Without more words the foreman and his wife prepared for the night. The dishes were cleared away and piled in the lean-to. From either end of the room bunks, broad as beds, were let down from the wall, and the blankets that formed their linings were carefully smoothed out. Along the pole extending across the middle of the room, another set was drawn, dividing the room in two. Then the two disappeared with a simple "Good-night."
Rankin and the boy sat alone looking at each other. From across the blanket partition there came the muffled sound of movement, the impact of Graham's heavy boots, as they dropped to the floor, and then silence.
"Better go to bed, Ben," suggested Rankin, with a nod toward the bunk.
The boy at once went through the process of disrobing, and, crawling in between the blankets, pulled them up about his chin. But the blue eyes did not close. Instead, they rested steadily upon the man's face. Rankin returned the look, and then the stubby pipe left his mouth.
The boy hesitated. "Am I to--to stay with you?" he asked at last.
For an instant the questioner seemed satisfied; then the peculiar inquiring look returned.
The lad hesitated longer than before. Beneath the coverings his body moved restlessly.
"Yes, sir, I want to know why nobody would come to help my mamma if she'd sent for them. She said they wouldn't."
The pipe left Rankin's mouth, his great jaws closing with an audible click.
"You wish to know--what did you say, Ben?"
For a minute, and then another, Rankin said nothing; then he knocked the ashes from the bowl of his brier and laid it upon the table.
"Never mind now why they wouldn't, son." He arose heavily and drew off his coat. "You'll find out for yourself quickly enough--too quickly, my boy. Now go to sleep."
Some men acquire involuntary prominence by being democratic amid aristocratic surroundings. Others, on the contrary, but with the same result, continue to live the life to which they were born, even when placed amid surroundings that make their actions all but grotesque. An example of this latter class was Scotty Baker, whose ranch, as the wild goose flies, was thirteen miles west of the Box R.
Scotty was a very English Englishman, with an inborn love of fine horse-flesh and a guileless nature. Some years before he had fallen into the hands of a promoter, and had bartered a goodly proportion of his worldly belongings for a horse-ranch in Dakota, to be taken possession of immediately. Long indeed was the wail which went up from his home in Sussex when the fact was made known. Neighbors were fluent in denunciation, relatives insistent in expostulation; his wife, and in sympathy their baby daughter, copious in the argument of tears; but the die was irrevocably cast. Go he would,--not from voluntary stubbornness, but because he must.