Ben Blair Part 4

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 a.s.sembled 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 gra.s.s 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 pa.s.sive 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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.sociates, 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.

There was no road in the direction Rankin was travelling,--only the unbroken prairie sod, eaten close by the herds that grazed its every foot. Even under the direct sunlight the air was sharp. The regular breath of the mustangs shot out like puffs of steam from the exhaust of an engine, and the moisture frosted about their flanks and nostrils. But the big man on the seat did not notice temperature. He had produced a pipe from the depths beneath the wagon seat, and tobacco from a jar cunningly fitted into one corner of the box, both without moving from his place, the seat being hinged and divided in the centre to facilitate the operation. More a home to him than the ranch-house itself was that battered buckboard. Here, on an average, he spent eight hours out of the twenty-four, and that seat-box was a veritable storehouse of articles used in his daily life. As the jog-trot measured off the miles he replenished the pipe again and again, leaving behind him the odor of strong tobacco.

Not until he was within a mile of the "Big B" property, and a rise in the monotonous roll of the land brought him in range of vision, did Rankin show that he felt more than ordinary interest in his expedition; then, shading his eyes, he looked steadily ahead. The sod barn stood in its usual place; the corral, with its posts set close together, stretched by its side; but where the house had stood there could not be distinguished even a mound. The hand on the reins tightened meaningly, and in sympathy the mustangs moved ahead at a swifter pace, leaving behind a trail of tobacco-smoke denser than before.

When the little Benjamin Blair, fugitive, had literally taken to the earth, it was with definite knowledge of the territory he was entering.

He had often explored its depths with childish curiosity, to the distress of his mother and the disgust of the rightful owner, the mongrel dog. Retreating to the farther end of the cave, the instinct of self-preservation set hands and feet to work like the claws of a gopher, filling with loose dirt the narrow pa.s.sage through which he had entered.

Panting and perspiring with the effort, choked with the dust he raised, all but suffocated, he dug until his strength gave out; then, curling up in his narrow quarters, he lay listening. At first he heard nothing, not even a sound from the dog; and he wondered at the fact. He could not believe that Tom Blair would leave him in peace, and he breathlessly awaited the first tap of an instrument against his retreat. A minute pa.s.sed, lengthened to five--to ten--and with the quick impatience of childhood he started to learn the reason of the delay. His active little body revolved in its nest. In the darkness a wiry arm scratched at the recently erected barricade. A head with a tousled ma.s.s of hair poked its way into the opening, crowded forward a foot--two feet, then stopped, the whole body quivering. He had pa.s.sed the curve, and of a sudden it was as though he had opened the door of a furnace and gazed inside.

Instead of the familiar room, a great sheet of flame walled him in.

Instead of silence, a roar as of a hurricane was in his ears. Never in his life had he seen a great fire, but instantly he understood.

Instantly the instinctive animal terror of fire gripped him; he retreated to the very depths of the kennel, and burying his small head in his arms lay still. But not even then, child though he was, did he utter a cry. The endurance which had made Jennie Blair stare death impa.s.sively in the face was part and parcel of his nature.

For the s.p.a.ce of perhaps a minute Ben lay motionless. Louder than before came to his ears the roar of the fire. Occasionally a hot tongue of flame intruded mockingly into the mouth of his retreat. The confined air about him grew close, narcotic. He expected to die, and with the premonition of death an abnormal activity came to the child-brain.

Whatever knowledge he possessed of death was connected with his mother.

It was she who had given him his vague impression of another life. She herself, as she lay silent and unresponsive, had been the first concrete example of it. Inevitably thought of her came to him now,--practical, material thought, crowding from his brain the blind terror that had been its predecessor. Where was his mother now? He pictured again the furnace into which he had gazed from the mouth of the kennel. Though perhaps she would not feel it, she would be burned--burned to a crisp--destroyed like the fuel he had tossed into the makeshift stove! Instinctively he felt the sacrilege, and the desire to do something to prevent it.

Something--yes, but what? He was himself helpless; he must seek outside aid--but where? Suddenly there occurred to the child-mind a suggestion applicable to his difficulty, an adequate solution, for it involved everything he had learned to trust in life. He remembered a Being more powerful than man, more powerful than fire or cold,--a Being whom his mother had called G.o.d. Believing in Him, it was necessary only to ask for whatever one wished. For himself, even to save his life, he would not call upon this Being; but for his mamma! In childish faith he folded his hands and closed his eyes in the darkness.