About Shining Mark’s capacity for ruthless action Robin had no
illusions whatever. He did not jump to the conclusion as a lesser
man might have done that his open defiance of Steele had driven him
to a cover from which he would not emerge. Mark was pretty deeply
committed one way and another, and he was growing more cautious,
that was all. Robin had simply put him on the defensive. Mark would
get him when and where he could. After that exchange before Adam
Sutherland, Shining Mark had to go through with it; he couldn’t hold
up his head before his employer if he didn’t. Robin knew that when
he deliberately called him “thief.” That was why he uttered the
epithet. He meant to put the shoe on the other foot, make Mark the
aggressor if war must ensue. And he had succeeded. The mere fact
that certain fibers within him had hardened so that he neither
feared Steele nor any other man did not lead Robin to underestimate
his enemy. Shining Mark was more dangerous than ever, for all he had
backed up from an insult with a gun hidden under his armpit.
So Robin took no foolhardy chances. He went to the hotel, lounged in
the bar and the office, and kept his eyes about him. Two or three of
the Block S riders wandered in. There was nothing to indicate that
they had heard of any new clash. Robin chaffered with them, but he
did not cross the street. He had said his say. The rest was up to
Mark.
Watching idly through a window half an hour later Robin saw Mark
mount his horse and ride to the store, emerge therefrom presently
and jog down the street looking neither to right nor left, vanishing
at last toward the round-up camp.
Robin ate supper, played cards until ten o’clock, went to bed. In
the morning he saddled Red Mike and rode south a mile or two. The
Block S outfit was gone. Robin rode west toward the mountains to see
a rancher he knew. He had all the time in the world. He meant to
stay around Big Sandy two or three days. He would sell that bit of
land to Adam Sutherland if he could. Then he would drift. He would
go on spring round-up with the YT or the Pool. One of the big
outfits would make a place for him he knew. If later his trail
crossed Mark Steele’s--well, he would never eat his words.
In the evening he went back to town. When he walked into the hotel
the rotund host said:
“Sutherland, he send the Chinaman for you. He want to see you by his
house ven you come in already.”
Robin walked over to the Sutherland cottage. Sutherland stood on the
top step rolling a cigar between his lips.
“You wanted to see me?”
“Yes. Come on in. Still chilly in the evenin’s.”
Robin sat down in an upholstered chair in a comfortably fitted,
homelike room. Sutherland stared at him for a minute.
“You’ll know me, I reckon, next time you see me,” Robin suggested
dryly. That appraising stare ruffled him a trifle.
Sutherland grinned.
“I reckon I will,” said he. “What possessed you to jump on Mark
Steele roughshod?”
“He had it coming,” Robin defended. “Anyway, I didn’t jump him. I
just told him where he got off.”
“Well, I guess he got off all right,” Sutherland grumbled. “Now
what’s the root of this trouble between you and Mark Steele? Strikes
me it’s more than a girl. Twice you’ve called him a thief. I got a
right to know.”
“You have,” Robin admitted frankly. “But I’m not goin’ to tell you,
right now. You’d have only my bare word. If I had a round-up crew to
myself for a couple of months I might be able to _show_ you.”
“Is it that serious?” Sutherland asked slowly.
Robin looked at him keenly. He couldn’t quite make out this
heavy-faced man whose brain was of a vastly different quality from
his flesh-burdened body or he would never have become a power in the
Bear Paws. Sutherland wasn’t stupid. Neither was Robin. Only Robin
didn’t want to talk, now that he had a hearer--where six months
earlier he would have poured out his tale.
“Do you know that Steele has bought in with Dan Mayne?” he asked
Sutherland.
Sutherland nodded. His eyes were on Robin narrowly.
“This got something to do with Bar M Bar stock, this trouble between
you two?”
“Partly.”
“You don’t seem to want to talk.”
“I won’t,” Robin said bluntly. “If I had a chance I might show you.”
“All right, you can show me. I’m from Missouri.”
“How?” Robin inquired.
“Well,” Sutherland drawled. “You can go to work for the Block S for
one thing. You said nobody loved you and you were out of a job. I’ll
give you a job.”
“I couldn’t work for the Block S, as things stand,” Robin said
impatiently. “You know that.”
“Don’t see why. You’re a cow-puncher. I can use you.”
“See here,” Robin told him bluntly. “I’ve ideas of my own. The only
way I’d ever work for the Block S would be to run it.”
“All right,” Sutherland said abruptly. “I’ll give you a whirl at
being a range boss. Mark Steele has quit me. Think you can fill his
boots? It’ll take a man.”
“I fill my own boots,” Robin answered slowly. “That’s good enough.”
A slow smile spread over Sutherland’s broad face.
“You’ll be the youngest wagon boss in Montana, I reckon,” he
drawled.
Robin didn’t answer. But his heart leaped within him. To attain the
seat of the mighty at a single bound! It seemed incredible. He had
made a reckless statement bear rich fruit. When he told Sutherland
that the only way he would work for the Block S would be to run it
he had been sincere enough; but that was only an oblique way of
stating that he didn’t want to be a Block S rider as matters stood.
This was a horse of a different color. When it came to that he was a
cowman. Responsibility had no terrors for him. If he could handle
men? Well, why not? Power is a sweet morsel for any man to set his
teeth in. Robin had confidence without vain conceit. He knew himself
equal to the job.
Sutherland mused, pulling at his walrus mustache, his rubicund face
glowing behind the smoke cloud of his cigar.
“Yes, sir,” he continued. “You’ll be the youngest wagon boss in
Montana. I’m kinda disappointed in Mark. He was a slashin’ good
cowman. Maybe gettin’ some money left him has spoiled him. He’s
quit. Least that’s how I take it. He drew all the money he had
comin’, put Jack Boyd in charge of the outfit, and got on the train
this afternoon. So you go out an’ take charge. The wagons’ll be
camped by the ranch. I’ll give you a note to Jack.”
“All right,” Robin said quietly.
“Now look,” Sutherland continued. “I don’t want you to take up with
the idea you’ve scared Mark Steele outa the country, because that’d
be a bad mistake. If he didn’t have it out with you right then and
there he had his own reasons besides bein’ afraid to take a chance.
Mark’s got a money interest on this range now. He’ll be back. I’d be
watchful,” Sutherland said very slowly, “if I was you.”
Robin had no mind to contradict that. He merely nodded.
“I don’t want to crowd you,” the old man went on in the kindliest
tone Robin had ever heard him use. “I ain’t got to be near sixty and
own thirty thousand cattle by goin’ through the world blind, deaf
and dumb. Maybe a man here and there fools me for awhile. See you
don’t. If I trust a man and he knifes me, I don’t forget. You say
you can show me somethin’ if you have a round-up crew to work with.
Well, you got it. And I’m from Missouri. I’m waitin’ to be shown.”
“I don’t want to talk big,” Robin murmured. “I’m kinda dizzy right
now. But when I spread my hand on the table I think you’ll say it’s
good.”
On a ridge overlooking the home ranch on Little Eagle, Robin drew
rein for a look. The painted roofs of barn and out buildings and
rambling house glowed in the sun. Windows flashed like beacons. The
willows fringing creek and irrigating ditch were one shade of green,
the wide meadows another, the pines that clothed the hills above
still a darker hue. And there were the white tents of the round-up
glistening against the sward, the scattered grazing horses. He could
hear far off the sweet tinkle of bells. His outfit! The youngest
range boss in Montana. Twenty riders, thirty thousand cattle, a
thousand square miles of range under his hand! Robin could have
whooped. Yet there was a sobering effect in the magnitude of his
task. It wasn’t simple. There were added complications no one knew
but himself, himself and Mark Steele and Tommy Thatcher. Perhaps
Adam Sutherland shrewdly guessed that where so much smoke arose
there must be fire.
Robin looked away down Birch Creek toward the Bar M Bar, thinking of
Ivy Mayne being urged along a way that promised unhappiness, driven
by impulses her dumb sullen heart could never fathom. Robin had
lived all his young life close to nature, striving with nature. He
had no bookish sophistication, but he was keenly alive, his mind
kindled easily. He had a keen sense of the remorselessness of
natural law. Nature’s ways were sometimes dark in getting her
business done. The individual wasn’t so much, just as a single
animal in a herd was of no great consequence--but the herd counted.
The pain and passion of mating and begetting and dying were no
mysteries to Robin. What he didn’t know he could dimly grasp.
Passion was sometimes wrapped up and obscured in material
complexities. Conflict was inherent in life itself, from the time a
man drew his first breath until he breathed his last.
Looking away toward that hidden ranch he could visualize Ivy with
Mark a sinister figure in the background. He felt sorry for her. In
the same breath he wondered if May was at the home ranch. Somehow he
hadn’t wanted to ask.
He shook himself out of these reflections and rode on. He had to dip
into a coulee, cross a little ridge, traverse a horse pasture and
pass the house to reach the camp. He dipped into the hollow. As he
topped the opposite crest a head appeared, a head surmounted by
yellow hair, a pair of shoulders clad in a cream-colored blouse.
Close by this figure seated on a flat rock a chestnut horse that
might have been a twin brother to Red Mike stood with trailing
reins.
Robin drew up beside this vision, answered the smile of greeting,
got down and seated himself beside May.
“I guess I’m kinda unexpected,” he observed.
“Not so much,” she told him. “I heard you were back.”
“The boys would talk, I expect,” he remarked. “Still, I guess I have
some news they couldn’t spread.”
“Yes?” she looked curious.
“Might not interest you much, at that,” Robin drawled. “The Block S
has a new range boss.”
“You?” she breathed. Her eyes danced.
“Good guess,” Robin said. “Kinda sudden. I don’t know which is the
most surprised, me or your dad.”
“I’m glad,” May smiled. Then she sobered. “What happened to Mark
Steele? Did you meet him?”
“Yes, I met him,” Robin answered truthfully. “Nothing happened.
Maybe something’ll happen later. I don’t know. Don’t care.”
“I wonder why he said he shot himself by accident last winter?” the
girl murmured.
“To save his face, I reckon. He’s proud. He don’t like to be beaten.
I did beat him that time.”
May stirred uneasily.
“A girl can stir up a lot of trouble sometimes,” she said.
“It wasn’t a girl. I told you that before.”
“There _was_ a girl, wasn’t there,” she whispered.
“There was, but there isn’t no more.”
Robin crinkled his brow. He looked at May intently. He had refused
to discuss that matter even with Adam Sutherland, until he had some
tangible proof of his assertions. Why should he feel a burning
desire to tell Sutherland’s daughter all about the coil Mark Steele
had woven around him? Yet that impulse was irresistible. “Can you
keep things to yourself?”
“What do you think?” she asked, a touch of color rising in her
cheeks. “Try me.”
Bluntly, baldly, with a cow-puncher’s vivid terseness of phrase,
Robin, sitting on the rock beside her, the embossed scabbard of his
.45 resting against her skirt, told her the tale from the beginning,
from the hour he lay on the bank below Cold Spring and watched
thieves at work. When he recounted the episode in the Birch Creek
line camp May shivered. When he finished she sat staring fixedly at
the ground, her hands in her lap, the white fingers locked tight
together. Robin bent his head to peer into her face. Her eyes were
bright-wet, troubled. He remembered the Coleridge of his school
days, ruefully.
“Shucks,” he said, “I didn’t mean to be like the Ancient Mariner, to
fix you with my glitterin’ eye and make you listen to my tale of
woe. I shouldn’t ’a’ worried you with all that stuff.”
“I’m not--not a worrier,” May whispered. “Only I can see it all so
clearly. I knew there was some good reason for my hating that man
so. It must have been simply hell for you.”
Robin swallowed something that came up in his throat. It _had_ been
hell. It moved him deeply that this slim wisp of a girl understood
so clearly what it had been like. He sat silent for a minute.
Then some unreasoned impulse made him put his arms around her, draw
her up close to him. For one long second May looked searchingly into
his face. What she saw there must have satisfied her, for she
smiled. When Robin’s lips touched hers she returned his kiss with a
pressure that made his heart leap. And then she snuggled her yellow
head against his neck with a contented, happy sigh.