house itself. The temper which had made the man what he now was, a drunkard and fugitive in a frontier country, took possession of him wholly, and with it came a madman's cunning; for at a sudden thought he stopped, and the cursing tongue was silent. Five minutes later he left the place, closing the door carefully behind him; but before that time a red jet of flame, like the ravenous tongue of a famished beast, was lapping at a hastily assembled pile of tinder-dry furniture in one corner of the shanty.
Chapter III.
The Box R Ranch
Mr. Rankin moved back from a well-discussed table, and, the room being conveniently small, tilted his chair back against the wall. The protesting creak of the ill-glued joints under the strain of his ponderous figure was a signal for all the diners, and five other men likewise drew away from around the board. Rankin extracted a match and a stout jack-knife from the miscellaneous collection of useful articles in his capacious pocket, carefully whittled the bit of wood to a point, and picked his teeth deliberately. The five "hands," sun-browned, unshaven, dissimilar in face as in dress, waited in expectation; but the housekeeper, a shapeless, stolid-looking woman, wife of the foreman, Graham, went methodically about the work of clearing the table. Rankin watched her a moment indifferently; then without turning his head, his eyes shifted in their narrow slits of sockets until they rested upon one of the cowboys.
"What time was it you saw that smoke, Grannis?" he asked.
The man addressed paused in the operation of rolling a cigarette.
"'Bout an hour ago, I should say. I was just thinking of coming in to dinner."
The lids met over Rankin's eyes, then the narrow slit opened.
"It was in the no'thwest you say, and seemed to be quite a way off?"
Grannis nodded.
"Yes; I couldn't make out any fire, only the smoke, and that didn't last long. I thought at first maybe it was a prairie fire, and started to see; but it was getting thinner before I'd gone a mile, so I turned round and by the time I got back to the corral there wasn't nothing at all to see."
Two of the other hands solemnly exchanged a wink.
"Think you must have eaten too many of Ma Graham's pancakes this morning, and had a blur over your eyes," commented one, slyly. "Prairie fires don't stop that sudden when the grass is like it is now."
The portly housewife paused in her work to cast a look of scorn upon the speaker, but Grannis rushed into the breach.
"Don't you believe it. There was a fire all right. Somebody stopped it, or it stopped itself, that's all."
Tilting his chair forward with an effort, Rankin got to his feet, and, as usual, his action brought the discussion to an end. The woman returned to her work; the men put on hats and coats preparatory to going out of doors. Only the proprietor stood passive a moment absently drawing down his vest over his portly figure.
"Graham," he said at last, "hitch the mustangs to the light wagon."
"All right."
"And, Graham—"
The man addressed paused.
"Throw in a couple of extra blankets."
"All right."
Out of doors the men took up the conversation where they had left off.
"You better begin to hope the old man finds something that's been afire up there, Grannis," said the joker of the house. "If he don't, you've cooked your goose proper."
Grannis was a new-comer, and looked his surprise.
"Why so?" he asked.
"You'll find out why," retorted the other. "Fire here's 'most as uncommon as rain, and the boss don't like them smoky jokes."
"But I saw smoke, I tell you," reiterated Grannis, defensively; "smoke, dead sure!"
"All right, if you're certain sure."
"Marcom knows what he's talking about, Grannis," said Graham. "He tried to ginger things up a bit when he was new here, like you are; found a litter of coyotes one September—thought they were timber wolves, I guess, and braced up with his story to the old man." The speaker paused with a reflective grin.
"Well, what happened?" asked Grannis.
"What happened? The boss sent me dusting about forty miles to get some hounds. Nearly spoiled a good team to get back inside sixteen hours, and—they found out Bill here in the next thirty minutes, that was all!" Once more the story ended in a grin.
"What'd