“A little drop to take along with me,” he whined.

Kennedy selected a pint bottle, filled it from the big flask, and silently proffered it over the board.

Blair took the extended favor, glanced once more about the room, and stumbled toward the exit.  Mick busied himself wiping the soiled bar with a towel, if possible, even more filthy.  At the threshold, his hand upon the knob, Blair paused, stiffened, grew livid in the face.

“May Satan blister your scoundrel souls, all of you!” he cursed.

Not a man within sound of his voice gave sign that he had heard, as the opened door returned to its casing with a crash.

CHAPTER II

DESOLATION

Ten miles out on the prairies,—­not lands plane as a table, as they are usually pictured, but rolling like the sea with waves of tremendous amplitude—­stood a rough shack, called by courtesy a house.  Like many a more pretentious domicile, it was of composite construction, although consisting of but one room.  At the base was the native prairie sod, piled tier upon tier.  Above this the superstructure, like the bar of Mick Kennedy’s resort, was of warping cottonwood.  Built out from this single room and forming a part of it was what the designer had called a woodshed; but as no tree the size of a man’s wrist was within ten miles, or a railroad within fifty, the term was manifestly a misnomer.  Wood in any form it had never contained; instead, it was filled with that providential fuel of the frontiersman, found superabundantly upon the ranges,—­buffalo chips.

From the main room there was another and much smaller opening into the sod foundation, and below it,—­a dog-kennel.  Slightly apart from the shack stood a twin structure even less assuming, its walls and roof being wholly built of sod.  It was likewise without partition, and was used as a barn.  Hard by was a corral covering perhaps two acres, enclosed with a barbed-wire fence.  These three excrescences upon the face of nature comprised the “improvements” of the “Big B Ranch.”

Within the house the furnishings accorded with their surroundings.  Two folding bunks, similar in conception to the upper berths of a Pullman car, were built end to end against the wall; when they were raised to give room, four supports dangled beneath like paralyzed arms.  A home-made table, suggesting those scattered about country picnic grounds, a few cheap chairs, a row of chests and cupboards variously remodelled from a common foundation of dry-goods boxes, and a stove, ingeniously evolved out of the cylinder and head of a portable engine, comprised the furniture.

The morning sunlight which dimmed the candles of Mick Kennedy’s saloon drifted through the single high-set window of the Big B Ranch-house, revealing there a very different scene.  From beneath the quilts in one of the folding bunks appeared the faces of a woman and a little boy.  At the opening of the dog-kennel the head of a mottled yellow-and-white mongrel dog projected into the room, the sensitive muzzle pointing directly at the occupied bunk.  The eyes of woman, child, and beast were open and moved restlessly about.