"You don't have to stay with me unless you like," Ben had said more than once; but each time Grannis had displayed his own wound, at first openly, at last, carefully concealed by bandages, whimsically.
"Got to take good care of this arm of mine," he explained. "Blood poisoning's liable to set in at any minute, and that's something awful, they tell me."
The invalid made no comment.
It was the evening following the afternoon of Blair's return to the Box R ranch. In the cosey kitchen, around the new range which Rankin had imported the previous Fall, sat three people,—Grannis, Graham, and Ma Graham. The two men were smoking steadily and silently. The woman, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes glued to the floor, was breathing loudly with the difficulty of the very corpulent. Of a sudden, interrupting, the door connecting with the room adjoining opened and Ben Blair appeared.
"Grannis," he requested, "come here a moment, please."
In silence Blair closed the door behind them, motioned his companion to a seat, and took another opposite him. He was very quiet, even for his taciturn self; and, glancing at a heap of papers on a nearby table, Grannis understood. For a long minute the two men eyed each other silently. Not without result had they lived the events of the last months together. It was the younger man who first spoke.
"Grannis," he said impassively, "I'm going to ask you a question, and I want an honest answer. Whatever you may think it leads to must cut no figure. Will you give it?"
Equally impassively the elder man nodded, "Yes."
Blair selected a paper from the litter, and looked at it steadily. "What I want to know is this: have I, has anyone, no matter what the incentive may be, the right to make known after another's death things which during that person's life were carefully concealed?"