At Havre, Robin found time between trains to cross the street and
find the livery stable.
“I left a saddle here about Christmas,” he said to the hostler. “A
three-quarter rig Cheyenne with a pair of _anqueros_.”
“Yeah, I recollect. Take a look,” the man replied.
Robin hauled his saddle out of the harness room, borrowed a sack to
put it in and check it as baggage on the train. He was under way up
the branch line within ten minutes. An hour and a half later he
stood on the station platform at Big Sandy, wondering with a mingled
curiosity and indifference how long it would be before a deputy
sheriff would saunter up and say with a casual wariness:
“Well, kid, I guess you’ll have to come along with me.”
No, in the face of those purple mountains lifting high in the
southeast, the limitless stretch of lonesome Prairie spreading north
to the Canada line, all those familiar places, the troublesome
future didn’t seem to matter so much. Silent, lonely, sterile here
and there, forbidding at first glance to such as were bred to field
and lane and orchard, the plains wove their own charm about the
hearts of men. All those leagues of grass and hill and canyon seemed
to hold out invisible hands to Robin. Bright with its vernal garment
the land smiled answer to his eager look as a maiden smiles to a
returning lover.
He stood a minute sweeping old horizons with his gaze. The station
agent nodded. No one had arrived. No one had departed. It was too
early in the morning for loungers. A man from Sutherland’s store
took up the mail sack, said “hello” to Robin. Robin followed him
across the street. He would put up at the hotel. If he went
unmolested for the present--and that was likely enough--he would
take horse later and ride to the Bar M Bar. If they wanted him they
could come and get him. Months in a strange country had taught Robin
that he was not the stuff of which an Ishmael is made.
The moon-faced Teutonic host of the Bear Paw House gazed at him
blandly over a varnished counter.
“Ach, so,” he said. “You have been away, yes.”
No more. Robin signed the register. From force of old habit he
suggested a drink. Host and guest went into the bar. Backed by a
mirror that reflected polished glass and decorative bottles a
bartender Robin had known for years said, “Hello, kid,” and set out
the drinks. Robin grew a little puzzled. This was carrying the
normal cow-country nonchalance toward a man who had been in
“trouble” to an extreme. He might have been gone only overnight, by
their attitude, instead of having jumped the country after killing a
well-known man.
He drank, and leaned on the bar, gazing about. A rider loped from
somewhere about the town and dismounted with a flourish before the
hotel. He stalked in, clanking his spurs. Robin knew him, Jack Boyd
of the Block S.
“Hello, old-timer.” He pumped Robin’s hand and slapped him on the
back. “Where the hell you been all winter? Have a shot.”
“On the coast,” Robin said briefly.
They drank. Boyd talked. He was a rattle tongue, no sequence to his
conversation. Robin’s wonder grew. What ailed them all? Were they
all with him, and trying to make him feel at ease, guessing that he
had come back to face trial? Men had done that before.
His gaze for a second turned to the open door. Across the street a
livery barn bulked large. Its double doors gaped on the brown earth
roadway. A man led out a saddled horse, put his foot in the stirrup
and swung up.
Robin stared incredulously. He could see the features under the gray
Stetson. The flash of silver conchos on saddle, silver inlay on bit
and spur, glinting in the sun; Robin saw these and still could not
believe.
He turned to Boyd.
“Who’s that on the black horse?” he demanded.
Boyd left off an argument with the bartender to look.
“You been snow-blind lately?” he laughed. “Your eyes still full of
that Puget Sound fog? That’s Shinin’ Mark. You know as well as I
do.”
“He’s actin’ meaner’n I ever knew him since he got around,” Boyd
added in a lower tone. “Some of these days, somebody that’s hot in
the head and quick on the draw is goin’ to get him right.”
“Since he got around?” Robin caught at the first sentence, repeated
it in an interrogative tone.
“Wasn’t it before you went away? No? Well he got careless with his
six-gun down in the Birch Creek line camp last winter and shot his
fool self. Darned near cashed in. He was on the bed ground for two
months.”
Robin listened, with a loud thumping in his breast, a feeling of
relief that was like a great weight rolled off his back. He had seen
the glaze of death gather in Mark Steele’s eyes as his knees sagged
under him. He had stood there looking down at the red stain
spreading and soaking into the dirt floor. He had seen Mark lie like
a log for twenty minutes. It had never occurred to Robin that he
wasn’t dead. How could a man, even an iron-hard man, survive a .45
slug through the base of his neck, in the region of his wishbone?
Yet there he was, reining in a black horse that curvetted and
twisted in eagerness to be off, while Mark talked to the stableman.
Robin could see his lips move.
The old passion flickered up in Robin’s breast. All the indignity,
the calculated insults, the treachery, Tex Matthews’ death, Steele’s
bold thievery, stirred Robin’s blood again. The old sores reopened.
So that was how it went? He wondered why. What had caused Steele and
Thatcher to take that tack? Accident! Didn’t want it known that an
unarmed boy had shot him with his own gun. Vanity? Perhaps. It
didn’t matter.
Tucked within the waistband of his trousers Robin’s .45 rested
against his stomach. He slid his hand under his coat, felt the
curved bone handle of the gun and took a step toward the door.
Boyd’s eyes had been on his face, in which all unconsciously
something of Robin’s feelings must have been reflected. Boyd caught
his arm as he moved.
“Aw, look. Let him go for this time,” he counseled cheerfully. “You
got all the time there is to carry on your private war. He’s pullin’
for Lonesome Prairie. They’re gatherin’ saddle stock. He wanted me
to ride with him but I ain’t quite ready. Pass it up this time,
Robin. Have a drink and let him go. Who wants to throw lead on a
spring day like this?”
Robin laughed. He could scarcely have followed up that first impulse
since at that very moment Shining Mark gave the black his head and
broke away in a gallop. Robin watched him grow small until he was a
bobbing dot on the out trail. Then he said to Jack Boyd:
“I guess he’ll keep for awhile.”
“Let’s amble across to the Silver Dollar,” Jack suggested. “There’s
some fellows over there.”
The afternoon and evening Robin spent was like that of a prodigal
son returned. He had not been in Big Sandy since the evening he cut
his string and went home full of shame and impotent anger. He had
come back under a cloud. That cloud was dispelled. Here on his own
ground, among his own peers, he passed the first carefree hours that
had fallen to his lot in weary months.
He went to bed at midnight and lay for a few minutes in the dark
room staring at the dim walls, smiling to himself. He did not care
what came next. Shining Mark was still to be reckoned with. He still
had his own word to make good. But that would be man to man, if at
all. In Robin’s mind the T Bar S and theft still remained a problem
to be solved if he desired to remain in the Bear Paws. But the
outcome of any personal clash with Mark Steele was something Robin
could now accept with composure. Somehow, in his mind, Shining Mark
had shrunk to normal proportions. Or perhaps he himself had grown.
He couldn’t say. But he knew how he felt.
Robin ate breakfast in the morning, took horse and rode south, rode
with a heart as light as the little clouds drifting around Shadow
Butte. The Butte itself lifted its cone summit high above him. He
rode past it on ground softened by spring rains, warmed by a spring
sun, green with new grass and speckled with flowers. The creeks ran
clear and strong. The Bear Paws nursed snowcaps on the highest
peaks, white pyramids on a base of dusky pine. Crows sailed cawing
around him. Meadow larks swung on sagebrush trilling their mating
song. Robin lifted his lusty young voice in a ribald version of The
Spanish Cavalier, a careless horseman chanting as he rode.
He pulled up a minute on the ridge where he had watched the sunset
with May Sutherland, and the singing mood passed. It was all
different now. His face turned toward the Bar M Bar. He rode on
soberly wondering what his welcome would be like. He stopped once
more to gaze at the closed door of his own cabin, but he did not
dismount. The new grass was springing thick in the bluejoint meadow.
He smiled. He might have a use for that place yet.
Ten minutes later he rode into Mayne’s. Old Dan himself stood in the
stable door. He stared at Robin, speechless.
“Well, I’m back,” Robin announced the obvious.
Mayne shook his hand, but there was no heartiness in his grip.
“You ain’t exactly overcome with joy, are you?” Robin challenged.
“What’s wrong with you--or with me?”
“Nothin’. Nothin’ a-tall,” Mayne protested. “Only--well, things is
sorta different, I guess, from last fall.”
“How?” Robin’s tone was curt.
“Aw, hell,” Mayne growled. “I might as well give it to you straight.
Me an’ Mark Steele has buried the hatchet. He’s bought a half
interest in the Bar M Bar. We was a little wrong about them T Bar
S’s. Anyway, that’s settled. So--well, you see how it is, don’t
you?”
“You’ve took Mark Steele in as a partner?” Robin stared with
narrowing eyes.
“Yeah. His old man died in Oklahoma an’ left him fifteen thousand
cash. It come about kinda offhand. They hauled Mark up here
after--after he got shot down Birch Creek, an’ we took care of him.
He ain’t so bad when you know him.”
“I see,” Robin said slowly. “So because he has a bunch of money to
put in with you you’ve overlooked a little thing like him stealin’
your stock. You’ve taken a cow thief for a partner!”
“That’s tall talk, young feller,” Mayne growled.
“Maybe. But I’ve said it. If it worries you I won’t talk no more.
But you know what I think. Yes, it sure makes it different,” Robin
muttered. “I’ll go see Ivy an’ ride on.”
“You better----” Mayne began, but Robin had turned his back and was
striding toward the house. The old man stood leaning against the
stable wall, twisting his scraggly mustache, poking absently at the
soft earth with the toe of his boot. His expression was not
precisely a happy one.
Robin stalked through the kitchen. Whether driven by eagerness or
anxiety he did not consider. Of old Ivy would have run across the
yard to meet him. He found her in the living room sitting beside a
window which commanded the yard. He knew she had seen him. She rose
as he entered but there was no welcome in her eyes. They were darkly
sullen, a little frightened.
Robin didn’t speak. He came up to her, put his hands on her
shoulders, looked searchingly into her face. What he saw there
troubled him with a sudden heart heaviness. To be near her stirred
him deeply. Yet as he looked at her he knew that something which had
linked them close was gone, extinguished like a burned-out candle.
“You don’t seem noway glad to see me,” he said gently.
“Did you expect me to be?” she returned. “You never wrote.”
“How could I, the way things were?” he asked. “You know I would have
sent word. It never struck you I’d either do that or come back
because I couldn’t stay away from--from everybody and everything?”
“You ran like a scared coyote,” she said tensely. “An’ you didn’t
shoot Mark, after all. He shot himself with his own gun. You were
just scared of him.”
“Yes? Well?”
Robin paused on the interrogation. He shook her gently.
“Are you goin’ to bust everythin’ up between us?” he asked quietly.
“Is _that_ the way you feel? Did I have to camp right on your trail
to hold you?”
“It’s already busted,” Ivy snapped.
She shook herself free of his hands, backed away a step or two,
looking at Robin with a dumb implacable resentment smoldering in her
eyes. She turned to a shelf on the wall, took something out of a box
and handed it to Robin without a word. It was the little diamond he
had given her--their engagement ring. Robin held it in the palm of
his hand. A pang of sadness, mingled with a touch of anger stabbed
him.
“Maybe it’ll do for another girl,” Ivy said spitefully. “I don’t
need it no more.”
“Neither do I,” he said hotly, and flung the ring into the dead ash
of the fireplace. For a moment they stared at the puff of ashes
where it fell, at each other. The girl’s lips quivered. Robin turned
on his heel and walked out of the house.
Old Mayne still leaned against the stable wall. Robin gathered up
his reins, turned to ask a question.
“Ivy goin’ to marry Steele?”
He shot the words at Mayne with a harshness that made the old man
start.
“I reckon so,” he said apologetically. “_I_ kain’t help it.”
“Nobody said you could,” Robin flung over his shoulder as he reached
for his stirrup.
Dark found him sitting with his feet on his own stove, in a house
without food or bedding, thinking, thinking! To-morrow he would ride
back to town. But to-night--here--he was not conscious of hunger nor
of physical discomfort as he sat with hands clasped over his knees
with an ache in his breast and a turmoil in his brain.
Sometimes it was bad for a man to see things too clearly.