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