CHAPTER VIIA RIDER AND A LADYWhen the Block S hauled in to a camp ground midway between the Bar M Bar and the Sutherland ranch its beef herd numbered close on two thousand head. They were pulling for the railroad. With that herd off their hands one more sweeping of the range between Mayne’s and Big Sandy would end the fall round-up.Robin came off day herd at four thirty of a September afternoon. He was through for the day. He had no guard to stand that night. But when the wrangler bunched theremudain the rope corral strung from the wheels of the bed wagon, he caught a horse just the same.Steele looked at him inquiringly. Robin half expected him to ask the why of a horse. A cow-puncher free of appointed duty came and went as he pleased, giving no account of his movements unless he chose. A “rep” had even wider latitude.It would not in the least have surprised Robin if Steele had overstepped a range boss’s privilege in regard to his movements. Each day in subtle, silent ways, Shining Mark evinced more of a tendency to “ride” him, and Robin couldn’t get away from the idea that Mark was slowly but deliberately working up to a point where the Bear Paws would not be big enough to hold them both. There was a definite limit to what a man could stand. To keep his peace, avoid friction, until Mark crowded him too hard was the only course Robin could see to pursue.With a little more than two hours’ daylight ahead of him he pointed for the Bar M Bar. Whether Steele showed his teeth or not Robin would be true to his salt. If Shining Mark had been thundering on his trail to start a private war Robin would still have ridden home that night to tell Mayne he had better ride those river bottoms and get his calves before Steele and Thatcher got around to them.Mayne would fume, but he would save his stock—unless there were other rustlers in league with Steele. Robin didn’t think that likely. Steele was a lone wolf, not a gangster. That was his clearest impression of the man; that Mark stood on his own feet, played his own hand strictly for his own benefit. If Thatcher was in with him it was simply because Steele could use Thatcher to advantage. Somehow, Robin gave little thought to this Texan confederate of Steele’s. In that he made a slight mistake for which he paid later.He had ten miles to make. As he rode the faint uneasiness that afflicted him most of the time around the Block S, a feeling born of the conviction that Mark Steele would make some break when he least expected it, fell away from Robin. The cool evening air was pleasant on his face. He stood in his stirrups and chanted the interminable rhymed history of Sam Bass, who was born in Indiana but who roamed unto Texas a cowboy for to be. Robin was happy. His lusty young voice kept time to the beat of his horse’s hoofs. He was going to see Ivy for an hour or so. Sufficient unto the day——In a coulee he jumped a bunch of wild horses. As they broke away and tore up the opposite slope Robin spotted among them the gray cow horse he had left a cripple by Cold Spring. In his own round-up mount one horse had gone sore-footed, another had a cinch sore. Robin could not only use another horse but he foresaw tall riding for Dan Mayne, and the gray would be useful. So he fell in behind the broom tails. He had all night to get back. A few miles more or less didn’t matter.He was well mounted but he couldn’t quite head the wild bunch. They raced away northwest from the Bar M Bar and toward the Sutherland ranch as if the devil was on their heels. On the plains as well as the sea a stern chase is sometimes a long one. But after half an hour of headlong galloping he drew up on them. Whereupon the long-tailed mares gave up their frantic effort to get out of the country and settled to a docile trot, permitting themselves to be driven at will. Robin promptly hazed them into a wild-horse corral standing lonely in the creek bottom and there roped the gray.By some kink in his equine make-up the gray had never become properly halter broken. He would not lead as a sensible cow horse should. His progress at a rope’s end was a series of stubborn leg-stiffenings. Robin knew his game. You didn’t lead the gray; you towed him. So Robin saddled him for riding. His other horse would lead at any pace by a grocery cord.Now the gray had fattened and grown high-spirited with weeks of freedom. Something of the wild always lurked in the cow horse until his heart was broken or his legs grew stiff. Robin knew that for about one minute and a half he would have to ride. The gray was a powerful beast, active, deep-chested, hot-blooded. He would sink his head the moment Robin’s leg crossed his back. Once convinced that he couldn’t buck off his rider he would be gentle as a lamb.So Robin tied his sweaty horse to a post and turned loose the broom tails. They left for parts unknown in a cloud of dust. The gray, walking stiff-legged, a decided hump in his back, snorting protest against the tight cinch, he led outside.When Robin topped off a snaky one he liked room; he didn’t like his legs being banged against corral posts. About this corral there lay a flat made to order for bronco busting. It ran level as a lawn for a couple of hundred yards, brown springy turf on which a plunging horse could keep his feet. Robin Tyler could ride any horse that ever lived so long as the brute would stay right side up.He had no special technique, except to get in the saddle and stay there. He doubled the gray’s head back toward his shoulder, put his foot gently in the stirrup, took firm hold of the horn.The moment his weight came on horn and stirrup the gray went in the air—and Robin went with him. The leather leg of hischaparejossmacked against the fender on the off side. His boot went home in the stirrup. He whooped once, long and loud, in sheer exultation at the plunge and shock and twist. The gray wasn’t mean. But he could and did pitch high and hard and fast. The whirl of his contortions took him across the flat with little pieces of sod torn loose and flung aside by his hoofs.Robin rode him straight up as he rode them all. He never admitted it, but he never failed to get a decided thrill out of such a set-to. Not once did the gray show daylight between Robin and his saddle. He held his reins in one hand. With the other he snatched the soft gray Stetson off his head so that the sun made glints on his brown wavy hair while he fanned the gray and taunted him and laughed out loud without quite knowing why he laughed when the horse made his last high, stiff-legged plunge and brought up, breathing hard, rattling the bit in his mouth within a few feet of a clump of quaking aspen that stood on the bank of the creek.“Go to it, Stormy,” Robin encouraged. “If it amuses you, I don’t mind. If you got any more in your system let’s have it out. Then we’ll go home.”The gray’s head was up, his ears erect. Robin touched him lightly with the spurs. Stormy took a step or two. He had got it out of his system, so to speak, and had another matter on his mind for the moment.When Robin’s gaze quite naturally lifted to what attracted the horse he perceived that all unknown he had an audience.A girl sat on a chestnut horse within thirty feet of him, drawn up against the aspens. She was bareheaded. Her hair was yellow, like ripe corn, very short, almost as short as Robin’s. It curled all over her head in little spirals. She had on a white blouse, a flaming orange scarf encircled her white throat, her skirt was divided and of gray corduroy. Her tan riding-boots were armed with a pair of silver spurs that flashed in the sun and reminded Robin disagreeably of Mark Steele. She had big, clear, very dark blue eyes that rested on Robin with a friendly light in them.All these details Robin noted in a breath. His hat was still in his hand. He sat erect in his saddle, staring in sheer astonishment. He wasn’t used to apparitions like that. They were rare indeed on the range. He felt thankful that the whimsicalities he had shouted at Stormy, the gray horse, in that wild progress across the flat had not been expressed in the ribald idioms of the cow camps.“Howdy,” he said politely.The girl smiled and stepped her horse forward.“Are you practicing to join Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show?” she asked.Robin grinned.“Not that you could notice,” said he, cheerfully. “Just ridin’, that’s all.”“You seem to enjoy it,” she observed.“Well, if a cow horse tries to throw me and can’t do it, it don’t make me sad,” Robin admitted.The gray woke up. He plunged twice, swapped ends once in the air, stopped as unexpectedly as he began, and stood fretfully shaking his head. Robin laughed. No horse ever caught him off guard. The gray sidestepped, turned so that he exposed the brand on his shoulder.“Oh. You ride for Dan Mayne, do you?” the girl said. “I’m May Sutherland.”“Robin Tyler’s my name,” he exchanged the courtesy. He was not surprised. He had surmised at first glance that this was Adam Sutherland’s daughter.“So you’re just riding,” she continued in a friendly tone. “I do that myself sometimes—just ride. I thought cow-punchers always rode for a purpose, not just for fun. You certainlycanride.”May Sutherland’s voice was a rather wonderful thing, it suddenly dawned upon Robin—and not because she praised his horsemanship. From that slender figure, pliant as a willow, a man somehow expected to hear a sweet, shrill tone, like a canary twittering. May’s voice was not so much deep, as throaty, liquid. It was like a caress. It stirred Robin curiously. There rose beside this very fair, frank-speaking daughter of a cattle king the image of Ivy Mayne. They were a direct contrast, in looks, manner, speech, in everything—and both alluring. If a man had to choose between them? That vagrant thought startled Robin. Indeed impressions flashed through his mind with such speed that those queer speculations were come and gone without his losing the point of her words or hesitating for an answer. He was reminded by her words that he had a very definite purpose in riding that evening.“I guess a man generally has something on his mind, even when he rides for fun,” Robin told her.He explained briefly why he was riding the gray horse in the cool of evening, all by himself in that lonely bottom, and where he was bound. They rode back to the corral. Stormy was docile now, a very model of high-spirited gentleness. Robin took the lead rope of his other pony. They crossed the creek and rode up on the opposite bank and the range opened before them. The Sutherland ranch lay in a hollow of the hills, masked by pine timber. The Bar M Bar was seven miles south, nestled in Little Birch. Robin could see the contour of the rolling ground behind his own place.Away on the farther edge of the westward plains the sun dipped below the horizon. The Bear Paws loomed over them on the north, a cluster of high peaks notching the sky line like the teeth of a huge saw. The canyons between the mountains were filled with a pearly tinge slowly turning into the first night shadows. All about them a great stillness in which crickets chirped—over them a sapphire sky with streaks of red and touches of pale gold in the west.“Which way you riding?” Robin asked.“I’m not riding. I’m looking,” May said in a low absent tone. “Look!”She waved a gloved hand in a gesture that swept half the horizon. Robin looked. He saw far off the dark line of the Missouri, flanked by the crisscross gashes of the Bad Lands. He saw far beyond the river the Moccasin Mountains, the Snowies, the Belts, pale bluish dabs like so many mirages. He didn’t look for anything in particular. He didn’t expect to see anything of sensational import such as a stampeding herd, or vigilantes pursuing train robbers, or cloud-bursts flooding low ground nor indeed any of the high lights which in other times and places are presumed to be shed almost continuously upon the cattle country. Robin was not obtuse. He had a dim comprehension of what the girl meant when she said “Look!” in that low, tense voice. Robin himself often paused on high ground to look away into those noble spaces—to wonder——May looked inquiringly at Robin now.“What do you see away off there?” she asked.“Room. Lots of room. Room to move around without knockin’ your elbows against somebody or something you don’t happen to like. And it’s pretty—no, that ain’t the right word. You know what I mean, though, I guess,” Robin finished lamely. “I like lots of room, myself.”“Yes, I know what you mean.” She rested her hand on the saddle horn before her and her tone was reflective. “I just wondered if you saw it, or felt it without seeing it. Space and freedom! Freedom without stint and space without limit,” she murmured more to herself than to the cow-puncher beside her. “I wish I were a poet.”She lifted her eyes again to Robin with that slow, faint, friendly smile.“Yes,” she said, “I wondered if you recognized loveliness when you saw it, or if all this great country only means to you grass and water for cows. Free pasture. A chance to make money.”“Cows,” Robin affirmed, “is part of the game. Nobody could live on just scenery. But I guess I’d like to look off across the prairie when the sun’s shining on it anyhow. It’d be just as good to look at if there wasn’t a cow in Montana. Only if there was no cattle here, we wouldn’t be here to look.”“That’s true, of course,” May admitted. “I wonder if cow-punchers generally have that feeling about this country they go galloping over?”“Some of ’em,” Robin hazarded. “Lots don’t. I’ve seen a college cow-hand or two that made up poetry about the range. Most of us haven’t got the education to say or write what we think. We just whoop when we feel good over anything and let it go at that. People from the East reckon we’re part human, anyway.”“I’m not from the East,” May laughed. “I was born here, within sight of where we sit. And if my father hadn’t made a lot of money in cattle I’d probably be like the cowboys—whoop when I felt good, without knowing why. As it is——”She stopped abruptly.Robin turned sidewise in his saddle.“I expect,” said he, “you’re crammed full of education. You’ve read all the books in the world. You can talk like a professor. And play the piano to beat the band. You’ll marry a French count or an English lord and live in a castle, and wear silk dresses all the time.”May rocked in her saddle.“You’re funny, Robin Tyler,” she chuckled. “Is that your idea of the proper setting for a cattleman’s daughter?”“Well, if she’s got thirty thousand cattle behind her I guess the sky’s the limit,” Robin answered dryly.“Possibly. Thirty thousand cattle is the important thing—in men’s eyes.”There was something in her tone that made Robin momentarily uncomfortable. May sat staring off across the rolling land.“If you have to go to the Bar M Bar, then back to the round-up,” she said at last, “you’ll be riding half the night.”“That don’t worry me,” Robin returned. “But I reckon you want to get home before dark, so I’ll drift.”“I don’t particularly care whether I get home before dark or not,” she answered. “I don’t have to stand guard or go on day herd to-morrow. Don’t you sleep now and then?”“I can sleep when there’s nothin’ else to do,” Robin told her. “I wouldn’t waste time sleepin’ if I could sit on a pinnacle and talk to you.”“Do you like to talk to me?” she inquired demurely.“Sure.”“Why?”The point-blank question, half-amused, half-serious, stumped Robin. He had more or less impulsively uttered the truth as it stirred in him at the moment. The “why” he couldn’t answer, except haltingly. But he did his best.“I don’t know, unless it’s because you seem a heap different from any girl I ever came across,” he replied honestly.“Are you sure of that?” May inquired smilingly. “I’m white and past twenty-one. I’ve got hands and feet, a nose and mouth and hair just like other girls. Where’s the difference?”But Robin grew wary of pursuing that inquiry. He was afraid of getting out of his depth, not too sure she wasn’t poking fun at him. Girls did that, he knew. He took refuge in the obvious.“Your hair’s sure different,” he grinned.“It is right now,” May admitted calmly. She ran her fingers through the tangle of short yellow curls. “But it won’t be by and by—when it grows again. I was ill. The fever made it come out. It’s a good cure for vanity to be bald as an egg, even if only for a little while. Let’s ride the way you’re going for awhile—toward the Bar M Bar.”Their horses struck a running walk, that untiring gait of the cow horse trained to cover ground with the least effort. As they rode May and Robin talked, until on a low ridge with twilight drawing in the girl pulled up and held out her hand.“Good-by, Robin Tyler,” she said. “I wonder when we’ll meet again.”“Lord knows,” Robin answered frankly. “If I had nothing to do but sit on a fat horse and let my feet hang down you might see more than you wanted to see of me. But I’m with the round-up until beef-gatherin’s done. By that time you’ll be gone.”“No,” May said. “I’m not going any more for awhile, except when dad goes to Helena or south for the winter. I’m through school.”“Got your diploma and everything?”“Yes. Although I don’t know what good it’s going to do me. If I’d been a boy I’d be on round-up now, myself.”“Tell me,” she asked, as if an afterthought had come, “you know Mark Steele pretty well, don’t you?”“No.” There was an unavoidable crispness in Robin’s tone. “I’ve seen him off and on the last three years. I never worked with him till this fall.”“You don’t like him, do you?” she observed. Her blue eyes burrowed into Robin’s.“I guess I like him as well as he likes me,” Robin said slowly. He didn’t want to talk about Mark Steele.“I don’t like him either,” May murmured. “I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. Yet my father thinks he’s the only thing that ever happened around the Block S.”Robin sat silent. He could discuss Shining Mark to a limited extent with Ivy, freely with old man Mayne—somehow, not with this girl.“I hate the man,” she said sharply. “You won’t repeat what I say?”“You know I won’t—or you wouldn’t say it to me,” Robin told her bluntly. “If you hate him it’s because you’re afraid of him.”May looked down at the ground for a second. She lifted her eyes again to Robin thoughtfully.“I wonder if that’s it? It didn’t occur to me. I have no reason to be afraid of him. But I find myself wanting to avoid him although I’ve only met him three or four times. I rode away from home this evening because my father expected him at the ranch.”“I know men in the Bear Paws that walk away around Mark Steele,” Robin said. “And some that step easy where he is. Some just naturally don’t like him. Most everybody figures he’s a bad man to cross. I guess he knows that, an’ it makes him think quite a heap of himself. I don’t know.”“What do you think of him yourself?” she persisted.“I ain’t sayin’ out loud.” Robin shrugged his shoulders.“That’s wisdom. Probably it’s just as well not to waste either words or thought on Shining Mark Steele. He’s rather gaudily picturesque, with all those silver ornaments on him, isn’t he?” she laughed. “Like a stage cowboy—only he’s real. By the way, there’s to be a dance at the schoolhouse above our place next week. One of the Davis girls told me it was to be timed so our cowpunchers could take it in when the whole outfit got back after shipping this herd. Will you be there?”“If there’s a dance I can get to I’m generally there. Don’t reckon you will be, though.”“I might. I’m no snob.”“I have a sort of idea what that is,” Robin confessed. “But I’m not dead sure.”“A snob is one who looks down on persons he deems of less consequence than himself, and fawns on those he regards as his superiors, either mentally, socially or financially.”“I’ve seen such.”“I don’t know of any in the Sutherland family, thank God,” May breathed.“You can sure sling the English language,” Robin said with a note of admiration in his voice. “Must be a comfort to know all the words there is to say what you want, what you mean.”“Sometimes it is,” May agreed. “But I imagine things can be said and pretty well said, and things done, too, without a great many words.”“Oh, sure,” Robin admitted cheerfully. “Education’s all right. I got enough school into my system to show me that. But it won’t do no work by itself. There was a fellow named Sears in the Black Hills where I was raised. He was a college man. Talked three languages. I’ve seen him keep a whole cow outfit quiet for an hour listening to him when he got tellin’ about things he’d seen and read and knew about. He should have been writin’ stories for the magazines. Well, his old man who was pretty well heeled somewhere east finally died an’ left Sears thirty thousand dollars. First thing he ups and gets married. Then he got him a ranch and about a thousand cattle for a starter. In four years he was broke and his wife run away with a bronco buster from Miles City. Last I heard of Sears he was punchin’ cows for the L7 on the lower Yellowstone.”“Does that illustrate the perils of education?” May chuckled.“Uh-uh. Not to me. Only that education don’t give you a cinch. If you got brains and half a chance you can get an education. If you only got a twice-by-two skypiece all the schoolin’ in the world won’t land you on top of the heap.”“I wonder which crowd I belong to,” May reflected.“Oh, shucks, I wasn’t aimin’ at you,” Robin protested.“I know you weren’t,” she smiled. “Well, maybe we’ll continue the discussion at that dance. Good-night.”This time she was gone, galloping into the twilight. Robin sat looking after her, listening to therat-a-patof her horse’s hoofs until both sound and rider were swallowed in the dark.Then he let Stormy have his head and in half an hour was dismounting at the Bar M Bar. Lights shone in the windows. Old Mayne came to the door. Ivy peered over his shoulder, smiling welcome when the lamplight showed Robin’s face.“I guess I’ll put these nags in the stable for awhile,” Robin said, and Mayne brought a lantern.Sitting on the hewed timber doorsill of the stable once the horses were munching hay, Robin told his boss bluntly just what he had seen and what he surmised.Mayne cursed in impotent fury.“But it might be worse,” he took heart after a bit. “We’re gettin’ onto him. I’ll ride them bottoms. You bet I will. I’ll have to get hold of another cow hand until you’re through round-up, I guess.”“Be careful who you get and what you tell him,” Robin warned. “Steele suspicions me now. He don’t make no breaks but I know he’s thinkin’.”“I wish it was ten years back.” Mayne’s anger rose again. “I’d ride to the Block S an’ shoot that dirty thief like I would a mad dog. But the country’s got so God damned civilized you can’t even kill a thief unless he pulls a gun on you first. They’d bury me in Deer Lodge for life. Adam Sutherland’d never let up. He’d spend a barrel of money to convict a man that shot that pet snake of his. Don’t you let him provoke you, Robin. If he thinks you know too much he’ll pick a row with you an’ make you start somethin’. Then he’ll put your light out an’ it’ll be a clear case of self-defense for him. Or he’ll make you quit the country.”Robin didn’t need Mayne to tell him these things. It was only putting in plain English just what had been gathering in his own mind—just what he felt to be the secret thought Steele nursed. So he didn’t discuss that phase of it at all. He had said his say, had done his duty. He rose.“I’m goin’ to see Ivy,” he told Mayne. “Then I guess I’ll split the breeze.”An hour later he was loping steadily through the night, Ivy’s farewell kiss on his lips, but with his mind strangely divided between his sweetheart and May Sutherland.May was beautiful and so was Ivy Mayne, each in her own fashion. But May’s liquid, throaty voice lingered like an echo of faint music in Robin’s ears. Robin was unread in the nuances of feeling but no man can escape the subtle thing called charm. May was so utterly free from archness, little coquetries. She was so honest and direct. If she had challenged something dormant in him with all the weapons of her sex, it was an unconscious challenge.Spaces and freedom! Robin looked up at the stars and wondered how she would have described that luminous, silver-spangled sky, what feelings would have moved her and what she would have said if she had been riding knee to knee with him across those rolling plains, guided by the Big Dipper and an instinctive sense of location. He knew quite well what Ivy would say, but what she would feel he doubted if she would know herself, because Ivy was a curiously dumb soul. Expression was strangled in her. She could only act, and act often with the driving impulse terribly obscured. In all their companionship Robin had been compelled to gauge Ivy’s deepest thoughts and feelings by outward manifestation alone.It seemed to Robin a wonderful thing to meet a girl who could talk in clear simple words about what she thought and felt about such puzzling sensations as came over a man when he looked at the vastness and wonder and mystery of the world he lived in. That quality of wonder, of space and time in which man danced his little turn and danced no more, in which there seemed much disorder but in which there seemed also a Law and a Pattern and a Purpose if a man could only discover what it was, had troubled Robin for a long time.She had been glad to sit there on her horse talking to him, to ride with him a few miles when she could just as well have ridden the other way. Robin knew that May wanted to see him again. She wanted him to come to that dance. There was no conceit in that certainty. He felt it. And he was troubled just a little. He wasn’t sure it would be wise for him. His future, the immediate future which should logically extend into the remote, was linked close with Ivy Mayne’s, and as he rode toward the Block S Robin did not dream of it being otherwise, did not even harbor the secret wish that it should be otherwise. He could admire anything that was lovely without any sense of being fickle or faithless. But he did have a faint apprehension that it would not be well for any of them if he should admire May Sutherland too long or at too close range.Still, Robin had his due share of masculine curiosity along with other male virtues and he did wonder why May seemed to like him. Since most of the mental experience of his life had been objective rather than introspective or analytical, it didn’t occur to Robin that neither wealth nor education nor a considerable knowledge of the world beyond the cow ranges made any great difference to a woman’s feelings as regards a man—not if that man was young, straight as an arrow, as blithe as Pan on a holiday and rode like a centaur for sheer joy of motion. Nor did Robin know that both men and women liked him for qualities it would have taken a May Sutherland fresh from a university to grasp and define. He only knew that people did like him, trusted him—he had never felt the venom of ill feeling until he came up against Mark Steele. Robin had gone joyously up and down the length of three states without ever drawing a gun or striking a blow in anger. He had seen both happen. He had never been so involved. Trouble had always passed him by until now.Well, men did go wrong, and the up-and-coming kind like Mark Steele went to hell with bells on when they did go wrong. He would have to be careful. And if trouble came he would have to cope with it as best he could.That was the philosophic reflection Robin took to bed with him in the Block S camp somewhere near midnight.
When the Block S hauled in to a camp ground midway between the Bar M Bar and the Sutherland ranch its beef herd numbered close on two thousand head. They were pulling for the railroad. With that herd off their hands one more sweeping of the range between Mayne’s and Big Sandy would end the fall round-up.
Robin came off day herd at four thirty of a September afternoon. He was through for the day. He had no guard to stand that night. But when the wrangler bunched theremudain the rope corral strung from the wheels of the bed wagon, he caught a horse just the same.
Steele looked at him inquiringly. Robin half expected him to ask the why of a horse. A cow-puncher free of appointed duty came and went as he pleased, giving no account of his movements unless he chose. A “rep” had even wider latitude.
It would not in the least have surprised Robin if Steele had overstepped a range boss’s privilege in regard to his movements. Each day in subtle, silent ways, Shining Mark evinced more of a tendency to “ride” him, and Robin couldn’t get away from the idea that Mark was slowly but deliberately working up to a point where the Bear Paws would not be big enough to hold them both. There was a definite limit to what a man could stand. To keep his peace, avoid friction, until Mark crowded him too hard was the only course Robin could see to pursue.
With a little more than two hours’ daylight ahead of him he pointed for the Bar M Bar. Whether Steele showed his teeth or not Robin would be true to his salt. If Shining Mark had been thundering on his trail to start a private war Robin would still have ridden home that night to tell Mayne he had better ride those river bottoms and get his calves before Steele and Thatcher got around to them.
Mayne would fume, but he would save his stock—unless there were other rustlers in league with Steele. Robin didn’t think that likely. Steele was a lone wolf, not a gangster. That was his clearest impression of the man; that Mark stood on his own feet, played his own hand strictly for his own benefit. If Thatcher was in with him it was simply because Steele could use Thatcher to advantage. Somehow, Robin gave little thought to this Texan confederate of Steele’s. In that he made a slight mistake for which he paid later.
He had ten miles to make. As he rode the faint uneasiness that afflicted him most of the time around the Block S, a feeling born of the conviction that Mark Steele would make some break when he least expected it, fell away from Robin. The cool evening air was pleasant on his face. He stood in his stirrups and chanted the interminable rhymed history of Sam Bass, who was born in Indiana but who roamed unto Texas a cowboy for to be. Robin was happy. His lusty young voice kept time to the beat of his horse’s hoofs. He was going to see Ivy for an hour or so. Sufficient unto the day——
In a coulee he jumped a bunch of wild horses. As they broke away and tore up the opposite slope Robin spotted among them the gray cow horse he had left a cripple by Cold Spring. In his own round-up mount one horse had gone sore-footed, another had a cinch sore. Robin could not only use another horse but he foresaw tall riding for Dan Mayne, and the gray would be useful. So he fell in behind the broom tails. He had all night to get back. A few miles more or less didn’t matter.
He was well mounted but he couldn’t quite head the wild bunch. They raced away northwest from the Bar M Bar and toward the Sutherland ranch as if the devil was on their heels. On the plains as well as the sea a stern chase is sometimes a long one. But after half an hour of headlong galloping he drew up on them. Whereupon the long-tailed mares gave up their frantic effort to get out of the country and settled to a docile trot, permitting themselves to be driven at will. Robin promptly hazed them into a wild-horse corral standing lonely in the creek bottom and there roped the gray.
By some kink in his equine make-up the gray had never become properly halter broken. He would not lead as a sensible cow horse should. His progress at a rope’s end was a series of stubborn leg-stiffenings. Robin knew his game. You didn’t lead the gray; you towed him. So Robin saddled him for riding. His other horse would lead at any pace by a grocery cord.
Now the gray had fattened and grown high-spirited with weeks of freedom. Something of the wild always lurked in the cow horse until his heart was broken or his legs grew stiff. Robin knew that for about one minute and a half he would have to ride. The gray was a powerful beast, active, deep-chested, hot-blooded. He would sink his head the moment Robin’s leg crossed his back. Once convinced that he couldn’t buck off his rider he would be gentle as a lamb.
So Robin tied his sweaty horse to a post and turned loose the broom tails. They left for parts unknown in a cloud of dust. The gray, walking stiff-legged, a decided hump in his back, snorting protest against the tight cinch, he led outside.
When Robin topped off a snaky one he liked room; he didn’t like his legs being banged against corral posts. About this corral there lay a flat made to order for bronco busting. It ran level as a lawn for a couple of hundred yards, brown springy turf on which a plunging horse could keep his feet. Robin Tyler could ride any horse that ever lived so long as the brute would stay right side up.
He had no special technique, except to get in the saddle and stay there. He doubled the gray’s head back toward his shoulder, put his foot gently in the stirrup, took firm hold of the horn.
The moment his weight came on horn and stirrup the gray went in the air—and Robin went with him. The leather leg of hischaparejossmacked against the fender on the off side. His boot went home in the stirrup. He whooped once, long and loud, in sheer exultation at the plunge and shock and twist. The gray wasn’t mean. But he could and did pitch high and hard and fast. The whirl of his contortions took him across the flat with little pieces of sod torn loose and flung aside by his hoofs.
Robin rode him straight up as he rode them all. He never admitted it, but he never failed to get a decided thrill out of such a set-to. Not once did the gray show daylight between Robin and his saddle. He held his reins in one hand. With the other he snatched the soft gray Stetson off his head so that the sun made glints on his brown wavy hair while he fanned the gray and taunted him and laughed out loud without quite knowing why he laughed when the horse made his last high, stiff-legged plunge and brought up, breathing hard, rattling the bit in his mouth within a few feet of a clump of quaking aspen that stood on the bank of the creek.
“Go to it, Stormy,” Robin encouraged. “If it amuses you, I don’t mind. If you got any more in your system let’s have it out. Then we’ll go home.”
The gray’s head was up, his ears erect. Robin touched him lightly with the spurs. Stormy took a step or two. He had got it out of his system, so to speak, and had another matter on his mind for the moment.
When Robin’s gaze quite naturally lifted to what attracted the horse he perceived that all unknown he had an audience.
A girl sat on a chestnut horse within thirty feet of him, drawn up against the aspens. She was bareheaded. Her hair was yellow, like ripe corn, very short, almost as short as Robin’s. It curled all over her head in little spirals. She had on a white blouse, a flaming orange scarf encircled her white throat, her skirt was divided and of gray corduroy. Her tan riding-boots were armed with a pair of silver spurs that flashed in the sun and reminded Robin disagreeably of Mark Steele. She had big, clear, very dark blue eyes that rested on Robin with a friendly light in them.
All these details Robin noted in a breath. His hat was still in his hand. He sat erect in his saddle, staring in sheer astonishment. He wasn’t used to apparitions like that. They were rare indeed on the range. He felt thankful that the whimsicalities he had shouted at Stormy, the gray horse, in that wild progress across the flat had not been expressed in the ribald idioms of the cow camps.
“Howdy,” he said politely.
The girl smiled and stepped her horse forward.
“Are you practicing to join Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show?” she asked.
Robin grinned.
“Not that you could notice,” said he, cheerfully. “Just ridin’, that’s all.”
“You seem to enjoy it,” she observed.
“Well, if a cow horse tries to throw me and can’t do it, it don’t make me sad,” Robin admitted.
The gray woke up. He plunged twice, swapped ends once in the air, stopped as unexpectedly as he began, and stood fretfully shaking his head. Robin laughed. No horse ever caught him off guard. The gray sidestepped, turned so that he exposed the brand on his shoulder.
“Oh. You ride for Dan Mayne, do you?” the girl said. “I’m May Sutherland.”
“Robin Tyler’s my name,” he exchanged the courtesy. He was not surprised. He had surmised at first glance that this was Adam Sutherland’s daughter.
“So you’re just riding,” she continued in a friendly tone. “I do that myself sometimes—just ride. I thought cow-punchers always rode for a purpose, not just for fun. You certainlycanride.”
May Sutherland’s voice was a rather wonderful thing, it suddenly dawned upon Robin—and not because she praised his horsemanship. From that slender figure, pliant as a willow, a man somehow expected to hear a sweet, shrill tone, like a canary twittering. May’s voice was not so much deep, as throaty, liquid. It was like a caress. It stirred Robin curiously. There rose beside this very fair, frank-speaking daughter of a cattle king the image of Ivy Mayne. They were a direct contrast, in looks, manner, speech, in everything—and both alluring. If a man had to choose between them? That vagrant thought startled Robin. Indeed impressions flashed through his mind with such speed that those queer speculations were come and gone without his losing the point of her words or hesitating for an answer. He was reminded by her words that he had a very definite purpose in riding that evening.
“I guess a man generally has something on his mind, even when he rides for fun,” Robin told her.
He explained briefly why he was riding the gray horse in the cool of evening, all by himself in that lonely bottom, and where he was bound. They rode back to the corral. Stormy was docile now, a very model of high-spirited gentleness. Robin took the lead rope of his other pony. They crossed the creek and rode up on the opposite bank and the range opened before them. The Sutherland ranch lay in a hollow of the hills, masked by pine timber. The Bar M Bar was seven miles south, nestled in Little Birch. Robin could see the contour of the rolling ground behind his own place.
Away on the farther edge of the westward plains the sun dipped below the horizon. The Bear Paws loomed over them on the north, a cluster of high peaks notching the sky line like the teeth of a huge saw. The canyons between the mountains were filled with a pearly tinge slowly turning into the first night shadows. All about them a great stillness in which crickets chirped—over them a sapphire sky with streaks of red and touches of pale gold in the west.
“Which way you riding?” Robin asked.
“I’m not riding. I’m looking,” May said in a low absent tone. “Look!”
She waved a gloved hand in a gesture that swept half the horizon. Robin looked. He saw far off the dark line of the Missouri, flanked by the crisscross gashes of the Bad Lands. He saw far beyond the river the Moccasin Mountains, the Snowies, the Belts, pale bluish dabs like so many mirages. He didn’t look for anything in particular. He didn’t expect to see anything of sensational import such as a stampeding herd, or vigilantes pursuing train robbers, or cloud-bursts flooding low ground nor indeed any of the high lights which in other times and places are presumed to be shed almost continuously upon the cattle country. Robin was not obtuse. He had a dim comprehension of what the girl meant when she said “Look!” in that low, tense voice. Robin himself often paused on high ground to look away into those noble spaces—to wonder——
May looked inquiringly at Robin now.
“What do you see away off there?” she asked.
“Room. Lots of room. Room to move around without knockin’ your elbows against somebody or something you don’t happen to like. And it’s pretty—no, that ain’t the right word. You know what I mean, though, I guess,” Robin finished lamely. “I like lots of room, myself.”
“Yes, I know what you mean.” She rested her hand on the saddle horn before her and her tone was reflective. “I just wondered if you saw it, or felt it without seeing it. Space and freedom! Freedom without stint and space without limit,” she murmured more to herself than to the cow-puncher beside her. “I wish I were a poet.”
She lifted her eyes again to Robin with that slow, faint, friendly smile.
“Yes,” she said, “I wondered if you recognized loveliness when you saw it, or if all this great country only means to you grass and water for cows. Free pasture. A chance to make money.”
“Cows,” Robin affirmed, “is part of the game. Nobody could live on just scenery. But I guess I’d like to look off across the prairie when the sun’s shining on it anyhow. It’d be just as good to look at if there wasn’t a cow in Montana. Only if there was no cattle here, we wouldn’t be here to look.”
“That’s true, of course,” May admitted. “I wonder if cow-punchers generally have that feeling about this country they go galloping over?”
“Some of ’em,” Robin hazarded. “Lots don’t. I’ve seen a college cow-hand or two that made up poetry about the range. Most of us haven’t got the education to say or write what we think. We just whoop when we feel good over anything and let it go at that. People from the East reckon we’re part human, anyway.”
“I’m not from the East,” May laughed. “I was born here, within sight of where we sit. And if my father hadn’t made a lot of money in cattle I’d probably be like the cowboys—whoop when I felt good, without knowing why. As it is——”
She stopped abruptly.
Robin turned sidewise in his saddle.
“I expect,” said he, “you’re crammed full of education. You’ve read all the books in the world. You can talk like a professor. And play the piano to beat the band. You’ll marry a French count or an English lord and live in a castle, and wear silk dresses all the time.”
May rocked in her saddle.
“You’re funny, Robin Tyler,” she chuckled. “Is that your idea of the proper setting for a cattleman’s daughter?”
“Well, if she’s got thirty thousand cattle behind her I guess the sky’s the limit,” Robin answered dryly.
“Possibly. Thirty thousand cattle is the important thing—in men’s eyes.”
There was something in her tone that made Robin momentarily uncomfortable. May sat staring off across the rolling land.
“If you have to go to the Bar M Bar, then back to the round-up,” she said at last, “you’ll be riding half the night.”
“That don’t worry me,” Robin returned. “But I reckon you want to get home before dark, so I’ll drift.”
“I don’t particularly care whether I get home before dark or not,” she answered. “I don’t have to stand guard or go on day herd to-morrow. Don’t you sleep now and then?”
“I can sleep when there’s nothin’ else to do,” Robin told her. “I wouldn’t waste time sleepin’ if I could sit on a pinnacle and talk to you.”
“Do you like to talk to me?” she inquired demurely.
“Sure.”
“Why?”
The point-blank question, half-amused, half-serious, stumped Robin. He had more or less impulsively uttered the truth as it stirred in him at the moment. The “why” he couldn’t answer, except haltingly. But he did his best.
“I don’t know, unless it’s because you seem a heap different from any girl I ever came across,” he replied honestly.
“Are you sure of that?” May inquired smilingly. “I’m white and past twenty-one. I’ve got hands and feet, a nose and mouth and hair just like other girls. Where’s the difference?”
But Robin grew wary of pursuing that inquiry. He was afraid of getting out of his depth, not too sure she wasn’t poking fun at him. Girls did that, he knew. He took refuge in the obvious.
“Your hair’s sure different,” he grinned.
“It is right now,” May admitted calmly. She ran her fingers through the tangle of short yellow curls. “But it won’t be by and by—when it grows again. I was ill. The fever made it come out. It’s a good cure for vanity to be bald as an egg, even if only for a little while. Let’s ride the way you’re going for awhile—toward the Bar M Bar.”
Their horses struck a running walk, that untiring gait of the cow horse trained to cover ground with the least effort. As they rode May and Robin talked, until on a low ridge with twilight drawing in the girl pulled up and held out her hand.
“Good-by, Robin Tyler,” she said. “I wonder when we’ll meet again.”
“Lord knows,” Robin answered frankly. “If I had nothing to do but sit on a fat horse and let my feet hang down you might see more than you wanted to see of me. But I’m with the round-up until beef-gatherin’s done. By that time you’ll be gone.”
“No,” May said. “I’m not going any more for awhile, except when dad goes to Helena or south for the winter. I’m through school.”
“Got your diploma and everything?”
“Yes. Although I don’t know what good it’s going to do me. If I’d been a boy I’d be on round-up now, myself.”
“Tell me,” she asked, as if an afterthought had come, “you know Mark Steele pretty well, don’t you?”
“No.” There was an unavoidable crispness in Robin’s tone. “I’ve seen him off and on the last three years. I never worked with him till this fall.”
“You don’t like him, do you?” she observed. Her blue eyes burrowed into Robin’s.
“I guess I like him as well as he likes me,” Robin said slowly. He didn’t want to talk about Mark Steele.
“I don’t like him either,” May murmured. “I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. Yet my father thinks he’s the only thing that ever happened around the Block S.”
Robin sat silent. He could discuss Shining Mark to a limited extent with Ivy, freely with old man Mayne—somehow, not with this girl.
“I hate the man,” she said sharply. “You won’t repeat what I say?”
“You know I won’t—or you wouldn’t say it to me,” Robin told her bluntly. “If you hate him it’s because you’re afraid of him.”
May looked down at the ground for a second. She lifted her eyes again to Robin thoughtfully.
“I wonder if that’s it? It didn’t occur to me. I have no reason to be afraid of him. But I find myself wanting to avoid him although I’ve only met him three or four times. I rode away from home this evening because my father expected him at the ranch.”
“I know men in the Bear Paws that walk away around Mark Steele,” Robin said. “And some that step easy where he is. Some just naturally don’t like him. Most everybody figures he’s a bad man to cross. I guess he knows that, an’ it makes him think quite a heap of himself. I don’t know.”
“What do you think of him yourself?” she persisted.
“I ain’t sayin’ out loud.” Robin shrugged his shoulders.
“That’s wisdom. Probably it’s just as well not to waste either words or thought on Shining Mark Steele. He’s rather gaudily picturesque, with all those silver ornaments on him, isn’t he?” she laughed. “Like a stage cowboy—only he’s real. By the way, there’s to be a dance at the schoolhouse above our place next week. One of the Davis girls told me it was to be timed so our cowpunchers could take it in when the whole outfit got back after shipping this herd. Will you be there?”
“If there’s a dance I can get to I’m generally there. Don’t reckon you will be, though.”
“I might. I’m no snob.”
“I have a sort of idea what that is,” Robin confessed. “But I’m not dead sure.”
“A snob is one who looks down on persons he deems of less consequence than himself, and fawns on those he regards as his superiors, either mentally, socially or financially.”
“I’ve seen such.”
“I don’t know of any in the Sutherland family, thank God,” May breathed.
“You can sure sling the English language,” Robin said with a note of admiration in his voice. “Must be a comfort to know all the words there is to say what you want, what you mean.”
“Sometimes it is,” May agreed. “But I imagine things can be said and pretty well said, and things done, too, without a great many words.”
“Oh, sure,” Robin admitted cheerfully. “Education’s all right. I got enough school into my system to show me that. But it won’t do no work by itself. There was a fellow named Sears in the Black Hills where I was raised. He was a college man. Talked three languages. I’ve seen him keep a whole cow outfit quiet for an hour listening to him when he got tellin’ about things he’d seen and read and knew about. He should have been writin’ stories for the magazines. Well, his old man who was pretty well heeled somewhere east finally died an’ left Sears thirty thousand dollars. First thing he ups and gets married. Then he got him a ranch and about a thousand cattle for a starter. In four years he was broke and his wife run away with a bronco buster from Miles City. Last I heard of Sears he was punchin’ cows for the L7 on the lower Yellowstone.”
“Does that illustrate the perils of education?” May chuckled.
“Uh-uh. Not to me. Only that education don’t give you a cinch. If you got brains and half a chance you can get an education. If you only got a twice-by-two skypiece all the schoolin’ in the world won’t land you on top of the heap.”
“I wonder which crowd I belong to,” May reflected.
“Oh, shucks, I wasn’t aimin’ at you,” Robin protested.
“I know you weren’t,” she smiled. “Well, maybe we’ll continue the discussion at that dance. Good-night.”
This time she was gone, galloping into the twilight. Robin sat looking after her, listening to therat-a-patof her horse’s hoofs until both sound and rider were swallowed in the dark.
Then he let Stormy have his head and in half an hour was dismounting at the Bar M Bar. Lights shone in the windows. Old Mayne came to the door. Ivy peered over his shoulder, smiling welcome when the lamplight showed Robin’s face.
“I guess I’ll put these nags in the stable for awhile,” Robin said, and Mayne brought a lantern.
Sitting on the hewed timber doorsill of the stable once the horses were munching hay, Robin told his boss bluntly just what he had seen and what he surmised.
Mayne cursed in impotent fury.
“But it might be worse,” he took heart after a bit. “We’re gettin’ onto him. I’ll ride them bottoms. You bet I will. I’ll have to get hold of another cow hand until you’re through round-up, I guess.”
“Be careful who you get and what you tell him,” Robin warned. “Steele suspicions me now. He don’t make no breaks but I know he’s thinkin’.”
“I wish it was ten years back.” Mayne’s anger rose again. “I’d ride to the Block S an’ shoot that dirty thief like I would a mad dog. But the country’s got so God damned civilized you can’t even kill a thief unless he pulls a gun on you first. They’d bury me in Deer Lodge for life. Adam Sutherland’d never let up. He’d spend a barrel of money to convict a man that shot that pet snake of his. Don’t you let him provoke you, Robin. If he thinks you know too much he’ll pick a row with you an’ make you start somethin’. Then he’ll put your light out an’ it’ll be a clear case of self-defense for him. Or he’ll make you quit the country.”
Robin didn’t need Mayne to tell him these things. It was only putting in plain English just what had been gathering in his own mind—just what he felt to be the secret thought Steele nursed. So he didn’t discuss that phase of it at all. He had said his say, had done his duty. He rose.
“I’m goin’ to see Ivy,” he told Mayne. “Then I guess I’ll split the breeze.”
An hour later he was loping steadily through the night, Ivy’s farewell kiss on his lips, but with his mind strangely divided between his sweetheart and May Sutherland.
May was beautiful and so was Ivy Mayne, each in her own fashion. But May’s liquid, throaty voice lingered like an echo of faint music in Robin’s ears. Robin was unread in the nuances of feeling but no man can escape the subtle thing called charm. May was so utterly free from archness, little coquetries. She was so honest and direct. If she had challenged something dormant in him with all the weapons of her sex, it was an unconscious challenge.
Spaces and freedom! Robin looked up at the stars and wondered how she would have described that luminous, silver-spangled sky, what feelings would have moved her and what she would have said if she had been riding knee to knee with him across those rolling plains, guided by the Big Dipper and an instinctive sense of location. He knew quite well what Ivy would say, but what she would feel he doubted if she would know herself, because Ivy was a curiously dumb soul. Expression was strangled in her. She could only act, and act often with the driving impulse terribly obscured. In all their companionship Robin had been compelled to gauge Ivy’s deepest thoughts and feelings by outward manifestation alone.
It seemed to Robin a wonderful thing to meet a girl who could talk in clear simple words about what she thought and felt about such puzzling sensations as came over a man when he looked at the vastness and wonder and mystery of the world he lived in. That quality of wonder, of space and time in which man danced his little turn and danced no more, in which there seemed much disorder but in which there seemed also a Law and a Pattern and a Purpose if a man could only discover what it was, had troubled Robin for a long time.
She had been glad to sit there on her horse talking to him, to ride with him a few miles when she could just as well have ridden the other way. Robin knew that May wanted to see him again. She wanted him to come to that dance. There was no conceit in that certainty. He felt it. And he was troubled just a little. He wasn’t sure it would be wise for him. His future, the immediate future which should logically extend into the remote, was linked close with Ivy Mayne’s, and as he rode toward the Block S Robin did not dream of it being otherwise, did not even harbor the secret wish that it should be otherwise. He could admire anything that was lovely without any sense of being fickle or faithless. But he did have a faint apprehension that it would not be well for any of them if he should admire May Sutherland too long or at too close range.
Still, Robin had his due share of masculine curiosity along with other male virtues and he did wonder why May seemed to like him. Since most of the mental experience of his life had been objective rather than introspective or analytical, it didn’t occur to Robin that neither wealth nor education nor a considerable knowledge of the world beyond the cow ranges made any great difference to a woman’s feelings as regards a man—not if that man was young, straight as an arrow, as blithe as Pan on a holiday and rode like a centaur for sheer joy of motion. Nor did Robin know that both men and women liked him for qualities it would have taken a May Sutherland fresh from a university to grasp and define. He only knew that people did like him, trusted him—he had never felt the venom of ill feeling until he came up against Mark Steele. Robin had gone joyously up and down the length of three states without ever drawing a gun or striking a blow in anger. He had seen both happen. He had never been so involved. Trouble had always passed him by until now.
Well, men did go wrong, and the up-and-coming kind like Mark Steele went to hell with bells on when they did go wrong. He would have to be careful. And if trouble came he would have to cope with it as best he could.
That was the philosophic reflection Robin took to bed with him in the Block S camp somewhere near midnight.