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