Ben Blair

Last of all, Benjamin Blair. Precisely as the boy had given promise, the youth had developed. He was now mature in size, in poise, in action. Long of leg, long of arm, long of face, he stood a half head above Rankin, who had been the tallest man upon the place. Yet he was not awkward. Physically he was of the type, but magnified, to which all cowboys belong; and no one would ever call him awkward or uncouth.

There had been less change upon the Baker ranch. Scotty was not an expansionist. Scarcely a score more horses grazed in his paddock than of old. The barn, though often repaired, was still of sod and thatch. The house contained the original number of rooms. The experiment with trees had never been repeated. If possible, the man himself had altered even less than his surroundings. Scrupulously fresh-shaven each day, fortified beyond the compound lenses of his spectacles, a stranger would have guessed him anywhere from thirty-five to fifty.

Time had not dealt as kindly with Mrs. Baker. She seemed to have aged enough for both herself and her husband. Notwithstanding the fact that for the first eight years of the twelve, the family had spent half their time in the East, she had grown careless of her appearance. True to his instincts, Scotty still dressed for dinner in his antiquated evening clothes; but pathetic as was the example, it had long ceased to stimulate her. The last four years had been dead years with Mollie Baker. The future held but one promise. She referred to it daily, almost hourly; and at such times only would a trace of youth and beauty return to the one-time winsome face. She looked forward and dreamed of an event after which she would do certain things upon which she had set her heart; when, as she said, she would begin to live. It seemed to Scotty ghastly to speak about that event, for it was the death of his father.

The last member of the family had developed with the child's promise, and at seventeen Florence was beautiful; not with a conventional prettiness, but with a vital feminine attraction. All that the mother had been, with her dark, oval face, her mass of walnut-brown hair, her great dark eyes, her uptilted chin, the daughter was now; but with added health and an augmented femininity that the mother had never known. Moreover, she had an independence, a dominance, born perhaps of the wild prairie influence, that at times made her parents almost gasp. Except in the minute details of their daily existence, which habit had made unchangeable, she ruled them absolutely. Even Rankin had become a secondary factor. Scotty probably would have denied the assertion emphatically, yet at the bottom of his consciousness he realized that had she told him to sell everything he possessed for what he could get and return to old Sussex he would have complied. Considering Mollie's daily plaint, it was a constant source of wonder to him that the girl did not do this; but she seemed wholly satisfied with things as they were. For exercise and excitement she rode almost every horse upon the place--rode astride like a man. For amusement she read everything she could lay hands upon, both from the modest Baker library and from the larger and more creditable collection which Rankin had imported from the East. This was the first real library that had ever entered the State, and, subject for speculation, it had uniformly the front fly-leaves remaining as mere stubs, as though the pages had been torn out by a hurried hand. What name was it that had been in those hundreds of volumes? For what reason had it been so carefully removed? The girl had often speculated thereon, and fitted theory after theory; but never yet, wilful as she was, had she had the temerity to ask the only person who could have given explanation,--Rankin himself.