WILD WEST

BY BERTRAND W. SINCLAIR

BOSTON

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY

1926

Copyright, 1926,

By Bertrand W. Sinclair.

All rights reserved

Published March, 1926

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

WILD WEST
CHAPTER I
THE STRAW IN THE WIND

Where a long spur of Chase Hill pitched down to the broken land bordering on Birch Creek, Robin Tyler came on what he had been seeking since sunrise. He pulled up his horse, sat sidewise in his saddle to roll a cigarette, to stare over the country, out over the wide roll of grassy ridges and sagebrush flats that ended abruptly in the confusion of the Bad Lands. As his eye marked single dots and groups of dots that were cattle and horses at rest and in motion, both near and far, a trampling of hoofs in a hollow below made his head turn sharply. He saw within a hundred yards the back and head and ears of a single animal and jumped his horse into a gallop with a touch of the spurs. He recognized that arched neck and brilliant mane; it flashed in the sun like burnished copper.

“Oh, you Red Mike,” he shouted, “you’ll have to burn the earth now to keep me from ridin’ you on round-up.”

In two jumps the gray cow horse Robin bestrode bounded over the low ridge. Below and beyond, a bunch of range horses, twenty or more, as wild as the elk that once grazed those slopes, stretched themselves like hounds on the trail of a running wolf. They were headed for a water hole and Robin was cutting them off. They lay low to the ground, manes and tails streaming, their hoofs beating the turf with a roll like snare drums. The horse Robin had shouted at ran in the lead, a beautiful sorrel beast with four white stockings and a star in his forehead. Red Mike knew what a mounted man on his trail meant. He was all for freedom. Behind him thundered the wild mares with their colts.

For a week, at odd times, Robin had been looking for that particular horse. Now he stood in his stirrups, whooping in sheer exultation of the chase. It didn’t matter how much he excited them. They were as wild as hawks and would run themselves out anyway. He meant to head them off from water, turn them back up the ridge and when they tired he would bunch them in a corral he knew, rope out Red Mike and lead him home.

He headed the wild bunch and turned them once. But a badger hole hidden in the grass undid him. The gray put a forefoot in the hole, went down as if shot, rolled over twice and scrambled to his feet, trembling. Robin fell clear, unhurt, except for the jar. He gathered up the reins, swung to his saddle. The gray took a step. Robin dismounted, stood looking with a frown. His mount had twisted a leg, wrenched a shoulder. He walked on three feet. Riding him was out of the question.

“Damn all badgers, anyway!” young Tyler muttered.

He looked after the band of broom tails streaking it westward up the ridge. As he watched they came to a stop, stood with up-pricked ears. Robin knew precisely what they would do; stand awhile, circle wide and make for that watering place by a cautious detour. He wanted Red Mike. He needed him now more than ever. And he was afoot in the blistering midsummer heat, fifteen miles from the nearest ranch, in a region where no rider could be expected to heave in sight.

Robin lifted his hat and ran his fingers through a thatch of brown, curly hair. He was hot and thirsty. Walking in high-heeled boots under a blazing sun was not his idea of pleasure.

“I hate to leave you, old caballo,” he said whimsically, “but I guess I’ll bid you a fond farewell.”

With which he stripped his riding gear off the gray and turned him loose, undid the fifty-foot reata from the bulging fork of his saddle and with the coils in his hand bore straight down the hill leaving his saddle, bridle and leather chaps in the grass, and the gray horse staring after him.

Below him, in the gut of that coulee, a small spring of clear water trickled out of a sandy hillside. Among the seepage grew clumps of willows. In that screen a man could lie perdu with his loop spread for a throw. If Red Mike and his friendly broncs came down to drink he still had a chance. If they smelled or sighted him and dodged Cold Spring they would bear down into the bed of Birch Creek. He would follow. It was no more than a mile or two. Or he would lie at Cold Spring. He still had hopes of snaring a mount. Small bands of wild horses would drift in to drink. Among the wild ones there was often an odd saddle horse, enjoying temporary escape from ranch or round-up. At any rate he did not propose to walk home. It wasn’t done! At the worst he could snare an unbroken horse, hog-tie him, pack the saddle down, and make the untamed one bear him somewhere. Robin was a rider. He preferred them gentle, but he could ride. So he trudged toward the spring, keeping to the low ground, hoping that Red Mike would not change his flighty horse mind about where he wanted to drink.

Evidently Red Mike did. Robin lay behind the willows until mid-afternoon, parched by the heat, chafing at inaction. Of all the roving bands of horses none trooped into Cold Spring. The wild cattle came down, drank, lay in the grass until the slopes near by carried a thousand head of resting longhorns. Some got wind of him and departed in haste, snuffing and tossing their heads. It did seem to Robin as if that fifteen-mile tramp grew more threatening.

He decided to take a chance on Birch Creek. It was no great way to the high banks that overlooked the deep sage-covered bottoms through which a lukewarm stream slunk like a great lazy snake, looping fold on fold. He stole away from Cold Spring with care to dodge the range cattle, to whom a man afoot was an unknown sight, a strange upright creature to be attacked or fled from as their bovine impulses chanced.

A little before Robin gained the first cut-bank whence he could look into Birch Creek bottoms for a horse, he heard a shot, then a second and a third. Robin had a keen ear. He recognized those reports as from a rifle. It held no particular significance, beyond the fact that shooting argued riders somewhere near, and a rider could soon solve the problem of a mount for Robin Tyler. Since these shots came from the bottom directly below him, Robin broke into a trot to reach the rim of the bank and call to the man or men below, if they were within hearing distance.

What he saw made him drop flat and do his looking through a fringe of long grass.

Robin had grown up in a cow country. There was little pertaining to the range, lawful or unlawful, which had escaped his awareness. So he was at no loss to read the signs below.

What he could not read were the brands involved nor the faces of the two men. The three dead cows, dark lumps in the gray sage, the three well-grown calves hog-tied for the running-iron that made little wisps of blue smoke puff from their ribs, were an open book to him. It was as old as the cow business, that trick. It originated in Texas in the chaos following the Civil War. In the years since it had been intermittently practiced with varying success from the Pecos River to the Canada line—and beyond.

Robin knew the modus operandi. You had a few cattle on the range. You owned a duly registered brand. You rode abroad in lonely places, where range riders seldom came except when the round-up swept through. Having found a cow with a desirable calf you shot the cow, roped the calf, ran your brand on him and hazed the orphan off two or three miles from his dead mother. Then you rode on and repeated the operation. Presently, if you were wary, well-mounted, a good roper, and craftily evaded being caught in the act, your natural increase assumed great proportions. The cow, being dead, could not embarrassingly claim a calf bearing a brand not her own. A dead cow here and there on the range excited no comment. Cows died from a variety of causes. The cattleman knew that to his sorrow and the cowboy accepted dead cattle as he accepted the sun and the wind and rain, as natural properties of his environment.

Only—when too many cows were found to be dying of sudden death there were sure to be riders abroad with Winchester carbines under their stirrup-leathers. It was apt to be unhealthy for those who sought to augment their herd by other than natural increase.

Since every rustler knew that, he himself was not likely to permit any one to view his activities with rope and iron and depart untroubled. Hence Robin Tyler lay very quiet in the grass. He was unarmed, to begin with. He was not sure he wished to know the identity of those two men, the brands on the dead cows nor the fresh iron marks on the calves. That knowledge spelled trouble. Somehow Robin had a distaste for trouble of a personal nature. He had seen plenty. He wasn’t combative. He seemed to have little of that primitive instinct to fight, to kill, to harry other men, which crops out now and then in even highly civilized persons.

Yet, as he stared at the two men in the silent flat, now flinging themselves across their saddles to start the stolen calves to new feeding grounds afar, he felt a touch of resentment. He had an intuitive knowledge of what brand could be read on those dead cows, because he was sure he knew one of the men—the flash and glitter of sun on silver ornaments as the rider’s horse wheeled and danced under the restraining bit gave Robin this unwelcome knowledge; unwelcome, because if confirmed, it was knowledge upon which he would have to act, if he dared. Would he dare? He didn’t know.

When they were gone out of sight down the Birch Creek flats hazing the calves before them on the run, Robin turned back to Cold Spring.

CHAPTER II
“KEEP OFF THE GRASS!”

The range cattle had finished their siesta and grazed afar when Robin once more hid among the willows. He was hungry but he had the solace of tobacco. He waited with dogged patience. Perhaps the broom-tails Red Mike ran with would yet come. If not there was always the chance of others. If the cool of evening brought no mount within reach of his loop he could still walk home.

So Robin lay thinking about those dead cows and the men who shot them. He couldn’t get rid of the certainty that came over him when silver conchos on bit and spur and saddle flashed in the sun. He knew the man. He was aware that he could be mistaken. Other riders caparisoned with silver ornaments could be abroad on that range. But the first conviction held.

Hornets and wild bees hummed among the willows. Meadow larks swooped to the cold water, washed, preened their feathers, swung on low bushes and caroled their sweet, throaty songs within ten feet of him. Pungent odors from sagebrush bruised by hoofs, the faint smell of mud stirred by watering cattle, all the manifold airs off a wide, hot land wafted across his nostrils as he lay there. The sun dipped westward, fiery in the crystal blue. The willows supplied a grateful shade. He grew drowsy, dozed, and was wakened by nickering and the thud of hoofs.

Luck had come his way. His sorrel horse stood with forefeet in the mud, drinking from the cold trickle. The band was ranged about the spring. Red Mike had set himself as if posed to receive the waiting loop, within range of a short and easy throw for a hand as true as Robin Tyler’s, whose first toy had been a rawhide string.

He made one end of the rope fast to the root of a willow, edged clear, shook his loop out. Then he rose and threw in the same motion and the loop swished over Red Mike’s ears and tightened about his glossy neck before he could so much as toss his head.

One frightened surge against Robin’s weight on the reata and the red horse stood still, wide-eyed with surprise, but knowing himself a prisoner. Robin went up to him gently, patted his neck, stroked him, talked to him soothingly. The red horse nuzzled him. When Robin took a turn over his nose with the rawhide the beast followed him like a dog on a leash.

Half an hour later he was mounted. Red Mike pranced and side-stepped and pawed the earth with impatience, a thing of steel and whalebone with the fire of life in it and Robin’s spirits rose as if he had drunk wine.

The gray fed close by, nursing his lame leg. Robin left him without regret, much gainer by the exchange. Red Mike was his own horse. He had never felt another man’s steel in his ribs. He was worth two of the gray. So Robin turned lightly homeward.

But before the sorrel had spurned a mile of the dry earth with his eager hoofs Robin changed his course, and swung down into Birch Creek. He had to see the brand on those dead cows. Why he had to he didn’t trouble to define. In the back of his mind, unadmitted, there was a motive—and the motive was simple loyalty to his salt. Mostly the rustler preyed on the big outfits, and the riders of the big outfits sometimes did not see more than they chose to see on the range. But cattleman and cow-puncher alike despised a thief who stole from a poor man. And somehow Robin Tyler had to know if those dead cows carried Dan Mayne’s brand.

They did. At least one did. Robin dropped his rope over the stiffened legs, took a dally round the horn and turned the animal brand side up. He saw the Bar M Bar. He did not tarry to look at the other two lying fifty yards apart, for as he leaned from his saddle to free the noose something went phut in the sandy soil and scattered dust in his face. Red Mike jumped, snorted. A noise like the pop of a distant whiplash sounded away off and high above.

Robin bent low over his saddle horn and gave Red Mike his head. The sorrel crossed the Birch Creek flats like a candidate for the Derby. As the dust rolled out in a banner from under his flying feet Robin glanced back over his shoulder. He saw two riders standing bold against the sky line on the farther crest of the valley and one of these riders gave off faint shiny reflections when his horse moved in the sun, and there was also a glint of metal in this rider’s hand.

They didn’t shoot again. The range was too great to hit anything in motion except by a fluke. They had scared him off and that, Robin surmised, was all they wanted. They sat there while Robin put a mile between himself and those dead cows as speedily as a fast and powerful horse could cover the distance. Then he pulled Red Mike to a walk, took to the high ground west of Birch Creek and pointed his nose for another water hole.

He rode into the Mayne ranch in the cool dusk having jingled around the south end of Chase Hill to pick up three more saddle horses in their usual haunts. He turned them into a small pasture, put Red Mike in the stable, with an armful of hay to munch. Then he shed his spurs and chaps and walked over to the house. A light glowed in the kitchen windows.

Robin paused in the doorway to look at a girl lifting warm food from the stove and placing it on the table. Ivy Mayne was worth a look. For a long time now, wherever he rode, unless the business in hand required his undivided attention, Robin carried in his mind a picture of this eldest daughter of Mayne’s. He could have told you just how each separate coil of her glossy, dark hair wound about her head, what dimples came and went at the corners of her red mouth when she smiled. He knew that her skin was like satin and her voice a sweet treble like the thrushes that sang in the pine thickets of the Bear Paws. She was eighteen and Robin was twenty-two and they had lived under the same roof, galloped in the same hot sun and under the same silver moon, faced the blustering plains wind and lain in the grass together to stare silent at the winking stars, for a little over two years. There was not, Robin felt, her like for beauty and sweetness in all the pine-clad jumble of the mountains that loomed high in the velvet night to the northward of her father’s ranch.

He always felt a queer flutter inside him when he was away from her and came back. He felt it now as she looked over her shoulder at his step.

“Did you ride clean out of the country?” she asked. “Everybody’s gone to bed. I’ve been keepin’ your supper warm, but you’d ’a’ eaten cold stuff in another half hour, Mister Man. Hungry? Or did you strike some place to eat?”

“Uh-uh. I’m starved.” Robin never wasted words.

“Where’d you go?”

He told her briefly of his mishap with the badger hole, and his snaring of Red Mike at Cold Spring. Her eyes danced.

“You sure do go into jack-pots and out of them oftener than any rider in this country.”

Robin smiled. It was true. Old man Mayne had once irritably told him that if he didn’t go around dreaming he’d save himself a lot of trouble.

“Mark Steele and another fellow stopped in for supper,” Ivy remarked presently.

Robin halted his coffee cup in mid-air.

“What for?” he inquired mildly. “Thought Shining would be at the Block S getting organized for beef-gathering.”

“How would I know?” Ivy replied. “They said they were just ridin’ around. They come in from the south. I saw ’em a long way off. Mark asked where you were.”

“You tell him?”

Robin knew neither Ivy nor any one else could guess where he rode to look for Red Mike that day. He hadn’t known himself where he would go when he started.

“Dad said you were huntin’ horses.”

“Don’t you tell nobody, not a soul, not even the old man, what I just told you about lamin’ the gray and catching Red Mike by Cold Spring,” Robin warned. “Keep that to yourself, Ivy. Will you? Forget it.”

“Why?” she demanded instantly.

“Nothing a-tall,” he parried. “Well, I have got a reason.”

“All right, Robin, I won’t tell,” she agreed. Then, laughingly: “You haven’t started draggin’ the long rope, have you, that you don’t want nobody to know where you rode to-day?”

“Dragging the long rope”, is a range euphemism for stealing other men’s cattle, specifically unbranded calves.

“No,” Robin said shortly. “But somebody else is. Sabe?”

She nodded. Robin had seen something. He didn’t want it known he had been where he might have seen anything. Sometimes it was not good for a man’s health to see too much, or to talk openly about what he saw. Ivy herself was a child of the range. She understood, nodded comprehension.

“I won’t talk.”

Robin leaned over the table to kiss her.

“If that silver-spangled hombre rides this way too often I’ll get to worryin’,” he whispered. “Reckon you could get to like him, Ivy, the way you like me?”

The eternal feminine flickered in Ivy’s dusky eyes.

“I don’t know,” she murmured. “Maybe. I don’t think I’d want to. I reckon I’d be a little afraid of him. I guess he’d be a pretty bad actor if he got going.”

She put her elbows on the table and nursed her round face in her hands.

“Everybody sort of seems to step soft around Mark,” she said reflectively. “Dad’s a little bit afraid of him. So’s other men. Are you?”

“I wouldn’t advertise myself,” Robin said.

He sat tracing a formless pattern on the oilcloth with his finger for a minute. Then he rose. A faint, nameless depression afflicted him whenever he linked Ivy Mayne and Mark Steele in his mind.

“It’ll be daylight before you can sneeze twice,” he said. “I guess I’ll turn in. I’ll have to step high and wide to-morrow.”

He turned to put his arm across Ivy’s shoulders, to pat her smooth hair. She smiled at him and blew him a kiss from her finger tips as he went out the door. She herself was sound asleep in her bed within twenty minutes—while Robin lay on his blankets in a detached bunk house listening to the audible slumber of a ranch hand in the opposite corner. He lay tired but sleepless, turning over and over in his mind the connection between those dead cows, Mark Steele, Ivy’s father, Ivy herself, and his own part in the play.

Should he tell Mayne about those slaughtered cattle and voice his certainty about the man who shot them? Both Mayne and Robin knew that for two seasons now there had been a peculiar shortage in the Bar M Bar calf crop. What Robin saw that afternoon in Birch Creek bottom furnished the key to that shrinkage.

But he knew Mayne. Shining Mark Steele had Mayne buffaloed. He would grumble and swear when Robin told him. But would he act? And if he didn’t act the thing would fester in his mind and sometime when he was drunk he would talk. Once he opened his mouth Robin Tyler was a marked man.

Robin stared up at the dusky ridge logs. He had no desire to have his light put out by any bushwhacking cow thief. Then he shrugged his shoulders and tried to sleep. In the morning—Robin didn’t consciously say so, but he had a feeling that such problems could better be solved in broad day than by lying awake in the dark.

He rose with the sun. Sometime that day he was due to leave to join the Block S crew as a representative of the Bar M Bar on the fall round-up. He had a couple of tender-footed horses to shoe, a few odds and ends of gear to repair. He was a busy youth until noon. Not until dinner was past and his string was bunched in the corral with one horse saddled and his bed and war-bag packed across another did he have any extended conversation with Dan Mayne. They sat side by side on the top rail now, looking down on the sleek backs of Robin’s cow ponies. Mayne had given him instructions about shipping beeves and fallen silent.

“I seen a dead cow yesterday,” Robin said at last. “A Bar M Bar.”

“Wolves?” Mayne grunted.

“Yeah. Two-legged ones,” Robin exploded. The words rushed out of him. “She was bit with a .30-30.”

Mayne looked at him, growled something through his scraggly, dispirited mustache.

“I guess that’s how you’re short on calves,” Robin continued. “Probably there’s quite a few Bar M Bar cows dyin’ of heart failure that way—when they happen to have big, unbranded calves that was missed on the spring round-up.”

“The shrinkage ain’t natural, that’s a fact,” Mayne grumbled. “We tallied a hundred less calves this year than last. Should ’a’ been a good increase. It wasn’t no hard winter.”

They sat wordless a minute.

“Somebody’s stealin’ you blind,” Robin asserted at last.

“I guess so,” Mayne admitted peevishly. He bent a shrewd eye on his man. “You got an idea who, ain’t you?”

“That’s all I have got, just an idea,” Robin declared. “And if I go bellerin’ that idea out loud I might get daylight let through me some day when I ain’t lookin’. I’d ride a lot, if I was you, with a Winchester handy.”

“You seen more’n a dead cow yesterday, kid,” Mayne challenged. “Spit it out. Where was you? What happened?”

Robin told him. But he stopped short of uttering his conviction that one of the riders was Mark Steele. The information he did divulge he cautioned Mayne about keeping to himself. That was as far as he dared go. If Mayne took two drinks too many some day and shot off his mouth about Mark Steele, Shining Mark would go gunning for him, Robin Tyler, not for Dan Mayne.

The old man scowled, tugging at his mustache.

“I’ve suspicioned somebody was workin’ on me,” he said irritably. “This cinches it. Keep your eye peeled for fresh iron-work while you’re with the Block S. I’ll get out and ride. By God!” he snarled in a sudden gust of resentment, “I sure do hate a cow thief. And you ain’t got no hunch who these two was?”

Robin hesitated. There was no guile in him. He was loyal, with the peculiar, single-minded loyalty that speckled Western America with cow-puncher’s graves, from the Staked Plains of Texas to Milk River in the north. No feudal baron ever took the field with more devoted followers than the men who rode for the cattle kings when the range was in its full pastoral flower.

“One of ’em,” he blurted out, “the one that smoked me up, was right flashy with silver. I ain’t namin’ no names.”

Mayne stared at him. His faded blue eyes blinked rapidly.

“Great snakes!” he muttered. “I don’t blame you. That sure makes it bad.”

He scowled reflectively. “The question is——”

“The question is,” Robin finished the sentence in his own way, “is he stealin’ for the Block S or for himself.”

“If he’s stealin’ for the outfit I got about as much chance on this range as a snowball in hell,” Mayne answered moodily. “If it’s his own iron, I got a show. I wish you’d seen what brand went on them calves.”

“I was afoot, I told you. I don’t pack a gun. I ain’t a damn fool,” Robin protested.

“You’re all right, kid.” The old man put his hand on Robin’s shoulder. “You’re no gun man, but you’ll burn your share of powder if you ever have to, I guess. Keep your eyes open around the Block S. I’ll find them fresh-branded calves, if it takes me all fall. And if you’re right——”

He spat angrily into the dust and got down off the fence.

When Robin drew clear of the ranch, jogging behind his string of thirteen mounts, old man Mayne rode out the other way, headed for Cold Spring with a blanket on the back of his saddle and food in his saddle pockets. Robin waved his hat to Ivy a last time before a dip in the rolling land hid the ranch from sight.

A mile above the Bar M Bar he turned his horse back into the creek bed, the same fork of Birch Creek that flowed by Mayne’s house. Willows lined the course of the stream. Under a clump of thick-trunked cottonwoods stood a log cabin and a stable of peeled pine logs, a round corral, all on the edge of a few acres of natural meadow enclosed by a pole fence. Robin reined up at the door. His ponies ambled on a few rods and stopped to graze. He sat half-turned in his saddle, looking about him with a pleased expression.

Ripe grass, yellow in the sun, ran in a rippling wave to the door. Robin had crossed Illinois and Iowa, he had gone more or less hurriedly through the great tier of corn states once or twice in winter. He had never seen wheatfields nor forest nor farmland nor pleasant gardens in midsummer bloom. He knew best the range with its endless miles of grass and sagebrush, peopled sparsely by riders and lonely ranches, grazed by hoofed and horned beasts. He knew the Bear Paws and the Little Rockies and the Sweetgrass Hills, where pine trees grew and wild roses bloomed in thickets under a June sun. The Rocky Mountains were a faint blue wall on the western limit of his journeyings. He had spent most of his years on the great plains that spread east to the Dakotas and south to Wyoming and Nebraska, where northern bunch grass merged into the arid desert of the southwest.

But Robin had imagination, without which indeed few men functioned long on the range, and he could sometimes see this bit of rich black soil about his cabin blooming with color and tender green of grass and shrubs, a bit of the wilderness taking on the atmosphere of a home where beauty was something more than a casual word.

That was why he had claimed and homesteaded this—a half-mile square of creek bottom—in a day when America had millions of acres to bestow on her sons for the asking. Title to it had been issued Robin only a month since. He had proved up. It was his own. The first definite stirrings of the pride of ownership moved in him now. He didn’t see it so much as it was, but as it would be; and Ivy Mayne loomed in the forefront of the picture.

“She’ll be a ranch some day,” he said to Red Mike. “And we won’t have to steal nobody’s calves to get up a herd, either.”

Then he shook up the red horse, fell in behind the others and stirred them to a jog trot that carried him rapidly across the rolling land under the shoulder of the Bear Paw Mountains, toward the Block S camp.

CHAPTER III
MACHIAVELLI?

From the Bar M Bar to Shadow Butte, where the Sutherland riders lay ready to start the fall work, was a matter of three hours’ riding. The round-up was camped under the Butte itself on a natural meadow in Little Eagle, a lovely spot ringed about by groves of poplars and clumps of willows, just where the foothills lifted sharply to the timbered slopes of the Bear Paw Mountains.

Robin’s string, heads up and ears erect at sight of the saddle bunch scattered on the flat, went downhill on the run. Robin himself drew up on the edge of the high bank to have a look. He had seen round-ups sweeping the plains, trail herds coming up from one horizon and vanishing below another ever since he could remember. Wild horses and wild cattle and wild riding had never grown old, commonplace, to Robin. He always thrilled a little to the sights and sounds of range work. Perhaps because he was and had always been a part of it, dimly conscious of its dramatic significance as the greatest pastoral movement in the history of the world, of himself as a minor figure playing a part in a spectacle bigger than any of its actors.

He had risen in his stirrups many a time on last guard to sniff the morning air, to stare at the sun’s brilliant upper segment thrusting above the eastern sky line, shooting yellow fingers across grassland that waved and shimmered like silken crêpe. At such a moment a queer glowing gladness in simply being alive, in being there on the fringe of a sleepy herd with a good horse under him, would give Robin an odd sensation. He got the same feeling when they went thundering down a long ridge, twenty riders abreast, elbows out, reins swinging loose, to the music of jingling bits and spurs, the creak of saddle leather. He had a touch of that strange uplift now, for a moment. An artist with an analytical turn might have defined it as a dumb response to beauty. Robin didn’t attempt to define his feelings. He only knew that when he looked down into Eagle Creek the sight pleased him in a way he could not describe.

The white tents gleamed like snowflakes against the poplar green. The yellow grass spread like a carpet under the feet of two hundred grazing horses, sleek-bodied brutes well broken to range use. Bells on the leaders tinkled as they moved their heads in feeding. The horse wrangler sat on the opposite bank, a lone horseman silhouetted like a statue against the evening sky. Figures moved about the chuck wagon. The smell of coffee and frying beef floated up to Robin’s nostrils. In dry, thin air that doubled the range of the human eye over a sea-level atmosphere and lent an uncanny resonance to sounds, the voices of the cowboys had a mellow ring. Some one was singing a ribald trail song. Half a dozen voices joined lustily in the chorus:

“Comin’ up the Chisholm Trail
I tell you what you’ll get,
A little chunk of bread and a little chunk of meat
Little black coffee with sugar on the sly,
Dust in your throat boys, and gravel in your eye!”

Robin whooped once, long and loud, and jumped Red Mike down the hill. He loosed his reata and slung a noose. Fifty yards short of the wagons he swept like a whirlwind upon the heels of his string, shot the rawhide full length to encircle the head of the horse packing his bed.

Five minutes later his riding gear was stacked under his saddle blanket, and Robin was squatting on his heels by the bed wagon swapping repartee with a dozen riders he knew.

Shortly the cook sounded an alarm. He did not approach these youths where they lounged and say in a softly modulated tone, “Gentlemen, dinner is served.” He seized a dishpan, hammered it vigorously with an iron spoon, shouted raucously, “Grub pi-i-ile!” And the crew swooped down on the chuck wagon like a flock of chickens gathering about the mother hen when she clucked discovery of fat worms.

The riders ate. A couple volunteered to help the cook wash up. The rest withdrew. They sat about the bed wagon, in the bed tent, sprawled on the earth, swapping yarns. They had no cares. Without capital or herds they worked on terms of perfect equality for those who had both in abundance. Their life called for courage, resource, initiative, endurance at divers times and in strange places. Cold, rain, sleet, driving snow, burning sun and buffeting winds, night watches on sleeping herds, rivers in flood, wild horses, lip-cracking thirst allayed by alkali water, days when they rode from sun to sun and slept with their boots on wherever they could lie down—it was all one. They took it as it came. Untrammeled space, action swift and purposeful toward a clearly seen end, work that was always tinged with the excitement of the unexpected, barred monotony from the range. Saving injury, the mishaps incident to what often was necessarily wild riding, the cow-puncher worked or sought diversion in uniformly high spirits. If he had no clear sense of being a unit in Homeric episodes enacted against a spacious and colorful background, he had a rude dignity of his own as well as a sense of humor which frequently took a Rabelaisian twist, so that his phraseology often needed expurgating before it would pass current in polite society. The tales circulating and the cross-fire of talk among the Block S riders needs no repeating, since it had no more to do with Robin Tyler than to make him chuckle now and then as he lay on his unrolled bed.

He had at once noted Mark Steele’s absence. Later some one remarked that Shining was due to eat a cold supper. Then in the dusk Mark Steele and Tommy Thatcher, a lean Texan, noted for his uncanny skill with a rope, rode in and unsaddled. The cook fed them. Mark remained in the chuck-tent, where, with the privilege of the wagon boss, he slept in comparative privacy. Tommy joined his fellows.

“Well, we hit her for Big Sandy in the morning,” he announced.

“Heigh-ho,” one stretched his arms wide. “Me for the high pillow then. Once we hit Lonesome Prairie us and bed’ll be strangers.”

Which was an oblique way of anticipating days in the saddle and nights on guard while the Block S combed the range for marketable beeves.

In twenty minutes silence fell on the camp. The men were in their blankets. The nighthawk relieved the day wrangler and moved his horse herd away from about the tents. A moon swam up and Shadow Butte cast a long black cone toward the northwest. Bells tinkled with distant sweetness where the ponies grazed. Midnight passed. When the few hours of darkness began to wane a lantern broke out yellow in the cook tent. As the first paleness showed in the east the cook lifted his call.

In less than an hour, with the sun heaving up above the sky line the outfit was under way, all their equipment, tents, cooking layout, beds, extra ropes and gear piled high and lashed on two wagons drawn by four-horse teams.

There were few trails and those dim ones over that sparsely settled land. One rider acted as pilot across country. In his wake the chuck wagon led the van. Behind this rattled the bed wagon driven by the nighthawk. Behind these came the saddle herd, urged on by the horse wrangler with a trailing rope. Last of all the riders mounted, shook the kinks out of their fractious horses and broke into a gallop. Some passed the remuda and the wagons. Some jogged leisurely. They rode as they pleased, in pairs, in clusters, at a walk or a gallop.

Robin found himself riding elbow to elbow with Mark Steele, “Shining” Steele. Appropriate name, apart from the beaten silver ornaments with which he adorned his gear, even to a row of conchos down the outer seam of his leathern chaps, for the man himself was like a steel blade, tall, lithe, thin-faced, a rider born and a cowman from his heels up. Mark Steele had come into the Bear Paws unheralded and unsung, and in two years had become range boss of the Block S over the heads of older hands.

He jogged beside Robin, hat pushed back, swaying to the gait of his horse, humming a little tune, his eyes roving over what spread before them as they topped each little rise.

“Mayne give you a good mount, kid?” he asked presently.

“Thirteen head. And I brought along a ridge runner of my own,” Robin answered.

“Uh-huh. You won’t be afoot, then, half the time, like you was with the Pool last spring.”

Mark said it with a smile but there was a sting in the remark, an implied sneer. Robin had joined the general round-up with the Bear Paw Pool that spring, having only ten horses in his mount. Of these one had gone crazy with loco weed, another grew lame. He rode the remaining eight to a standstill trying to hold up his end with men far better mounted. It was neither his fault nor Dan Mayne’s—just ill luck. Saddle horses had vanished, others had got crippled. There was no time to break colts. But both Robin and the Bar M Bar had lost a modicum of prestige. He didn’t thank Steele for reminding him. He knew that with his present string he could take the outside circle and come into camp with the best of the Block S. So he kept silent.

“I was down to Mayne’s night before last,” Steele observed. “You weren’t in sight.”

“Hunting horses,” Robin explained. He knew Mayne, or Ivy, or both, had told Steele that. What business of Mark’s was it, anyway?

“Where’d you ride?” Shining asked quite casually.

“So that’s it,” Robin thought—recalling the dead cows and the rifle shot that put him on the run out of Birch Creek bottom. Aloud he said: “Sand Coulee, Boggy Spring, west side of Chase Hill.”

“Much stock in sight?”

“Quite a lot.”

They rode two hundred yards in silence.

“There’s thieves workin’ on this range,” Shining Mark broke out suddenly.

“The hell you say!” Robin’s surprise was not simulated, but it was surprise at information coming to him from this source.

“I been ridin’ myself some lately,” Mark went on in his crisp tone. “I’ve seen things.”

“What you been drinkin’?” Robin tried raillery.

Steele frowned.

“I seen some pretty fishy lookin’ work,” he growled. “Pretty raw. There’ll be a necktie party when I get it figured out.”

“Well, they can’t steal no cows of mine,” Robin said lightly. “’Cause I don’t own ary a split hoof. You don’t surprise me much. I guess there’s no range in Montana, nor any place where cows run, that there isn’t somebody packin’ a runnin’ iron and draggin’ the long rope now and then.”

“Ain’t you seen nothin’—no big calves with a fresh brand and no mother handy?” Steele persisted.

Robin shook his head.

“If I’d come across stuff like that anywhere in Bar M Bar territory I guess old Dan Mayne would be ridin’ the pinnacles with a Winchester and frothin’ at the mouth,” he drawled. “What’s the brand?”

“I ain’t talkin’,” Steele said darkly. “An’ you keep this to yourself what I say. Sabe? They’re workin’ on the Block S mostly, I expect. But they might not overlook the Bar M Bar. So keep your eyes open, kid, an’ let me know if you spot anything that looks queer.”

Three or four riders behind broke their horses into a lope, came abreast, laughing, elbows flopping like limp-winged birds. Steele and Robin fell into their pace. In a row, bobbing uniformly, hoofs beating out a steady rhythm on the dry turf, they passed the saddle herd, the wagons. The night hawk driving the bed wagon popped his whiplash as they went by. The cook, acting Jehu, braced himself by the four-horse reins, a cigarette in his lips. Far ahead of the wagons they overtook and joined the other riders.

At noon they camped two hours on a creek bottom, ate, caught fresh horses and moved on. Mid-afternoon saw the cavalcade top a rise below which, in the middle of a great gray stretch of sagebrush, the town of Big Sandy lifted a huddle of unpainted buildings. There the chuck wagon would take on a month’s grub, the cowboys would drink Bourbon whisky and play poker overnight, and at dawn the Block S would depart into the wide waste of Lonesome Prairie, to return again in due time with a herd of prime beef cattle two thousand strong.

And all the way to town Robin wondered what Shining Mark was getting at; what was his real object in that conversation. Was he craftily seeking to discover if Robin had been the rider on the sorrel horse who turned over the dead cow to read her brand?

Or was he shooting straight when he promised a necktie party for cow thieves unknown? When Robin gazed at Steele’s easy erectness in the saddle, the flashy ornamentation of his riding rig, he was troubled by a promise of trouble. He was sure, yet not so sure.

More than ever he wished he had been able to see what brand went on those calves that day.

Coupled with uncertainty went the firm conviction that if Shining Mark once linked him with a knowledge of those dead cows and stolen calves, he, Robin Tyler, would need eyes in the back of his head whenever he rode alone.

CHAPTER IV
ONE STEP AT A TIME

The Block S outfit, far into that night, staged a good-natured minor riot in a town whose population of something less than a hundred souls was eighty per cent dependent on Block S activities for its existence. There were half a dozen small ranches within a ten mile radius, men who owned from three to five hundred head of stock. A few sheep-masters with flocks and herders and camp tenders helped put money in circulation there and lent a color—and odor—of their own to the region. Brooklyn-born fiction to the contrary, the cattleman and the sheep owner were not always at each others’ throats. The man on horseback tended to look down on the shepherd who guarded his flocks afoot. In all history the man on horseback has done that. But physical clashes between the two groups only occurred when one encroached too arrogantly on what the other deemed his inalienable rights and privileges.

And all these folk lived under the tolerant shadow of Adam Sutherland, whose Block S marked the ribs of thirty thousand cattle. Sutherland owned the town site of Big Sandy. He owned the general store and operated the post office. If he didn’t own the hotel and the three saloons and the blacksmith shop it was simply because he didn’t care to bother about petty details of commerce. So Big Sandy supported a number of people and activities that were like mistletoe on the parent oak, some ornamental, some possibly useful, but a secondary growth as far as the Block S was concerned.

Sutherland had come into Montana with a beef herd for a military post. He had remained to grow up with the country. He had become big financially. He had been a big man physically. Now that he was no longer young his flesh was becoming a burden. He liked to jog around the home ranch on Little Eagle in the summer, to ride out and watch his men handle stock when the round-up worked near home. He liked to be in Big Sandy when his beef herds were marshaled into the stockyards in a cloud of dust and see the fat steers go rolling east in trainloads. He liked to see his riders have their fling in town. His rule over all that lay under his ægis was beneficent, almost paternal. Adam Sutherland had never heard of such a thing as an efficiency system, but he had its equivalent at his service, functioning smoothly, ungrudgingly. A vision of the future was a phrase he might not have fully comprehended, but he had that too, or he would not have owned thousands of acres of meadow land, the headwaters of mountain streams, a score of unfenced pastures in a country where grass and water were as yet free to all men, in a period when most cattlemen still believed that the great plains must remain a cow pasture for all time to come. The Sutherland holdings dotted the foothills of the Bear Paws in a semicircle fifty miles south and east.

He sat on the counter in the big store now, and greeted his riders as they passed in and out making sundry small purchases. Later in the evening he made the round of the saloons and hotel bar, the Silver Dollar, Monty’s Place, the Exchange, bought a round of drinks for “the house” in each place. Then he went away to his house set off on a knoll to one side of the town, a white, sprawling cottage with a green patch of lawn about it, surrounded by a picket fence to keep out the wandering stock that sometimes strayed wide-eyed into the single street of this frontier hamlet. The fence served also the secondary purpose of keeping out over-hilarious cow-punchers who might mistake the place for something else and in high spirits—both literally and figuratively—undertake to ride their horses up the front steps and along the porch, crying a jovial challenge to those within to come out and “whoop ’er up.”

Mark Steele’s outfit went north into the flat waste of Lonesome Prairie next morning. The Block S cowboys struck town again in something less than three weeks. They had sent a trainload of cattle east from Galata on the high line of the Great Northern. Now they drew up to Big Sandy with a herd seventeen hundred strong, sleek, fat, long-horned beasts moving like an army without banners but armed with spears that glinted in the sun, the slender wide-curving horns inherited from bulls of Andulasian blood.

The outfit camped where the level of the Prairie pitched down to the sagebrush flats. Robin went on first guard with the lights of Big Sandy glimmering two miles distant and five hundred feet below. East, west, north, Lonesome Prairie spread its night-shrouded breadth, an enormous, uninhabited triangle of grassland a hundred miles on each side, with a railway crossing its middle and scarcely a dwelling in all those miles except the dull red section houses where the railroad laborers lived.

Robin jogged his two hours and a half, meeting and passing the other rider, around and around the outer edge of a herd that slept as peacefully as a babe in the cradle, a vast amorphous blot on the shrouded plain. They crooned chanty songs as they rode, not because they loved singing well enough to drone interminable ditties for their hours on watch, but because a rider moving silently in the dark might sneeze, flap a slicker, his horse might stumble—and at a strange noise breaking the night silence that herd would jump the bed-ground as one, in a panic, making the earth shake with the thunder of their flight. So they sang, crooned rather. And the relief coming on at eleven o’clock came droning or whistling to the herd.

“All right. You got ’em. See that you keep ’em.” Robin and his mate jocularly greeted the relief, and departed.

Robin was paired for night work with Tex Matthews, a middle-aged Texan, a quiet, soft-voiced man whose gentle ways were a serviceable mask for a rider who had seen a good deal of wild west in his time. They turned toward camp. Matthews rode a little way, turned to look into the flat below. In the dark and the silence a night breeze sighed, as if the range breathed audibly. The Texan stared at the town lights. Half the Block S crew had ridden in when first guard was set. Sometime before dawn they would come galloping back.

“They’ll be gettin’ action down there, I expect,” he murmured.

“Let’s ride in,” Robin suggested. “I don’t want to sleep, nohow.”

They swung their horses about. In fifteen minutes they were dismounting before the Silver Dollar. That particular house was the favorite resort of the Block S. They patronized all saloons without favor, as a rule, but the Silver Dollar was roomy, clean, it had a billiard table and comfortable chairs. More important, it was conducted by a genial soul who, having been a range-rider himself, knew and welcomed cow-punchers regardless of whether or not they had money to spend over his bar.

Now Robin and Matthews had neither expectation nor purpose beyond a natural hankering for the glow of bright lights, a drink or two—a little diversion, so to speak. They would ordinarily have found some of the outfit, perhaps have played stud poker an hour or two, taken a stirrup cup and departed.

But once inside the door Robin Tyler had a strange intuition of something in the air. Mark Steele leaned on one end of the bar. Three or four Block S men stood or lounged about. A couple of strangers were present. And slumped in a chair against the farther wall sat Dan Mayne. His chin was sunk on his breast. His dispirited mustache drooped more dispiritedly than ever. But he was neither asleep nor in a stupor. Mark Steele regarded him with a smile that was a mixture of contempt and calculation.

“Hello cowboys,” Steele greeted the two. “Couldn’t resist temptation eh? C’mon. Have a drink. Ho, Dan!”

He called Mayne.

“Line up, old-timer. Have a shot.”

“I ain’t drinkin’,” Mayne snarled.

Robin, who had started toward him, and so stood between the two, heard Mayne add a rider to the sentence under his breath—“not with you, damn your soul!”

“No, you don’t drink, do you?” Mark laughed unpleasantly. “You just pour it down, that’s all. Come on, kid,” he spoke to Robin, “line up here. The old man’s on the prod, but the rest of us are sociable.”

Robin hesitated a moment. There was something in the air. There was a subtle shade of the peremptory in that “line up here.” The tone nettled him out of all reason. And he didn’t like the conjunction of Dan Mayne drunk and resentful in the same room with Shining Mark Steele.

“Leave me out this time,” he said casually. “Looks like I better put my boss to bed. I generally have to when he goes on a bust.”

“Suit yourself,” Steele replied tartly. “All the same to me.”

That muttered sentence of Mayne’s was apparently the last coherent speech he was capable of making. Robin got him out of the chair, steadied his uncertain progress across the way to the hotel and half-carried him up to a bedroom.

He sat down beside him, and piled a wet towel on Mayne’s head. In the course of half an hour the thickness of tongue and brain partially cleared.

“You been squabblin’ with Mark to-night?” Robin asked then. He wanted to know. If Mayne had jumped Steele, he, Robin, would be in a difficult situation, working under Steele. Somehow Mark’s attitude promised trouble.

“Naw, not about that.” Mayne understood his meaning at once. “I ain’t a damn fool altogether. But I don’t like that hombre. And I am drunk. When I’m drunk I ain’t got as much sense as I should have about some things. Ivy’s in town with me. Mark he comes ridin’ in about supper time and gets her corraled in the parlor an’ sets there talkin’ the kid black in the face. So I tell him to lay off, that I don’t want no flashy, silver-spangled wagon bosses in my family. I wanted to say cow thief instead uh wagon boss, but I didn’t. Least I don’t think I did.”

“You are a damn fool,” Robin said angrily. “Ivy’s a blamed sight abler to stand off Mark Steele than you are. I’m a darned sight more interested in who she talks to than you are, an’ I sure wouldn’t jump any man for settin’ talkin’ to her in a hotel parlor. Darn it, he comes to the ranch, and you make him welcome.”

“No more,” Mayne asserted with drunken emphasis. “’F he ever jingles his spurs on my porch again I’ll ventilate him.”

After a minute he said thickly:

“I found them dead cows below Cold Spring. I rode a week steady before I located the calves. I found ’em fresh marked. I can’t prove nothin’. But I found ’em.”

“S-sh,” Robin warned. “Not so loud. What brand’s on the calves?”

“T Bar S.”

“Huh! I’ve seen a few around.” Robin wrinkled his brows. “Little bunch was thrown in on the Block S range a year ago. Supposed to belong to some Helena man.”

“Yeah,” Mayne snorted. “I looked into that, too. Helena hell! The T Bar S is registered in Jim Bond’s name. I’ve known him a long time. He keeps a two-by-four saloon in Helena. Never owned a cow in his life. Them T Bar S’s was throwed in here last year, a hundred and fifty head mixed stock. I bet you Mark Steele put up the money. But I can’t prove it. I can’t prove nothin’—yet.”

“Well, if you can’t prove nothing, you can’t, that’s all,” Robin said. “You just got to lay low, and see which way the cat hops.”

“I’m goin’ to ask old Adam to-morrow if he’s got any idea what’s goin’ on around here,” Mayne growled. “An’ I’m goin’ to ride an’ watch. Ride an’ watch,” he repeated darkly. “Ride an’ watch!”

CHAPTER V
WATCHFUL WAITING

Robin rode to camp alone. The Block S riders were all gathered in the Silver Dollar when he came back to where his night horse stood with the others in a row by the hitching rack. Through the windows he could see that a poker game had started. Tex Matthews was playing. Robin didn’t want to drink. With his mind fully occupied he somehow didn’t care to talk. He was aware of a faint reluctance to facing Mark Steele while Mark was in that hair-trigger mood—a trouble-breeding temper, certainly quickened by a few drinks, that might or might not have been generated by something Mayne had said in his cups.

Steele was not rated a quarrelsome man. He could be arbitrary, high-handed, and he had never been known to give way an inch for any one. Even his ordinary genial manner could easily take on an edge. He had no known notches on his gun handle. But whatever obscure inner force it is, that makes some men positive, and others negative, in their human contracts, it resided in Mark Steele, and exacted a certain deference among men who were lightning-quick to resent any form of aggression.

So Robin, deep in his own reflections, swung into his saddle and rode away to camp. If Ivy had not been asleep in her room he would have tarried longer. But he would see her to-morrow. He fell asleep, in a bed unrolled on the grass, with his face turned to the stars. He wakened once when the riders came pattering into camp and got quietly into their beds. A cloudless sky brilliant with specks of silver arched over him, a luminous inverted bowl. Crickets chirped in the grass. Night horses tied to the bed wagon, on picket, made their usual noises. The bells on the remuda tinkled distantly. Small sounds in a deep hush overlying a lonely land. Robin turned over and slept again.

At daybreak the outfit mounted. There was a herd to trim. While the bulk of that seventeen hundred bore the Block S there were strays of half a dozen other brands to be shipped, and these cattle were not jammed indiscriminately into cars to be sorted in Chicago. The cattleman unscrambled his own eggs.

From dawn to noon the flat a mile outside the stockyards was a scurry of dust, flying riders, steers and cows being shot out of the main herd into little bunches held separate. Once sorted by brand and sex each group moved into the shipping pens. By four o’clock the last longhorn was on his way, two trainloads of him.

The riders were free until the following morning, when the Block S would pull south. Thirty miles beyond Birch Creek, beyond the Bar M Bar, Steele would throw his riders on circle again to comb the range for beef. The camp would move day by day toward the railroad as the riders gathered a herd.

But now, as the last door clanged shut on the last animal, the cowboys flung themselves on their horses and charged down on the Silver Dollar. For ten hours they had worked in heat and dust. They were hot and thirsty. Cold beer was nectar to their parched mouths.

Robin stayed with the crowd for one round of elbow-crooking. Then he crossed to the hotel. The Maynes were still in town. He sought the store. As he clanked up the steps he passed Dan Mayne and Adam Sutherland perched on the planking, Mayne talking with emphatic motions of his hands and head, Sutherland big, fat, good-natured, placidly listening, chewing on a cigar. Robin nodded and went on in, looking for Ivy. But in that semi-public place he couldn’t talk to her nor she to him even if she had not been deep in purchases of dry goods aided and abetted by the blacksmith’s wife and the hotel keeper’s daughter. Out of their natural habitat both Robin and Ivy were shy, self-conscious. They exchanged greetings. Robin bought a pound of Bull Durham and took himself off.

Sutherland rose as he came out and ambled away toward his house. Robin sat down beside Mayne. The old man’s eyes were slightly reddened. Otherwise he showed no sign of his overnight tussle with John Barleycorn. His mind was still occupied with cows and cow thieves.

“Sutherland don’t take no stock in any rustlin’,” he complained. “He’s so gol darned sure nobody’s got the nerve to rustle stock on the Block S range. ’Course I couldn’t blat it all. I only told him what I seen myself, an’ not all that either. He just laughed. Said if some of my cows got shot it wasn’t because somebody was stealin’ their calves, but more likely some poison mean galoot had it in for me.”

“How’d he figure calves with no mothers and a T Bar S on their ribs?” Robin inquired.

“I didn’t go that far.” Mayne’s normal caution was to the fore, evidently. “I don’t want to start nothin’ I can’t finish. I got to know more before I go hollerin’ names and brands.”

“I guess that’s good policy,” Robin agreed. “Still, I don’t sabe the play. If it was Mark— Why’d he steal calves for a man in Helena?”

“Bond’s probably a stall. Mark’s either got an interest in that brand or owns it. Naturally he keeps that dark,” Mayne replied sourly. “If them calves had had a Block S on ’em I’d think my chances were slim to make any money in the cow business around here. I thought at first he was workin’ on me to make a good showin’ for the Block S. I never seen a big cow outfit yet that wouldn’t back a wagon boss in anything he did if he could show a good increase from year to year. But when I see that T Bar S I know he’s out for himself.”

“Maybe it ain’t Mark, after all,” Robin murmured. “I’m not dead sure, you know. I went mostly on the flash of silver.”

Robin didn’t say that he had been confirmed in his first impression largely by Mark’s behavior since.

Mayne looked at him peevishly.

“Who’d you think it might be, then?” he inquired. “Or has Mark got you buffaloed so’s you dassent think out loud to me? ’S he been puttin’ the fear uh God into you? You ’fraid of him?”

“I don’t know,” Robin answered truthfully. “He’s done some pretty high-handed things in this country and made ’em stick, hasn’t he? He’d be a bad man to tangle with. He’s never made a gun play that I know of. Still, everybody seems to take him for walkin’ dynamite.”

“He is, too,” Mayne agreed moodily. “He looks it, acts it once in a while. I sized him up as dangerous the first time I ever saw him. Some men are that way. Soon as you look ’em in the eye, you know they’ll be poison if you go up against ’em. Same time, nobody, if he was deadly as a Gila monster, is goin’ to keep stealin’ my stock and get away with it, make me think I like it. I seen plenty wild west before Mark Steele was born. You watch he don’t keep cuttin’ back unbranded stuff on you when the outfit works south of the mountains, Robin. The time to keep cases on him is all the time. If he drags the long rope on my territory after round-up’s over, I bet you I get him before the grass comes up in the spring.”

“Suppose you were dead sure, but had no evidence a stock inspector could make an arrest on, what’ you do?” Robin asked curiously.

“More’n one way of killin’ a cat besides chokin’ it to death with butter,” Mayne drawled cryptically.

As the Block S wagons, saddle bunch and riders traveled south the next forenoon they passed one equipage and were themselves passed by another on the trail that ran to the Sutherland ranch on Little Eagle.

The first was Dan Mayne and Ivy rolling home with a team and wagon. Robin jogged beside them for a mile or so bantering Ivy. Then Mark Steele detached himself from the other riders and joined him, and somehow the light-hearted chaffering between Ivy and Robin ceased. Mark did the talking. He was as genial as the sun. Even old Mayne had to grin. But Robin didn’t. He kept pace and was casual, but he wasn’t happy. And when Mark said: “Well, kid, the outfit’s leavin’ us behind,” Robin lifted his hat and rode on with Steele, in spite of the fact that it was his privilege to join the outfit when he chose. He wasn’t a Block S man. He was a “rep.” But he went.

Steele tightened up as soon as they were clear of the Maynes. It wasn’t anything he said because he didn’t open his mouth. It was his manner, a subtle something Robin could feel. Mark looked back at the team and wagon once. Then he looked searchingly at Robin and smiled—without a word. The mocking flicker in his eyes made Robin uneasy. It was not the first time Steele had manifested an interest in Ivy Mayne, although everybody within fifty miles knew she was Robin’s girl.

“Maybe,” thought Robin, “he thinks he can get her the way he’s gettin’ the old man’s calves.”

They joined the other riders. As they paced along the trail some one noticed a little banner of dust far behind.

“Somebody’s foggin’ it on our track,” Tommy Thatcher remarked.

The “somebody” turned out to be Adam Sutherland, in a fancy buggy, holding taut reins over a pair of standard-bred bays kicking the dust out from under them as if they were hitched to a racing sulky.

The buggy passed like a rider at the gallop. Sutherland nodded. The cowboys lifted their hats when they saw a girl in the seat beside Sutherland. The shiny top was up and all they had was a glimpse. But that was sufficient, for some of them.

“May’s back, eh?” one commented.

Robin had a flash of a pale face, fair hair, bright blue eyes. He knew about Sutherland’s only daughter although he had never seen her until now. She was getting a formal education in the State capital, where Sutherland lived in the winter, and sometimes she came to the home ranch a few weeks in summer. She had been born on Little Eagle when the Block S cattle numbered hundreds instead of thousands. She was good-looking, the cowboys said, and she had been very pleasant to crippled riders laid up at the home ranch, but none of them knew her well. She rode about in the hills a little with her father, and a great deal more alone. The Sutherland riders discussed her freely as the buggy grew small on the trail ahead and disappeared at last over a rise.

“She used to love a good rider,” Amby Phillips said reflectively. “So you bronco fighters can have hope. One time she was half-stuck on a kid that broke horses on Little Eagle—about four years ago, if I remember right. I seen her sit on the fence and clap her hands when he topped off a colt that jumped high, wide an’ handsome. She used to run around with him a lot. An’ one day a bronc went over backward on this kid an’ killed him. She went all to pieces over it, they say. She ain’t been here much since. You know her, Mark?”

Steele nodded. “Met her two or three times,” he drawled. “I was over to the house last night. Nice lookin’, all right. Kinda acts as if she was proud as hell about something, though.”

Old Tex Matthews snickered audibly and Steele flashed a cold glance at him.

“What you say, Tex?” he inquired with exaggerated politeness.

“I didn’t say. But I was thinkin’ that if it don’t rain soon and soften up this ground I’ll have to shoe a couple of horses.”

Steele made no comment. There was a funny little quirk about the Texan’s mouth when he made that answer, and he looked straight at Shining Mark. For some reason there was a brief silence, and after that there was no more mention of May Sutherland. Presently they stirred up their horses and tore down into a creek bottom where the wagons were to stop for noon.

That night they camped under Shadow Butte again. The following day took them far east of Birch Creek, east of the Bar M Bar. The Little Rockies loomed blue on the horizon beyond the broad reach of the Gros Ventre Reservation. On their first ride they picked up a fair sprinkling of beef cattle and Robin cut a score of Bar M Bars into the day herd to throw back on his home range. After that the routine of each day followed its usual order of saddling at dawn, riding circle, bunching the gathered cattle in a compact mass near the camp while they cut out the prime beef and branded such calves as had been missed on the spring round-up. Each day they moved a few miles back toward Big Sandy, working the range on either side of the wagons as far as they could reach in one ride.

Robin noted a T Bar S here and there. Some of the riders knew a Helena man owned that brand. None of them cared about the question of ownership. They were not owners. There were other brands on the range with absentee owners. Somehow, because a generous honesty was the accepted range standard the calves of such got branded with the mark their mothers bore, and the steers got shipped to market. If no special arrangement was made for looking after such cattle the big outfits looked after them anyhow. It kept the range in order. Unbranded stock at large was a temptation to men anxious to build up a big herd off a shoestring foundation. If a rustler could get away with stuff from a little owner he soon extended his operations to the big outfit. To the big cattleman a cow thief was an affront to his jealous sense of property rights—to the man with only a few head the same thief was a poisonous sneak who took the bread out of his mouth while he slept.

Robin went about with his keen eyes wide open. He saw nothing suspicious nor did he expect to see such except by chance. For that chance he was always alert. And within a week, when the Block S worked certain ridges east of Birch Creek chance came his way.

He had noted one thing. Invariably when Mark Steele led his riders on circle and scattered them by twos and threes to make a sweeping drive back toward the wagon, he kept Tommy Thatcher with him. That might have been accident or inclination. Every man has his preferences. If Mark preferred Thatcher’s company there was no one to gainsay his choice. For whatever reason, Thatcher and Steele were Siamese twins when it came to riding the outside. The odd fancy that the T Bar S spelled Thatcher & Steele took hold of Robin’s mind. He knew better. The T Bar S was an old brand. It had changed hands many a time. Still the idea lingered with Robin.

On a certain afternoon the riders finished working a gathered herd. Every outfit, on its home range, took the first cut. When they had finished with the round-up the “reps” could ride in to see if anything of theirs had been overlooked.

Steele waved to Robin.

“Look ’em over,” he invited. “I cut a couple of your cows with unbranded calves.”

Robin had seen that. It was his business to see such things. But he had spotted another cow with a calf well-grown in that milling mass and he knew other men must have seen them also. None of them would mention the fact, unless he asked. A “rep” was supposed to know his business. He turned and twisted in that jumble of moving beasts until he found what he looked for, and cut them into the bunch being held. He knew precisely how many unbranded calves with Mayne mothers were in that cut. While four riders threw the beef into the day herd the rest built a fire, put in the irons. There were perhaps forty calves to be branded. Robin was delegated to run an iron. As each calf came dragging to the fire the roper called the brand of his mother cow. With a dozen men on the job it was soon done.

“’At’s all.” Thatcher stopped and coiled his rope.

“All right. Turn ’em loose,” Steele ordered curtly.

Robin flung himself on his horse and tore after the cattle that were already departing at a trot, running out a noose as he went. He knew what he was after. He had an extremely tenacious memory for animals.

He spotted his objective, swung his loop, took his turns and came back dragging a red calf full six months old. Fifty yards behind a Bar M Bar cow came bawling a loud protest at the maltreatment of her offspring.

The irons had been drawn, the fire partly kicked apart. But when they saw Robin with his calf an iron went back into the coals.

“Good eye, kid,” Steele commented. “They overlooked one on you. Some of these stock hands losin’ their eyesight, I guess.”

No more was said. The calf ran free, squirming at the smarting mark on his side. But Robin wondered how often that sort of thing happened to Mayne cows in the course of the season’s round-up. He couldn’t be everywhere. It was not humanly possible for him to see everything. And he nursed the conviction that any Bar M Bar calf overlooked like that would carry a T Bar S before spring.

It was a tough proposition, he said to himself, a hard game. The cards were stacked; the play crooked.

If he could just once get Mark Steele dead to rights! Robin had never fired a shot in anger in his life. But he felt now, at rare moments, that under certain circumstances homicide was not only justifiable but righteous.

CHAPTER VI
EVIDENCE IN THE CASE

At the outer end of a long ride, a circle which was carrying them deep into the Bad Lands lining the north side of the Missouri River, Robin found himself riding beside Mark Steele after all the other riders save Tommy Thatcher, Tex Matthews and himself had been turned off. They had fallen into pairs. Thatcher and Matthews jogged fifty yards in the rear.

“You mentioned rustlers one time to me,” Robin said guilefully. “I haven’t seen no sign of crooked work. Did you dream somebody was draggin’ the long rope on the Block S range?”

“If you were awake,” Mark retorted, “you might notice that slick-ears is damned scarce in this rough country where there’s generally plenty on account of bunches being missed here and there.”

“Maybe so,” Robin answered. “But I haven’t noticed anything that looked like a maverick totin’ a strange brand, either.”

“Look here.” Shining Mark lowered his voice. “What I said to you and what I say now is not for publication. I told you because you work for old Mayne and I reckon he can’t afford to have his stock stolen. You can tell old Dan what I said if you like—but you can tell him likewise that if I hear any loose talk about cow thieves there’ll be dust flyin’ around him. I know what’s goin’ on. I don’t want no rustler tipped off that I’m on his trail. You tell old Mayne to either keep his face closed or stop drinkin’ whisky.”

“Why don’t you tell him yourself,” Robin suggested mildly.

“I’m tellin’ you to tell him,” Steele drawled coolly. “You’ll see him first, I guess. And that goes for anybody. Sabe?”

He shot the last word at Robin as if it were a challenge.

“Don’t know as I do, but I hear what you say,” Robin answered slowly.

Steele rode along looking sidewise at him now and then. Robin was sensitive to impressions. He felt that this slender and capable range foreman regarded him with suspicion and annoyance, and a touch of contempt. Whether there was more in the back of Mark Steele’s mind Robin couldn’t say. Mark’s words did sound like a threat. Robin suspected Steele meant his message to Dan Mayne to be taken as a threat. It was as if he said, “You fellows keep off my trail or you’ll get hurt.”

It wouldn’t be the first time in the history of the cow business, Robin knew, that a range boss had used his delegated power and freedom of movement to feather his own nest at the expense of other people. Nor would Shining Mark be the first man to grow restive and see red when he found himself in danger.

Robin knew he had to be wary—or blind. Steele was obliquely warning him that he and Dan Mayne had better be blind. But he did not let Steele know that he so understood. He simply said:

“So long as this sight unseen cow thief don’t show his mark on anything belonging to the man I work for, I leave him—or them—to you. The Block S can take care of its own.”

“You’re damned right it can,” Steele said tartly, “long as I run it. I don’t like cow thieves, myself.”

Again that curious repetition, emphasised Robin had no acquaintance with classic literature, or he might have retorted: “Methinks thou dost protest too much.”

As it was he said nothing.

A mile farther Steele pulled up. When the other two came abreast he pointed into a ravine pitching down to a steep-walled canyon.

“You and Tex,” he instructed Robin, “drop in here and get across on top of that other bench. Shove everything from there on back to camp. We’ll take in the flat at the river and come up the bottom of the canyon.”

They parted. When Matthews and Robin reached the high bench across the canyon the other two were near the drop-off into the river, riding fast. Robin reflected that if there were any Bar M Bar cows with unbranded calves in that river flat they would probably stay there. But orders were orders. He couldn’t go one place when he had been told to go elsewhere. A range boss’s word was law on round-up. If a “rep” didn’t like it he could cut his string and go home.

Bunches of cattle dotted the long, narrow plateau they had gained. The wild brutes fled before them until the dry soil smoked under their feet. All they had to do was lope and yell now and then. The cattle could only follow that bench north to the round-up ground. Where Tex and Robin crossed the canyon was the only possible crossing in ten miles.

But though Steele had ordered them to work back from there, between them and the river the bench held other cattle.

Tex rested both hands on his saddle horn and looked south. He frowned. A cow-puncher on circle is supposed to get all the cattle in sight except on ground he knows will be swept by other riders. They were both aware of that. Robin didn’t need to ask what Tex was thinking.

“He wasn’t none too clear, was he, kid?” Tex remarked. “He said to work back. But if one of ’em don’t come up behind us there’ll be a parcel of stuff missed.”

“Let’s linger awhile,” Robin suggested. “See if one of ’em shows up. They’ll be in the river bottom by now.”

They got down off their horses, sought the shade of a clump of jack pine. Half an hour passed. Those distant cattle fed undisturbed.

“If they came up the canyon they ought to be abreast of here now.” Robin broke a long silence.

“Yep. Let’s ride,” Tex muttered.

“Which way?”

“Look into the canyon first.”

A view of that deep gorge, straight-walled, floored with sage, gave sight of cattle feeding quietly between them and the river.

“No riders in sight,” Tex commented. “Maybe they went swimmin’. Reckon we better get those cattle below us on the bench, kid.”

“Mark’ll bawl us out if one of them does come up behind us,” Robin observed. “But I ain’t workin’ for the Block S. I don’t want to miss cattle.”

“We ain’t supposed to miss cattle,” Tex replied. “As a matter of fact I remember now that a man can’t ride up on this bench from the river bottom. Steele and Thatcher got to come up the canyon. I was mixed up on that proposition a couple of years ago on a pack trip down here. Mark knows that too. I guess he forgot.”

They turned and rode south. Because to ride down the bench openly would start every hoof running toward the blind cliff overlooking the Big Muddy they sought the farther side and worked along under the brow, out of sight, until they judged they were south of the last bunch. It was rough going on steep sidehills with loose earth crumbling underfoot, gullies to scramble over, thickets of jack pine to scrub their faces with low branches.

They came out on the bench again less than half a mile from the plateau end. Between them and where they had crossed the canyon at least a hundred and fifty cattle showed.

“Shucks, there sure would have been a bunch of stuff missed,” Tex grunted.

“Let’s take a look into the bottom,” Robin said. “Let’s look at the old Missouri once more for a change.”

“Go look your head off,” Matthews said good-naturedly. “I’ve seen her plenty. I near drowned in her two or three times. She’s no beautiful sight I long to see.”

“All right. I’ll catch you.”

Robin headed for the end of the bench on a high run. He wanted to look. He didn’t know what he expected to see. He didn’t know if there was anything to be seen.

What he did lay eyes on was sufficient to make him whirl his horse back out of sight the moment his eyes peered over the high bank. Then he dismounted, crawled to the rim and lay flat on his stomach, just as he had lain and looked that afternoon on Birch Creek, a deeply interested spectator.