CHAPTER XVIIA CHALLENGEBefore dawn Robin saddled and headed south on the trail of Red Mike. Minus supper and breakfast he was hungry. But his mount was fresh and fed with grazing in the little pasture. Robin was tough. A meal more or less didn’t greatly matter. And sunrise brought him a happier mood. Luck also bestowed a double quantum as if to make up for past niggardliness. Ten miles from the Bar M Bar he ate hot cakes and coffee with a lowly sheep herder tending his flock on the northern flank of Chase Hill. Within an hour of that camp he found his sorrel horse, ranging as the cow horse at liberty was wont to range, with a band of the untamed.The wild bunch broke headlong in the general direction of the Bar M Bar. Robin fell in behind them. The direction suited his book. He had a bed roll and a packsaddle still at Mayne’s, and a cow-puncher’s bed was part of his working outfit. He would need that bedding.So he loped behind the wild horses until they ran themselves out. Once Robin caught up and jogged at their heels he headed them where he wished. With rope ready he watched his chance. A touch of the spurs, a deft throw, and the rawhide noose closed about Red Mike’s burnished copper neck.Robin led him on to Mayne’s, changed his saddle to Red Mike’s back and lashed his bedding on the livery horse. He saw Ivy’s face for a moment at a window. Her father strolled over to say a word or two. Robin answered in monosyllables, not because he was still angry or resentful—that had all evaporated—but because there was nothing more to say. When the last hitch was taken in the pack rope he rode on.He slept that night at a horse ranch in the foothills halfway between Shadow Butte and Big Sandy. Before noon he was in sight of the town, the pack horse trotting to keep up with Red Mike’s running walk. He did not know what he was going to do but that uncertainty sat lightly on his mind. He had money in his pocket. An able range rider was welcome anywhere. In all the long tier of states bordering the east slope of the Rockies a man who could ride and rope could be a rolling stone and still gather moss. If the Bar M Bar and the Block S were both taboo there was still the Bear Paw Pool, the Shonkin, the YT and the Circle within a radius of seventy miles. He did not have to quit Montana, only that immediate section of the Bear Paw mountains—and that merely because he chose, because the south side of the hills had grown distasteful as well as dangerous. On the latter count alone he would not have retreated. He was not even sure he would leave. He would never run again. Once was enough.But still he was minded to leave Birch Creek and Little Eagle and Chase Hill, all that varied region he had haunted for three happy years. Robin wanted to go clean, to be rid of every tie. Most of them were broken. There remained only that hundred and sixty acres which he had dreamed of making a home. He would sell it if he could, for what he could get. Since the Block S was the only outfit that set any store by land Robin thought he might sell it to Adam Sutherland. Looking far-sightedly into a future that should long outlast himself Sutherland had increased his acreage as his herds increased. Sutherland would give him something for that homestead, although old Adam owned thousands of acres he had got for a song and sung the song himself. Robin didn’t want to see it again. Shining Mark in partnership with Dan Mayne. Mark marrying Ivy. Pah!Yet in spite of these dolors riding across earth that exhaled the odor of new growth under a sun blazing yellow in a sapphire sky, Robin’s spirits gradually rose. A man couldn’t be sad in the spring astride of a horse that bounced under him like a rubber ball. Robin whistled. He sang little snatches of song. He pulled up on a hill to stare across the flat in which Big Sandy lay. Space and freedom! Room to move and breathe—and some to spare. The sunrise plains before they were fenced and trammeled. A new, new land but yesterday wrested by the cattleman with his herds from the Indian and the buffalo. Robin could not wholly and consciously visualize the old wild west of which he was a part. He could only feel instinctively that as it was it was good.Concretely his mind turned upon matters of immediate concern. Below him, where Big Sandy creek debouched from the rolling country he saw tents and wagons and a cluster of horses.“Aha,” he said to Red Mike, “there’s the Block S. They’re in off Lonesome Prairie. They’ll be draggin’ it to the home ranch to get organized for round-up. I reckon Shinin’ Mark’ll be in town.”It was out of his way to swing over to the Block S camp. He had no qualms about bearding the wolf (Robin couldn’t think of Mark Steele as a lion; a lion in his mind had a certain majesty) but he saw no reason for seeking the wolf in his own lair. Town would do as well. He had no desire to avoid Shining Mark. In fact he had a certain curiosity about what Mark would do or say when they met. To Thatcher he gave scarcely a second thought.He stabled his horses. By the hitching rack before the Silver Dollar a row of cow ponies drooped their heads in equine patience. Robin walked into the saloon. His gun was belted on his hip, the first time he had ever carried a six-shooter openly in Big Sandy. Steele was not there. Block S men, Jack Boyd among them, greeted him hilariously. Thatcher alone neither spoke nor smiled. Robin looked him in the eye.“Well,” he said casually, “if there’s anything on your mind I’m listenin’.”“Nothin’ much besides my hat,” Thatcher made a feeble effort at grinning. “I’m not lookin’ for trouble—unless you are.”That was fair enough in all outward seeming, and Robin felt that Thatcher, for whatever reason, spoke the truth. Most decidedly Tommy Thatcher was not keen for trouble. He showed that plainly enough. It didn’t occur to Robin that his own attitude was aggressive, that he was taking a wild bull by the horns with a confidence that made the bull give ground. Thatcher’s words and bearing simply gave him an opportunity publicly to close that incident in so far as it could be closed.“I never went lookin’ for trouble in my life,” Robin said quietly. “I side-step it if I can. If I can’t——”He shrugged his shoulders.“Come on, have a drink an’ let her slide,” Thatcher proffered the peace symbol of the range. Men with bad blood between them didn’t drink together.“It happens I’m not drinkin’ to-day, not with anybody,” thus Robin announced to all and sundry that he was not refusing the olive branch merely because it came from Thatcher—although he would have died thirsty rather than drink with a man he felt sure had sped one of the bullets that snuffed out Tex Matthews’ life. “Thanks, just the same.”Probably no one but himself detected the sardonic note in that phrase of declination.He walked on up toward the store. He didn’t know Mark Steele’s whereabouts and he cared less. He wanted to see Adam Sutherland. The old man was in town. If in seeking the owner of the Block S he ran across Shining Mark that was as it happened.He didn’t have to ask a clerk if Sutherland was about. Back by the bookkeeper’s desk Sutherland occupied his favorite roost deep in an armchair. The cattleman’s face, round and red about a walrus-like mustache didn’t alter its normal placidity as Robin approached.“Hello, kid,” he greeted. “I haven’t seen you for quite a spell.”“No, and you maybe won’t see me for quite a spell again,” Robin answered, “if I can do some business with you.”“Well, shoot,” Sutherland encouraged.“It’s nothin’ much,” Robin said, “except that I’ve been away for quite a while. Since I’ve been back and looked the ground over I reckon I’ll move on again. Nobody loves me and I’m out of a job,” he finished with a whimsical twist. It was true, but a truth so stated that it contained for Robin the germ of humor. “I thought maybe I’d sell you that hundred and sixty I homesteaded on the creek above Mayne’s.”“Oh, did you? You reckon I’m in the real estate business?” Sutherland rumbled. “You got your deed to it?”Robin nodded.“How much you reckon it’s worth?”“As much as I can get for it.”“Well, I might——” Sutherland stopped abruptly. Robin saw the change of expression cross his face. He heard the front door click. Out of one corner of his eye he saw Shining Mark come striding down between the counters.“You might what?” Robin prompted.But Sutherland clasped his hands over his rotund stomach and leaned back in his chair, silent and expressionless as a poker player nursing a pat hand.“Hello, Tyler.”Robin turned his head at Mark’s greeting. The quality of the man’s voice was the same, arrogant, subtly menacing.Robin didn’t even trouble to reply. He looked at Mark calmly, an outward, deceptive calm for within something was beginning to burn, a flame that he knew he must keep down. It was like being too close to a venomous snake—only, somehow, for Robin the snake’s fangs were drawn. He didn’t know why he felt so sure of that but he did. He was no more afraid of Shining Mark than he was afraid of Sutherland’s elderly bookkeeper, who was mildness personified, years of clerical work and domestic infelicity having rendered him harmless. He gazed at Mark with deliberate, insolent scrutiny.“They tell me you had an accident with your gun down on Birch,” he said at length.“Yeah. Fool thing to do,” Steele growled. It struck Robin that Shining Mark was a little uneasy.“Shot yourself with your own gun, eh?” Robin drawled. “Right in the wishbone, they say. Too bad it wasn’t about six inches higher. Seems like I heard, too, that it wasn’t quite accidental.”“What you tryin’ to do? Provoke me?” Steele asked coolly. “You act like you wanted to open up a package of trouble. I’d sure accommodate you on the spot if I was heeled. You act real bad when you happen to find me unarmed.”“You’re a liar as well as a thief,” Robin took a step toward him. “Do you want me to prove it?”Shining Mark’s face flamed. He looked at Robin, then at Sutherland sitting quietly in his chair, an impassive listener save that his eyes were narrowly watching both men. Mark stared at Robin. That youth laughed aloud in his enemy’s face. A whimsical thought took form in a play on words—steel had lost its temper!“You’re weakenin’, Mark,” he taunted. “I’ve just come in from Mayne’s ranch. I said you were a liar and a thief. I say it again.”“I heard you,” Steele replied, making a visible effort at self-control, although his lean face was burning. “You don’t need to say anything to me at all. I’ll drop you in your tracks as soon as I get my hands on a gun, you mouthy pup. You sure do swell up when you happen to have a six-gun on your hip and catch me barehanded.”“I beat you barehanded once, and I can do it again,” Robin kept his voice low, his tone casual. “I don’t reckon you understand why I called you a liar. I know a Texas trick or two myself. You——”He darted a forefinger at Mark and the man jumped backward—but not so quickly that Robin’s fingers failed to tap smartly against something hard and outline it briefly under Steele’s coat.“You got a gun in a Texas holster under your arm,” Robin said contemptuously. “And you talk about being unarmed. As if anything you could say or do would throw me off my guard for a second. You swine! When I think that you put the fear of God in me once, I could laugh.That’show dangerous you look to me now.”Robin took off his soft Stetson and slapped Mark across the face. Mark put up his hand and backed away. Behind him Robin heard Adam Sutherland grunt, heard the scrape of his chair legs. Robin laughed again. He remembered the dead cows in Birch Creek. He remembered Tex Matthews’ stiffened body across a bloody saddle, borne by a tired horse, led by a tired rider through a long winter night. He remembered with a bitter clearness Steele swinging his spurred foot from a table in a line camp and saying cold-bloodedly, “I hate to muss up a perfectly good camp but you’ve bothered me long enough.”With those pictures blazing bright in his memory Robin had to laugh—or cry. He did laugh, looking straight into Steele’s burning eyes, but there was no mirth in the sound.“I’ve said my say,” he kept his voice without passion. “If a gun under your arm isn’t good enough for you, go buckle one on your hip. I’m not even going to bother looking for you, Steele. That’s how much I think of you. I won’t waste no time nor talk on you after this. If you want my scalp—and you’ve been after it a long time—you’ll have to come after me. If you jump me you won’t be able to say it was an accident with your own gun a second time.”Steele turned and walked away. Once he hesitated, seemed about to turn. Robin stood watching him, one hand resting on the desk, a half-smoked cigarette in his fingers. And when Steele passed through the swinging doors Robin followed, his thought and vision so concentrated on the man ahead that he did not hear Sutherland call after him:“Hey, Tyler. Come back here. I want to talk to you.”
Before dawn Robin saddled and headed south on the trail of Red Mike. Minus supper and breakfast he was hungry. But his mount was fresh and fed with grazing in the little pasture. Robin was tough. A meal more or less didn’t greatly matter. And sunrise brought him a happier mood. Luck also bestowed a double quantum as if to make up for past niggardliness. Ten miles from the Bar M Bar he ate hot cakes and coffee with a lowly sheep herder tending his flock on the northern flank of Chase Hill. Within an hour of that camp he found his sorrel horse, ranging as the cow horse at liberty was wont to range, with a band of the untamed.
The wild bunch broke headlong in the general direction of the Bar M Bar. Robin fell in behind them. The direction suited his book. He had a bed roll and a packsaddle still at Mayne’s, and a cow-puncher’s bed was part of his working outfit. He would need that bedding.
So he loped behind the wild horses until they ran themselves out. Once Robin caught up and jogged at their heels he headed them where he wished. With rope ready he watched his chance. A touch of the spurs, a deft throw, and the rawhide noose closed about Red Mike’s burnished copper neck.
Robin led him on to Mayne’s, changed his saddle to Red Mike’s back and lashed his bedding on the livery horse. He saw Ivy’s face for a moment at a window. Her father strolled over to say a word or two. Robin answered in monosyllables, not because he was still angry or resentful—that had all evaporated—but because there was nothing more to say. When the last hitch was taken in the pack rope he rode on.
He slept that night at a horse ranch in the foothills halfway between Shadow Butte and Big Sandy. Before noon he was in sight of the town, the pack horse trotting to keep up with Red Mike’s running walk. He did not know what he was going to do but that uncertainty sat lightly on his mind. He had money in his pocket. An able range rider was welcome anywhere. In all the long tier of states bordering the east slope of the Rockies a man who could ride and rope could be a rolling stone and still gather moss. If the Bar M Bar and the Block S were both taboo there was still the Bear Paw Pool, the Shonkin, the YT and the Circle within a radius of seventy miles. He did not have to quit Montana, only that immediate section of the Bear Paw mountains—and that merely because he chose, because the south side of the hills had grown distasteful as well as dangerous. On the latter count alone he would not have retreated. He was not even sure he would leave. He would never run again. Once was enough.
But still he was minded to leave Birch Creek and Little Eagle and Chase Hill, all that varied region he had haunted for three happy years. Robin wanted to go clean, to be rid of every tie. Most of them were broken. There remained only that hundred and sixty acres which he had dreamed of making a home. He would sell it if he could, for what he could get. Since the Block S was the only outfit that set any store by land Robin thought he might sell it to Adam Sutherland. Looking far-sightedly into a future that should long outlast himself Sutherland had increased his acreage as his herds increased. Sutherland would give him something for that homestead, although old Adam owned thousands of acres he had got for a song and sung the song himself. Robin didn’t want to see it again. Shining Mark in partnership with Dan Mayne. Mark marrying Ivy. Pah!
Yet in spite of these dolors riding across earth that exhaled the odor of new growth under a sun blazing yellow in a sapphire sky, Robin’s spirits gradually rose. A man couldn’t be sad in the spring astride of a horse that bounced under him like a rubber ball. Robin whistled. He sang little snatches of song. He pulled up on a hill to stare across the flat in which Big Sandy lay. Space and freedom! Room to move and breathe—and some to spare. The sunrise plains before they were fenced and trammeled. A new, new land but yesterday wrested by the cattleman with his herds from the Indian and the buffalo. Robin could not wholly and consciously visualize the old wild west of which he was a part. He could only feel instinctively that as it was it was good.
Concretely his mind turned upon matters of immediate concern. Below him, where Big Sandy creek debouched from the rolling country he saw tents and wagons and a cluster of horses.
“Aha,” he said to Red Mike, “there’s the Block S. They’re in off Lonesome Prairie. They’ll be draggin’ it to the home ranch to get organized for round-up. I reckon Shinin’ Mark’ll be in town.”
It was out of his way to swing over to the Block S camp. He had no qualms about bearding the wolf (Robin couldn’t think of Mark Steele as a lion; a lion in his mind had a certain majesty) but he saw no reason for seeking the wolf in his own lair. Town would do as well. He had no desire to avoid Shining Mark. In fact he had a certain curiosity about what Mark would do or say when they met. To Thatcher he gave scarcely a second thought.
He stabled his horses. By the hitching rack before the Silver Dollar a row of cow ponies drooped their heads in equine patience. Robin walked into the saloon. His gun was belted on his hip, the first time he had ever carried a six-shooter openly in Big Sandy. Steele was not there. Block S men, Jack Boyd among them, greeted him hilariously. Thatcher alone neither spoke nor smiled. Robin looked him in the eye.
“Well,” he said casually, “if there’s anything on your mind I’m listenin’.”
“Nothin’ much besides my hat,” Thatcher made a feeble effort at grinning. “I’m not lookin’ for trouble—unless you are.”
That was fair enough in all outward seeming, and Robin felt that Thatcher, for whatever reason, spoke the truth. Most decidedly Tommy Thatcher was not keen for trouble. He showed that plainly enough. It didn’t occur to Robin that his own attitude was aggressive, that he was taking a wild bull by the horns with a confidence that made the bull give ground. Thatcher’s words and bearing simply gave him an opportunity publicly to close that incident in so far as it could be closed.
“I never went lookin’ for trouble in my life,” Robin said quietly. “I side-step it if I can. If I can’t——”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Come on, have a drink an’ let her slide,” Thatcher proffered the peace symbol of the range. Men with bad blood between them didn’t drink together.
“It happens I’m not drinkin’ to-day, not with anybody,” thus Robin announced to all and sundry that he was not refusing the olive branch merely because it came from Thatcher—although he would have died thirsty rather than drink with a man he felt sure had sped one of the bullets that snuffed out Tex Matthews’ life. “Thanks, just the same.”
Probably no one but himself detected the sardonic note in that phrase of declination.
He walked on up toward the store. He didn’t know Mark Steele’s whereabouts and he cared less. He wanted to see Adam Sutherland. The old man was in town. If in seeking the owner of the Block S he ran across Shining Mark that was as it happened.
He didn’t have to ask a clerk if Sutherland was about. Back by the bookkeeper’s desk Sutherland occupied his favorite roost deep in an armchair. The cattleman’s face, round and red about a walrus-like mustache didn’t alter its normal placidity as Robin approached.
“Hello, kid,” he greeted. “I haven’t seen you for quite a spell.”
“No, and you maybe won’t see me for quite a spell again,” Robin answered, “if I can do some business with you.”
“Well, shoot,” Sutherland encouraged.
“It’s nothin’ much,” Robin said, “except that I’ve been away for quite a while. Since I’ve been back and looked the ground over I reckon I’ll move on again. Nobody loves me and I’m out of a job,” he finished with a whimsical twist. It was true, but a truth so stated that it contained for Robin the germ of humor. “I thought maybe I’d sell you that hundred and sixty I homesteaded on the creek above Mayne’s.”
“Oh, did you? You reckon I’m in the real estate business?” Sutherland rumbled. “You got your deed to it?”
Robin nodded.
“How much you reckon it’s worth?”
“As much as I can get for it.”
“Well, I might——” Sutherland stopped abruptly. Robin saw the change of expression cross his face. He heard the front door click. Out of one corner of his eye he saw Shining Mark come striding down between the counters.
“You might what?” Robin prompted.
But Sutherland clasped his hands over his rotund stomach and leaned back in his chair, silent and expressionless as a poker player nursing a pat hand.
“Hello, Tyler.”
Robin turned his head at Mark’s greeting. The quality of the man’s voice was the same, arrogant, subtly menacing.
Robin didn’t even trouble to reply. He looked at Mark calmly, an outward, deceptive calm for within something was beginning to burn, a flame that he knew he must keep down. It was like being too close to a venomous snake—only, somehow, for Robin the snake’s fangs were drawn. He didn’t know why he felt so sure of that but he did. He was no more afraid of Shining Mark than he was afraid of Sutherland’s elderly bookkeeper, who was mildness personified, years of clerical work and domestic infelicity having rendered him harmless. He gazed at Mark with deliberate, insolent scrutiny.
“They tell me you had an accident with your gun down on Birch,” he said at length.
“Yeah. Fool thing to do,” Steele growled. It struck Robin that Shining Mark was a little uneasy.
“Shot yourself with your own gun, eh?” Robin drawled. “Right in the wishbone, they say. Too bad it wasn’t about six inches higher. Seems like I heard, too, that it wasn’t quite accidental.”
“What you tryin’ to do? Provoke me?” Steele asked coolly. “You act like you wanted to open up a package of trouble. I’d sure accommodate you on the spot if I was heeled. You act real bad when you happen to find me unarmed.”
“You’re a liar as well as a thief,” Robin took a step toward him. “Do you want me to prove it?”
Shining Mark’s face flamed. He looked at Robin, then at Sutherland sitting quietly in his chair, an impassive listener save that his eyes were narrowly watching both men. Mark stared at Robin. That youth laughed aloud in his enemy’s face. A whimsical thought took form in a play on words—steel had lost its temper!
“You’re weakenin’, Mark,” he taunted. “I’ve just come in from Mayne’s ranch. I said you were a liar and a thief. I say it again.”
“I heard you,” Steele replied, making a visible effort at self-control, although his lean face was burning. “You don’t need to say anything to me at all. I’ll drop you in your tracks as soon as I get my hands on a gun, you mouthy pup. You sure do swell up when you happen to have a six-gun on your hip and catch me barehanded.”
“I beat you barehanded once, and I can do it again,” Robin kept his voice low, his tone casual. “I don’t reckon you understand why I called you a liar. I know a Texas trick or two myself. You——”
He darted a forefinger at Mark and the man jumped backward—but not so quickly that Robin’s fingers failed to tap smartly against something hard and outline it briefly under Steele’s coat.
“You got a gun in a Texas holster under your arm,” Robin said contemptuously. “And you talk about being unarmed. As if anything you could say or do would throw me off my guard for a second. You swine! When I think that you put the fear of God in me once, I could laugh.That’show dangerous you look to me now.”
Robin took off his soft Stetson and slapped Mark across the face. Mark put up his hand and backed away. Behind him Robin heard Adam Sutherland grunt, heard the scrape of his chair legs. Robin laughed again. He remembered the dead cows in Birch Creek. He remembered Tex Matthews’ stiffened body across a bloody saddle, borne by a tired horse, led by a tired rider through a long winter night. He remembered with a bitter clearness Steele swinging his spurred foot from a table in a line camp and saying cold-bloodedly, “I hate to muss up a perfectly good camp but you’ve bothered me long enough.”
With those pictures blazing bright in his memory Robin had to laugh—or cry. He did laugh, looking straight into Steele’s burning eyes, but there was no mirth in the sound.
“I’ve said my say,” he kept his voice without passion. “If a gun under your arm isn’t good enough for you, go buckle one on your hip. I’m not even going to bother looking for you, Steele. That’s how much I think of you. I won’t waste no time nor talk on you after this. If you want my scalp—and you’ve been after it a long time—you’ll have to come after me. If you jump me you won’t be able to say it was an accident with your own gun a second time.”
Steele turned and walked away. Once he hesitated, seemed about to turn. Robin stood watching him, one hand resting on the desk, a half-smoked cigarette in his fingers. And when Steele passed through the swinging doors Robin followed, his thought and vision so concentrated on the man ahead that he did not hear Sutherland call after him:
“Hey, Tyler. Come back here. I want to talk to you.”