CHAPTER PAGE

I. In rude border-land                     1
II.  Desolation                              9
III.  The box R ranch                        23
IV.  Ben’s new home                         37
V. The EXOTICS                            44
VI.  The soil and the seed                  53
VII.  The sanity of the wild                 66
VIII.  The glitter of the unknown             74
IX.  A Riffle of prairie                    83
X. The dominant animal                    94
XI.  Love’s avowal                         106
XII.  A deferred reckoning                  117
XIII.  A shot in the dark                    134
XIV.  The inexorable trail                  148
XV.  In the grip of the law                164
XVI.  The quick and the dead                185
XVII.  Glitter and tinsel                    193
XVIII.  Painter and picture                   204
XIX.  A visitor from the plains             217
XX.  Club confidences                      230
XXI.  Love in conflict                      242
XXII.  Two friends have it out               258
XXIII.  The back-fire                         270
XXIV.  The upper and the nether millstones   287
XXV.  Of what avail?                        304
XXVI.  Love’s surrender                      318

* * * * *

BEN BLAIR

CHAPTER I

IN RUDE BORDER-LAND

Even in a community where unsavory reputations were the rule, Mick Kennedy’s saloon was of evil repute.  In a land new and wild, his establishment was the wildest, partook most of the unsubdued, unevolved character of its surroundings.  There, as irresistibly as gravitation calls the falling apple, came from afar and near—­mainly from afar—­the malcontent, the restless, the reckless, seeking—­instinctively gregarious—­the crowd, the excitement of the green-covered table, the temporary oblivion following the gulping of fiery red liquor.

Great splendid animals were the men who gathered there; hairy, powerful, strong-voiced from combat with prairie wind and frontier distance; devoid of a superfluous ounce of flesh, their trousers, uniformly baggy at the knees, bearing mute testimony to the many hours spent in the saddle; the bare unprotected skin of their hands and faces speaking likewise of constant contact with sun and storm.

By the broad glow of daylight the place was anything but inviting.  The heavy bar, made of cottonwood, had no more elegance than the rude sod shanty of the pioneer.  The worn round cloth-topped tables, imported at extravagant cost from the East, were covered with splashes of grease and liquor; and the few fly-marked pictures on the walls were coarsely suggestive.  Scattered among them haphazard, in one instance through a lithographic print, were round holes as large as