“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 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.