The Box R Ranch had evolved along with the others, and always well in advance.  The house now boasted six rooms; the barn and stock-sheds had at a distance the appearance of a town in themselves; the collection of haying implements—­mowers, loaders, stackers—­was almost complete enough to stock a jobbing house.  The herd itself had augmented, despite its annual reduction, until one artesian well was inadequate to supply water; and fifteen miles north, at the extreme limit of his home-ranch, Rankin had sunk another well, making a sort of sub-station of that point.  From it an observer with good eyes could see the outlines of the modern Big B Ranch property, built on the old site, and ostensibly operated by a long-legged Yankee, Rob Hoyt by name, but in reality owned, as had been the remnant of stock Tom Blair left behind him, by saloon-keeper Mick Kennedy.

The ranch force had changed very little.  Rankin, stouter by a quarter-hundred weight, shaggier of eyebrows and with an accentuated droop in the upper eyelids, and if possible an increased taciturnity, still lived his daytime life mainly on wheels.  The old buckboard had finally succumbed, but its counterpart, mud-spattered and weather-bleached, had taken its place.  In the kitchen, Ma Graham still presided, her accumulated avoirdupois seeming to have been gathered at the expense of her lord, who in equal ratio thinner and more weazened, danced attendance as of old.  Only one of the former cowboys now remained.  That one, strange to say, was Grannis, the “man from nowhere,” who had apparently taken root at last.  Regularly on the last day of each month he drew his pay, and without a word of explanation or comment disappeared upon the back of a cow-pony, to reappear, perhaps in ten hours, perhaps in sixty, dead broke, with a thirst seemingly unappeasable, but quite non-committal concerning his experience, apparently satisfied and ready to take up the dull routine of his life again.

Last of all, Benjamin Blair.  Precisely as the boy had given promise, the youth had developed.  He was now mature in size, in poise, in action.  Long of leg, long of arm, long of face, he stood a half head above Rankin, who had been the tallest man upon the place.  Yet he was not awkward.  Physically he was of the type, but magnified, to which all cowboys belong; and no one would ever call him awkward or uncouth.

There had been less change upon the Baker ranch.  Scotty was not an expansionist.  Scarcely a score more horses grazed in his paddock than of old.  The barn, though often repaired, was still of sod and thatch.  The house contained the original number of rooms.  The experiment with trees had never been repeated.  If possible, the man himself had altered even less than his surroundings.  Scrupulously fresh-shaven each day, fortified beyond the compound lenses of his spectacles, a stranger would have guessed him anywhere from thirty-five to fifty.