Ben Blair | Page 8

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 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