The death of his mother, however, and the later advent of a step-parent, wrought a disastrous change in the boy’s hitherto happy enough life. His stepmother’s intolerance with his high spirits led to many family quarrels and finally had the effect of provoking a naturally wayward temper to open rebellion and a definite course of action.
Her studied, unremitting hostility towards the boy succeeded in arousing in him a bitter, lasting hatred for her which, in its intensity and fixity of purpose, was positively awesome and well-nigh incredible in one of his years.
Scorning to follow his elder brother’s example in meekly submitting to the new regime he turned, in his misery and distress, to an old friend of his dead mother’s, one—Major Carlton—his ofttime confidant and mediator in many boyish troubles.
Borrowing fifty pounds from the latter, and taking little else save his mother’s photograph and a few clothes, with a farewell to none except his debtor, he turned his back on that beautiful old Devonshire home forever.
A youthful imagination inspired, perhaps, by prolific and intelligent reading, inexplicably directed his course to the United States; so, booking his passage at Liverpool, he found himself later, depleted in money—but not in pluck or resolution—a waif in that vast assemblage of mixed peoples. One letter—the last that he was ever to write home—he despatched to his father.
Sir John Benton’s fierce, lined face softened for an instant as he perused his son’s missive, but it grew darker and drearier than ever before he had read it through. The letter said no word of return, and he guessed rightly it was meant for an absolutely final farewell.
A strict disciplinarian in his own household, its contents he never divulged to the rest of the family; and if he felt the loss of the manly, headstrong boy, he never showed it hereafter by word or deed. The stern old soldier recognized in those lines—penned with a certain boyish courtesy—only too well the inflexible characteristics that matched, to the full, his own.
Various vicissitudes eventually landed young Benton in a great cattle-raising district of Montana, where he obtained a job as a chore boy on a big ranch, known as the “Circle H.” A fearless upbringing amongst horses stood him now in good stead, and this, combined with a willing capacity for work, ultimately won for him the approval of “Big Jim Parsons,” the silent, laconic ranch foreman, who befriended the lonely, and now taciturn, youngster.
It is not to be supposed that he gained this patronage any too easily. Although babbling little concerning his history, his English speech and apparent breeding were sufficient at the start to make him the butt of many doubtful pleasantries from the devil-may-care cow-punchers whose bunkhouse victim he was. No sulker, he could assimilate the most of it in good part; but there were limitations to such “joshing,” as many of his tormentors found out when the savage, uncontrollable Benton temper blazed forth with such appalling venom of fist and tongue that, immature youth though he was, caused the bleeding and cursing authors of the disturbance to retreat aghast at the devil they had raised. The old Mosaic law—“An eye for an eye”—with its grim suggestion of unforgiving finality, always found in Ellis an ardent and exacting adherent.
At such scenes Big Jim would generally appear on the field of hostilities, a threatening, nasal sneer twisting his morose face.