Ben Blair

"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 Rankin say?" asked Grannis, with interest.

"How about it, Bill?" suggested Graham.

The big cowboy looked a trifle foolish.

"Oh, he didn't say much; 'tain't his way. He just remarked, sort of off-hand, that as far as I was concerned the next year had only about four pay-months in it. That was all."

* * * * * Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing at once. This was the motto of the master of the Box R Ranch. In ten minutes' time Rankin's big shapeless figure, seated in the old buckboard, was moving northwest at the steady jog-trot typical of prairie travel, and which as the hours pass by annihilates distance surprisingly. Simply a fat, an abnormally fat, man, the casual observer would have said. It remained for those who came in actual contact with him to learn the force beneath the forbidding exterior,--the relentless bull-dog energy that had made him dictator of the great ranch, and kept subordinate the restless, roving, dissolute men-of-fortune he employed,--the deliberate and impartial judgment which had made his word as near law as it was possible for any mandate to be among the motley inhabitants within a radius of fifty miles. Had Rankin chosen he could have attained honor, position, power in his native Eastern home. No barrier built of convention or of conservatism could have withstood him. Society reserves her prizes largely for the man of initiative; and, uncomely block as he was, Rankin was of the true type. But for some reason, a reason known to none of his associates, he had chosen to come to the West. Some consideration or other had caused him to stop at his present abode, and had made him apparently a fixture in the midst of this unconquered country.