The first circle the Block S made the next morning covered that
portion of the Range between the home ranch and Shadow Butte.
Afternoon saw the outfit camped on Little Birch a gunshot above
Robin’s homestead. That evening Steele assigned him to “cocktail”,
range slang for the short watch on herd between supper and dusk.
Then he was slated for middle guard. Even if he had desired to ride
down and see Ivy, Robin had no time. He was not sure he should go.
Ivy’s anger did not always evaporate like mist in the brightness of
her lover’s smile. In another day or two she might be able to laugh
at that tantrum. To-night the sun might still be setting on her
wrath.
When they rode at dawn they passed within a hundred yards of the
house. That afternoon the chuck wagon rolled down Birch to a point
near Cold Spring. For four days the Block S worked in the heart of
Dan Mayne’s range, without Mayne once appearing at the round-up.
Usually when the outfit worked his territory the old man rode with
them. Robin guessed that Mayne kept away because he couldn’t stand
close contact with the man who was stealing his stock. Anyway Robin
had his instructions and he knew marketable beef when he saw it. A
third of the cattle in each round-up carried the Bar M Bar. Robin
cut over a hundred prime beeves into the day herd for shipment.
Well below Cold Spring a sprinkling of T Bar S stuff began to show.
There was no shipping beef in that brand. But every cow had her calf
marked. Once or twice Robin noted a T Bar S calf without a mother, a
little bit lean and scraggly--orphans. There would be others, he
surmised, which he did not see. One man couldn’t see everything over
a territory fifty miles wide and a hundred miles long. Not once in
that region did he spot a Bar M Bar cow with an unbranded calf at
side. Nor did Robin again have opportunity to see what Steele and
Thatcher did when they took the outside circle by themselves. That
happened less often. Robin knew Steele would be wary now anywhere
within a few miles of the Mayne ranch. The man might take long
chances but he was not a fool.
As they worked east of Chase Hill the T Bar S cattle grew more
plentiful.
“For a man who lives in Helena, who don’t have no rider, who don’t
ever show up himself, this here Jim Bond sure gets his stock well
looked after,” Tex Matthews remarked to Robin one day. “He’ll do
well in the cow business, I reckon.”
“How?” Robin inquired.
Tex shrugged his shoulders.
“If I didn’t know you, kid, I might think maybe you were asleep.
There’s awful good care took in this country to see that all Jim
Bond’s calves get branded.”
There was a slight emphasis on the “all.”
“You don’t reckon he gets branded for him more’n the law allows?”
Robin hazarded.
The Texan looked hard at him for a second. Then he smiled.
“If it was anything to me; if I had stock in these parts, I’d be
mighty curious about this T Bar S,” he drawled. “I sure would. As it
is, it ain’t a Block S man’s business to be curious about anything
but Block S stuff.”
“Even if Block S calves should happen to grow a T Bar S on their
ribs?”
The Texan sat sidewise in his saddle and gazed at Robin with a faint
uplift at one corner of his thin lips.
“Well,” he remarked with seeming irrelevance, “I reckon the Bar M
Bar ‘rep’ don’t go to sleep at the switch. Say, did you ever know a
man get ambitious and figure out wise little schemes to make him
rich off his neighbors?”
“Seems like I’ve heard of such.”
“So’ve I. I have an idea somebody not a million miles away might
know more about this T Bar S than we do. No, sir. I shouldn’t be
surprised. Only,” he added thoughtfully, “you needn’t mention I said
so.”
“I ain’t a great hand at mentionin’,” Robin grunted. “You know
that.”
“Old Jim Bond, he’s supposed to turn a hundred and fifty head of
stuff south of the Bear Paws a year ago last spring,” Matthews
rambled on. “I guess a man don’t make no fortune out of a one-horse
saloon in Helena. Now wouldn’t it be fine for old Jim if his stock
doubled in a year, and kept on. At that rate in five years or so
he’d be quite a cowman. Only I have a sort of hunch that in a good
deal less’n five years somebody else’ll own the T Bar S.”
“Who’ll it be?” Robin asked idly.
They were sitting on a rise of ground that overlooked a southward
bend of the Missouri, waiting for the last drive to come into the
round-up.
“Well, I ain’t sure. But I could give a guess. So could you.”
“In five years,” Robin prophesied, “Adam Sutherland’ll own the T Bar
S--or it won’t be used on cows.”
“Maybe so, maybe so,” Tex said. “I expect somebody’ll be surprised
when old Adam decides to own the T Bar S, though.”
“What you gettin’ at, Tex?” Robin demanded bluntly.
“Just passin’ the time in talk,” Matthews drawled. “Say, did you
never pack a six-gun.”
Robin shook his head.
“I never even owned one.”
“How come you never did? First kid I ever saw on the range that
didn’t like to play with a pistol.”
“Never took much to it,” Robin told him. “My old man was killed in a
gun play when I was about ten. My mother was dead set against
burnin’ powder. She’d seen too much of it. She was a Terry. Seems
like the Tylers and Terrys have thrown lots of lead down South where
she come from. She kinda discouraged me packin’ a pistol. She used
to say that if I ever needed one bad enough I could get it when it
was wanted. When I started to ride I never thought much about a
six-pistol. Never needed one. I carry a rifle in the winter for
wolves, and I’ve hunted deer an’ antelope quite a lot. Why?”
“Oh, I just wondered. You’re a good-natured, easy-goin’ jasper that
laughs trouble away. But what’d you do if some bad _hombre_ jumped
you out of pure cussedness and started to make a monkey outa you?”
“I don’t know. Never had that happen.” The idea amused Robin
slightly. He laughed. “I’ve been around a few bad actors. I never
seen any of ’em jump a man who wasn’t armed and kinda sorta ready
for trouble--not without some good reason.”
“Some men’s reasons for startin’ trouble ain’t known to nobody but
themselves,” Tex observed. “But they stir her up just the same.”
Matthews’ last sentence recurred to Robin as being almost prophetic
before the afternoon was over. The riders had swept a range where
stock was thick. They had bunched over a thousand head and were
cutting beef on three sides in swirls of dust. Twilight would be on
them before the last steer was separated from that milling herd.
They had worked at top speed for two months. Now at the end of a
hard day both horses and men were tired and short-tempered. They
rode fast and silently, without smiles or laughter.
Robin was well mounted. Energetic and alert he held his own wherever
he found himself, but a continuous darting of steers from the herd
to the cut had kept him so steadily on the jump that when a lull
came he let his horse stand and sat rolling himself a cigarette.
Steele shot an animal out of the herd. The brute went at a swinging
trot and Steele pulled up. Then the beast suddenly changed its
bovine mind and charged back. Steele laid his horse alongside. The
animal dodged this way and that. Headed on each attempt by an active
cutting horse the steer finally joined his fellows in the cut. Robin
sat still and watched. It was nothing. If it had been a little
nearer he might have taken the animal off Steele’s hands and left
him free to cut out another. Such an action was not compulsory. On
the other side of the herd these dodging contests were occurring
every minute or two. But Steele reined up beside him.
“Wake up and ride, you -- -- --!” he snarled in a tone so low Robin
knew Steele intended no one but himself should hear. “Think all you
got to do is be an ornament?”
The epithet amazed Robin. It came out of the blue. His face flamed.
Before he could open his mouth Steele dashed back into the herd.
Robin gasped. His first impulse was to spur his horse after Shining
Mark. No man could take that. Those were fighting words. Yet Steele
wasn’t making a war talk or he would have shouted so that every man
could hear and there would have been no avoiding the issue. Robin’s
brain worked fast. He knew that Steele was quite calm and collected.
What he said he said deliberately, with a considered purpose.
“You’re lookin’ for trouble,” Robin said thoughtfully. “But you aim
to make _me_ start it. I _sabe_ your play. You’ll have to try again.
I won’t give you no openin’.”
Twice in the next three days Steele dug into Robin. Each time they
were out of earshot of any rider. Each time Shining Mark flayed him
with insult, with provocative abuse. The second time Robin said
quietly:
“You’re wastin’ ammunition, Mark. You can’t kill me with a blank
cartridge. Why don’t you make these fighting talks before the
outfit?”
Shining Mark looked him coldly in the eye.
“Maybe I will,” said he. “What’ll you do then?”
“Whatever I do everybody’ll know you got it in for me and forced the
play,” Robin told him. “You’ll never start me smokin’ you up by
whispering nasty remarks in my ear. I don’t give a damn what you say
to me under your breath. _Sabe?_”
Steele sidled his horse up close beside Robin. He leaned forward.
“You’re yellow,” he said, with a sneer. “Yellow clear through. You
know you are. I can take your girl away from you, spit in your face,
and you’re afraid to make a break. When I get through with you a
sheep herder could make you step sideways every time he blatted at
you. I’ll make you jump at your own shadow.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure of that if I was you,” Robin drawled. A most
unnatural calm seemed to possess him. He felt rather indifferent to
Steele’s venomous abuse. Any feeling Shining Mark betrayed was mere
simulation. Every move he made, every word he uttered was
calculated, part of a design. Its effect on Robin was to make him
wary, watchful. If there had been any real passion in Steele’s
attitude some spark in Robin would have matched it in spite of
himself.
“Talk’s cheap,” Robin continued. “You’re pretty small potatoes, it
strikes me, to shoot off your face the way you do when you’ve got a
gun on your hip and I haven’t. You’re the yellow dog, it strikes
me.”
“You can always heel yourself,” Mark suggested.
“Why are you so keen to have me make a break at you?” Robin asked.
“So I can kill you,” Mark returned. “I don’t like you.”
“If you kill everybody you don’t like,” Robin curled his lip, “you
sure must have a big graveyard. Where do you bury your dead,
anyway?”
He laughed in Steele’s face and Shining’s thin, handsome features
grew dark with a genuine scowl.
“I’ll make you laugh on the other side of your face,” he snapped.
“You watch my smoke. Before the snow flies I’ll get you.”
“I hear you,” Robin taunted. “You sound like the buzzing of a
mosquito to me.”
“Of course you can always quit the country,” Mark said
significantly, and swung his horse away in a lope.
So that was it! Robin sat looking after the Block S range boss. He
had thought himself cool and he found that he was shaking with anger
and he knew that his face was white. Probably Shining Mark thought
those were the signs of a man who was getting the fear of God put in
his heart. So _that_ was the play. Put fear into him so that he
would quit the Bar M Bar, quit the country. Men had shifted ranges
before now to avoid trouble with a potential killer. Steele was all
that. Robin didn’t doubt that Shining Mark would make his word good.
He had made other men walk around him by virtue of some inner force
to which weaker spirits submitted. Robin had recognized that dynamic
quality long before he had dreamed of a personal clash with Mark
Steele.
But he did not believe that Mark had reached the stage where he
considered it necessary to bushwhack him. His personal safety
necessitated Robin Tyler’s mouth being stopped from mentioning cows
dead of sudden death and calves stealthily branded. Robin did not
believe Steele had yet reached the point where he would deliberately
pick a row in public--force him to burn powder. That would be too
raw. That in itself would arouse a curiosity as to what fire lay
behind the smoke. Steele’s game seemed clear to Robin. It was simply
to treat him like any other man in public and privately to goad him
beyond all endurance until in desperation he belted on a six-shooter
and started something. Whereupon in self-defense Mark would kill him
in a workmanlike manner.
Mark was deadly with a six-shooter. He had killed nothing but
badgers, prairie dogs and the ubiquitous tin can with his belt-gun
since he had been with the Block S. But he had potted whatsoever he
shot at with a skill and precision which argued long practice. He
was fast on the draw. He shot as a man throws a stone, with
instinctive rather than measured aim. Perhaps one range rider in a
hundred ever developed that perfect coördination of hand and eye
with a .45 Colt. The man who had it--along with unquestioned
courage--could be reasonably assured of respectful consideration
from his fellows.
No, Robin told himself, he would not walk into _that_ trap.