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.
The new-comer was first to make a move. Walking over to the centre of the room, he stopped and looked upon his subjects.
"Well, of all the infernally lazy people I ever saw!" he commented, "you beat them, Jennie! Get up and cook something to eat; it's way after noon, and I'm hungry."
The woman said nothing, but the boy slid to his feet, facing the intruder.
"Mamma's sick and can't get up," he explained as impersonally as to a stranger. "Besides, there isn't anything to cook. She said so."
The man's brow contracted into a frown.
"Speak when you're spoken to, young upstart!" he snapped. "Out with you, Jennie! I don't want to be monkeyed with to-day!"
He hung up his coat and cap, and loosened his belt a hole; but no one else in the room moved.
"Didn't you hear me?" he asked, looking warningly toward the bunk.
"Yes," she replied.
Autocrat under his own roof, the man paused in surprise. Never before had a command here been disobeyed. He could scarcely believe his own senses.
"You know what to do, then," he said sharply.
For the first time a touch of color came into the woman's cheeks, and catching the man's eyes she looked into them unfalteringly.
"Since when did I become your slave, Tom Blair?" she asked slowly.
The words were a challenge, the tone was that of some wild thing, wounded, cornered, staring death in the face, but defiant to the end. "Since when did you become my owner, body and soul?"
Any sportsman, any being with a fragment of admiration for even animal courage, would have held aloof then. It remained for this man, bred amid high civilization, who had spent years within college halls, to strike the prostrate. As in the frontier saloon, so now his hand went involuntarily to his throat, clutched at the binding collar until the button flew; then, as before, his face went white.