osing with an audible
click.

"You wish to know--what did you say, Ben?"

The boy repeated the question.

For a minute, and then another, Rankin said nothing; then he knocked the
ashes from the bowl of his brier and laid it upon the table.

"Never mind now why they wouldn't, son." He arose heavily and drew off
his coat. "You'll find out for yourself quickly enough--too quickly, my
boy. Now go to sleep."

CHAPTER V

THE EXOTICS

Some men acquire involuntary prominence by being democratic amid
aristocratic surroundings. Others, on the contrary, but with the same
result, continue to live the life to which they were born, even when
placed amid surroundings that make their actions all but grotesque. An
example of this latter class was Scotty Baker, whose ranch, as the wild
goose flies, was thirteen miles west of the Box R.

Scotty was a very English Englishman, with an inborn love of fine
horse-flesh and a guileless nature. Some years before he had fallen into
the hands of a promoter, and had bartered a goodly proportion of his
worldly belongings for a horse-ranch in Dakota, to be taken possession
of immediately. Long indeed was the wail which went up from his home in
Sussex when the fact was made known. Neighbors were fluent in
denunciation, relatives insistent in expostulation; his wife, and in
sympathy their baby daughter, copious in the argument of tears; but the
die was irrevocably cast. Go he would,--not from voluntary stubbornness,
but because he must.

The actual departure of the Bakers was much like the sailing of
Columbus. Probably not one of the friends who saw them off for their
new home expected ever to see the family again. Indians they were
confident were rampant, and frantic for scalps. Should any by a miracle
escape the savages, the tremendous herds of buffalo, running amuck, here
and there, could not fail to trample the survivors into the dust of the
prairie. By comparison, war was a benignant prospect; and sighs mingled
until the sound was as the wailing of winds.

Scotty was very cheerful through it all, very encouraging even in the
face of incontestibly unfavorable evidence, until, with the few remnants
of civilization they had brought with them, the family arrived at the
wind-beaten terminus, a hundred miles from his newly acquired property.
Then for the first time he wilted.

"I've been an ass," he admitted bitterly, as he glanced in impotent
contempt at the handful of weather-st