“You’re not going, sonny.  I’m glad you thought of it, but I can’t let you go.”

Again there was silence for so long that the waiting dog, impatient of the delay, whined in soft protest.

“Why not, mamma?”

“Because, Benjamin, it’s too late now.  Besides, there wouldn’t be a person there who would come out to help me.”

The boy’s look of perplexity returned.

“Not if they knew you were very sick, mamma?”

“Not if they knew I was dying, my son.”

The boy took off hat, mittens, and coat, and returned them to their places.  Never in his short life had he questioned a statement of his mother’s, and such heresy did not occur to him now.  Coming back to the bunk, he laid his cheek caressingly beside hers.

“Is there anything I can do for you, mamma?” he whispered.

“Nothing but what you are doing now, laddie.”

Tired of standing, the mongrel dropped within his tracks flat upon his belly, and, his head resting upon his fore-paws, lay watching intently.

* * * * *

When the door of Mick Kennedy’s saloon closed with an emphasis that shook the very walls, it shut out a being more ferocious, more evil, than any beast of the jungle.  For the time, Blair’s alcohol-saturated brain evolved but one chain of thought, was capable of but one emotion—­hate.  Every object in the universe, from its Creator to himself, fell under the ban.  The language of hate is curses; and as he moved out over the prairie there dripped from his lips continuously, monotonously, a trickling, blighting stream of malediction.  Swaying, stumbling, unconscious of his physical motions, instinct kept him upon the trail; a Providence, sometimes kindest to those least worthy, preserved him from injury.

Half way out he met a solitary Indian astride a faded-looking mustang, and the current of his wrath was temporarily diverted by a surly “How!” Even this measure of friendliness was regretted when the big revolver came out of the rancher’s holster like a flash, and, head low on the neck of the mustang, heels in the little beast’s ribs, the aborigine retreated with a yell, amid a shower of ill-aimed bullets.  Long after the figure on the pony had passed out of range, Blair stood pulling at the trigger of the empty repeater and cursing louder than before because it would not “pop.”

Two hours later, when it was past noon, an uncertain hand lifted the wooden latch of the Big B Ranch-house door, and, heralded by an inrush of cold outside air, Tom Blair, master and dictator, entered his domain.  The passage of time, the physical exercise, and the prairie air, had somewhat cleared his brain.  Just within the room, he paused and looked about him with surprise.  With premonition of impending trouble, the mongrel bristled the yellow hair of his neck, and, retreating to the mouth of his kennel, stood guard; but otherwise the scene was to a detail as it had been in the morning.  The woman lay passive within the bunk.  The child by her side, holding her hand, did not turn.  The very atmosphere of the place tingled with an ominous quiet,—­a silence such as one who has lived through a cyclone connects instinctively with a whirling oncoming black funnel.