For a moment a small thin face appeared above the dishevelled figure, and a great sob shook the little frame. Then the head disappeared again.
"I can't help it, sir," wailed a muffled voice. "She was my mamma!"
CHAPTER IV
BEN'S NEW HOME
Supper was over at the Box R Ranch. From the tiny lean-to the muffled rattle of heavy table-ware proclaimed the fact that Ma Graham was putting things in readiness for breakfast. Beside the sheet-iron heater in the front room, her husband, carefully swaddled in a big checked apron with the strings tied in a bow under his left ear, was busily engaged in dressing the half-dozen prairie chickens he had trapped that day. As fast as he removed the feathers he thrust them into the stove, and the pungent odor mingled with the suggestive tang of the bacon that had been the foundation of the past supper, and with the odor of cigarettes with which the other four men were permeating the place.
Graham critically held up to the light the bird upon which he had just been operating, removed a few scattered feathers, and, with practised hand, attacked its successor.
"If I were doing this job for myself," he commented, "I'd skin the beasts. Life is too blamed short to waste it in pulling out feathers!"
Grannis, the new-comer from no one knew where, smiled.