CHAPTER XVIRESURRECTIONAt Havre, Robin found time between trains to cross the street and find the livery stable.“I left a saddle here about Christmas,” he said to the hostler. “A three-quarter rig Cheyenne with a pair ofanqueros.”“Yeah, I recollect. Take a look,” the man replied.Robin hauled his saddle out of the harness room, borrowed a sack to put it in and check it as baggage on the train. He was under way up the branch line within ten minutes. An hour and a half later he stood on the station platform at Big Sandy, wondering with a mingled curiosity and indifference how long it would be before a deputy sheriff would saunter up and say with a casual wariness:“Well, kid, I guess you’ll have to come along with me.”No, in the face of those purple mountains lifting high in the southeast, the limitless stretch of lonesome Prairie spreading north to the Canada line, all those familiar places, the troublesome future didn’t seem to matter so much. Silent, lonely, sterile here and there, forbidding at first glance to such as were bred to field and lane and orchard, the plains wove their own charm about the hearts of men. All those leagues of grass and hill and canyon seemed to hold out invisible hands to Robin. Bright with its vernal garment the land smiled answer to his eager look as a maiden smiles to a returning lover.He stood a minute sweeping old horizons with his gaze. The station agent nodded. No one had arrived. No one had departed. It was too early in the morning for loungers. A man from Sutherland’s store took up the mail sack, said “hello” to Robin. Robin followed him across the street. He would put up at the hotel. If he went unmolested for the present—and that was likely enough—he would take horse later and ride to the Bar M Bar. If they wanted him they could come and get him. Months in a strange country had taught Robin that he was not the stuff of which an Ishmael is made.The moon-faced Teutonic host of the Bear Paw House gazed at him blandly over a varnished counter.“Ach, so,” he said. “You have been away, yes.”No more. Robin signed the register. From force of old habit he suggested a drink. Host and guest went into the bar. Backed by a mirror that reflected polished glass and decorative bottles a bartender Robin had known for years said, “Hello, kid,” and set out the drinks. Robin grew a little puzzled. This was carrying the normal cow-country nonchalance toward a man who had been in “trouble” to an extreme. He might have been gone only overnight, by their attitude, instead of having jumped the country after killing a well-known man.He drank, and leaned on the bar, gazing about. A rider loped from somewhere about the town and dismounted with a flourish before the hotel. He stalked in, clanking his spurs. Robin knew him, Jack Boyd of the Block S.“Hello, old-timer.” He pumped Robin’s hand and slapped him on the back. “Where the hell you been all winter? Have a shot.”“On the coast,” Robin said briefly.They drank. Boyd talked. He was a rattle tongue, no sequence to his conversation. Robin’s wonder grew. What ailed them all? Were they all with him, and trying to make him feel at ease, guessing that he had come back to face trial? Men had done that before.His gaze for a second turned to the open door. Across the street a livery barn bulked large. Its double doors gaped on the brown earth roadway. A man led out a saddled horse, put his foot in the stirrup and swung up.Robin stared incredulously. He could see the features under the gray Stetson. The flash of silver conchos on saddle, silver inlay on bit and spur, glinting in the sun; Robin saw these and still could not believe.He turned to Boyd.“Who’s that on the black horse?” he demanded.Boyd left off an argument with the bartender to look.“You been snow-blind lately?” he laughed. “Your eyes still full of that Puget Sound fog? That’s Shinin’ Mark. You know as well as I do.”“He’s actin’ meaner’n I ever knew him since he got around,” Boyd added in a lower tone. “Some of these days, somebody that’s hot in the head and quick on the draw is goin’ to get him right.”“Since he got around?” Robin caught at the first sentence, repeated it in an interrogative tone.“Wasn’t it before you went away? No? Well he got careless with his six-gun down in the Birch Creek line camp last winter and shot his fool self. Darned near cashed in. He was on the bed ground for two months.”Robin listened, with a loud thumping in his breast, a feeling of relief that was like a great weight rolled off his back. He had seen the glaze of death gather in Mark Steele’s eyes as his knees sagged under him. He had stood there looking down at the red stain spreading and soaking into the dirt floor. He had seen Mark lie like a log for twenty minutes. It had never occurred to Robin that he wasn’t dead. How could a man, even an iron-hard man, survive a .45 slug through the base of his neck, in the region of his wishbone? Yet there he was, reining in a black horse that curvetted and twisted in eagerness to be off, while Mark talked to the stableman. Robin could see his lips move.The old passion flickered up in Robin’s breast. All the indignity, the calculated insults, the treachery, Tex Matthews’ death, Steele’s bold thievery, stirred Robin’s blood again. The old sores reopened.So that was how it went? He wondered why. What had caused Steele and Thatcher to take that tack? Accident! Didn’t want it known that an unarmed boy had shot him with his own gun. Vanity? Perhaps. It didn’t matter.Tucked within the waistband of his trousers Robin’s .45 rested against his stomach. He slid his hand under his coat, felt the curved bone handle of the gun and took a step toward the door. Boyd’s eyes had been on his face, in which all unconsciously something of Robin’s feelings must have been reflected. Boyd caught his arm as he moved.“Aw, look. Let him go for this time,” he counseled cheerfully. “You got all the time there is to carry on your private war. He’s pullin’ for Lonesome Prairie. They’re gatherin’ saddle stock. He wanted me to ride with him but I ain’t quite ready. Pass it up this time, Robin. Have a drink and let him go. Who wants to throw lead on a spring day like this?”Robin laughed. He could scarcely have followed up that first impulse since at that very moment Shining Mark gave the black his head and broke away in a gallop. Robin watched him grow small until he was a bobbing dot on the out trail. Then he said to Jack Boyd:“I guess he’ll keep for awhile.”“Let’s amble across to the Silver Dollar,” Jack suggested. “There’s some fellows over there.”The afternoon and evening Robin spent was like that of a prodigal son returned. He had not been in Big Sandy since the evening he cut his string and went home full of shame and impotent anger. He had come back under a cloud. That cloud was dispelled. Here on his own ground, among his own peers, he passed the first carefree hours that had fallen to his lot in weary months.He went to bed at midnight and lay for a few minutes in the dark room staring at the dim walls, smiling to himself. He did not care what came next. Shining Mark was still to be reckoned with. He still had his own word to make good. But that would be man to man, if at all. In Robin’s mind the T Bar S and theft still remained a problem to be solved if he desired to remain in the Bear Paws. But the outcome of any personal clash with Mark Steele was something Robin could now accept with composure. Somehow, in his mind, Shining Mark had shrunk to normal proportions. Or perhaps he himself had grown. He couldn’t say. But he knew how he felt.Robin ate breakfast in the morning, took horse and rode south, rode with a heart as light as the little clouds drifting around Shadow Butte. The Butte itself lifted its cone summit high above him. He rode past it on ground softened by spring rains, warmed by a spring sun, green with new grass and speckled with flowers. The creeks ran clear and strong. The Bear Paws nursed snowcaps on the highest peaks, white pyramids on a base of dusky pine. Crows sailed cawing around him. Meadow larks swung on sagebrush trilling their mating song. Robin lifted his lusty young voice in a ribald version of The Spanish Cavalier, a careless horseman chanting as he rode.He pulled up a minute on the ridge where he had watched the sunset with May Sutherland, and the singing mood passed. It was all different now. His face turned toward the Bar M Bar. He rode on soberly wondering what his welcome would be like. He stopped once more to gaze at the closed door of his own cabin, but he did not dismount. The new grass was springing thick in the bluejoint meadow. He smiled. He might have a use for that place yet.Ten minutes later he rode into Mayne’s. Old Dan himself stood in the stable door. He stared at Robin, speechless.“Well, I’m back,” Robin announced the obvious.Mayne shook his hand, but there was no heartiness in his grip.“You ain’t exactly overcome with joy, are you?” Robin challenged. “What’s wrong with you—or with me?”“Nothin’. Nothin’ a-tall,” Mayne protested. “Only—well, things is sorta different, I guess, from last fall.”“How?” Robin’s tone was curt.“Aw, hell,” Mayne growled. “I might as well give it to you straight. Me an’ Mark Steele has buried the hatchet. He’s bought a half interest in the Bar M Bar. We was a little wrong about them T Bar S’s. Anyway, that’s settled. So—well, you see how it is, don’t you?”“You’ve took Mark Steele in as a partner?” Robin stared with narrowing eyes.“Yeah. His old man died in Oklahoma an’ left him fifteen thousand cash. It come about kinda offhand. They hauled Mark up here after—after he got shot down Birch Creek, an’ we took care of him. He ain’t so bad when you know him.”“I see,” Robin said slowly. “So because he has a bunch of money to put in with you you’ve overlooked a little thing like him stealin’ your stock. You’ve taken a cow thief for a partner!”“That’s tall talk, young feller,” Mayne growled.“Maybe. But I’ve said it. If it worries you I won’t talk no more. But you know what I think. Yes, it sure makes it different,” Robin muttered. “I’ll go see Ivy an’ ride on.”“You better——” Mayne began, but Robin had turned his back and was striding toward the house. The old man stood leaning against the stable wall, twisting his scraggly mustache, poking absently at the soft earth with the toe of his boot. His expression was not precisely a happy one.Robin stalked through the kitchen. Whether driven by eagerness or anxiety he did not consider. Of old Ivy would have run across the yard to meet him. He found her in the living room sitting beside a window which commanded the yard. He knew she had seen him. She rose as he entered but there was no welcome in her eyes. They were darkly sullen, a little frightened.Robin didn’t speak. He came up to her, put his hands on her shoulders, looked searchingly into her face. What he saw there troubled him with a sudden heart heaviness. To be near her stirred him deeply. Yet as he looked at her he knew that something which had linked them close was gone, extinguished like a burned-out candle.“You don’t seem noway glad to see me,” he said gently.“Did you expect me to be?” she returned. “You never wrote.”“How could I, the way things were?” he asked. “You know I would have sent word. It never struck you I’d either do that or come back because I couldn’t stay away from—from everybody and everything?”“You ran like a scared coyote,” she said tensely. “An’ you didn’t shoot Mark, after all. He shot himself with his own gun. You were just scared of him.”“Yes? Well?”Robin paused on the interrogation. He shook her gently.“Are you goin’ to bust everythin’ up between us?” he asked quietly. “Isthatthe way you feel? Did I have to camp right on your trail to hold you?”“It’s already busted,” Ivy snapped.She shook herself free of his hands, backed away a step or two, looking at Robin with a dumb implacable resentment smoldering in her eyes. She turned to a shelf on the wall, took something out of a box and handed it to Robin without a word. It was the little diamond he had given her—their engagement ring. Robin held it in the palm of his hand. A pang of sadness, mingled with a touch of anger stabbed him.“Maybe it’ll do for another girl,” Ivy said spitefully. “I don’t need it no more.”“Neither do I,” he said hotly, and flung the ring into the dead ash of the fireplace. For a moment they stared at the puff of ashes where it fell, at each other. The girl’s lips quivered. Robin turned on his heel and walked out of the house.Old Mayne still leaned against the stable wall. Robin gathered up his reins, turned to ask a question.“Ivy goin’ to marry Steele?”He shot the words at Mayne with a harshness that made the old man start.“I reckon so,” he said apologetically. “Ikain’t help it.”“Nobody said you could,” Robin flung over his shoulder as he reached for his stirrup.Dark found him sitting with his feet on his own stove, in a house without food or bedding, thinking, thinking! To-morrow he would ride back to town. But to-night—here—he was not conscious of hunger nor of physical discomfort as he sat with hands clasped over his knees with an ache in his breast and a turmoil in his brain.Sometimes it was bad for a man to see things too clearly.
At Havre, Robin found time between trains to cross the street and find the livery stable.
“I left a saddle here about Christmas,” he said to the hostler. “A three-quarter rig Cheyenne with a pair ofanqueros.”
“Yeah, I recollect. Take a look,” the man replied.
Robin hauled his saddle out of the harness room, borrowed a sack to put it in and check it as baggage on the train. He was under way up the branch line within ten minutes. An hour and a half later he stood on the station platform at Big Sandy, wondering with a mingled curiosity and indifference how long it would be before a deputy sheriff would saunter up and say with a casual wariness:
“Well, kid, I guess you’ll have to come along with me.”
No, in the face of those purple mountains lifting high in the southeast, the limitless stretch of lonesome Prairie spreading north to the Canada line, all those familiar places, the troublesome future didn’t seem to matter so much. Silent, lonely, sterile here and there, forbidding at first glance to such as were bred to field and lane and orchard, the plains wove their own charm about the hearts of men. All those leagues of grass and hill and canyon seemed to hold out invisible hands to Robin. Bright with its vernal garment the land smiled answer to his eager look as a maiden smiles to a returning lover.
He stood a minute sweeping old horizons with his gaze. The station agent nodded. No one had arrived. No one had departed. It was too early in the morning for loungers. A man from Sutherland’s store took up the mail sack, said “hello” to Robin. Robin followed him across the street. He would put up at the hotel. If he went unmolested for the present—and that was likely enough—he would take horse later and ride to the Bar M Bar. If they wanted him they could come and get him. Months in a strange country had taught Robin that he was not the stuff of which an Ishmael is made.
The moon-faced Teutonic host of the Bear Paw House gazed at him blandly over a varnished counter.
“Ach, so,” he said. “You have been away, yes.”
No more. Robin signed the register. From force of old habit he suggested a drink. Host and guest went into the bar. Backed by a mirror that reflected polished glass and decorative bottles a bartender Robin had known for years said, “Hello, kid,” and set out the drinks. Robin grew a little puzzled. This was carrying the normal cow-country nonchalance toward a man who had been in “trouble” to an extreme. He might have been gone only overnight, by their attitude, instead of having jumped the country after killing a well-known man.
He drank, and leaned on the bar, gazing about. A rider loped from somewhere about the town and dismounted with a flourish before the hotel. He stalked in, clanking his spurs. Robin knew him, Jack Boyd of the Block S.
“Hello, old-timer.” He pumped Robin’s hand and slapped him on the back. “Where the hell you been all winter? Have a shot.”
“On the coast,” Robin said briefly.
They drank. Boyd talked. He was a rattle tongue, no sequence to his conversation. Robin’s wonder grew. What ailed them all? Were they all with him, and trying to make him feel at ease, guessing that he had come back to face trial? Men had done that before.
His gaze for a second turned to the open door. Across the street a livery barn bulked large. Its double doors gaped on the brown earth roadway. A man led out a saddled horse, put his foot in the stirrup and swung up.
Robin stared incredulously. He could see the features under the gray Stetson. The flash of silver conchos on saddle, silver inlay on bit and spur, glinting in the sun; Robin saw these and still could not believe.
He turned to Boyd.
“Who’s that on the black horse?” he demanded.
Boyd left off an argument with the bartender to look.
“You been snow-blind lately?” he laughed. “Your eyes still full of that Puget Sound fog? That’s Shinin’ Mark. You know as well as I do.”
“He’s actin’ meaner’n I ever knew him since he got around,” Boyd added in a lower tone. “Some of these days, somebody that’s hot in the head and quick on the draw is goin’ to get him right.”
“Since he got around?” Robin caught at the first sentence, repeated it in an interrogative tone.
“Wasn’t it before you went away? No? Well he got careless with his six-gun down in the Birch Creek line camp last winter and shot his fool self. Darned near cashed in. He was on the bed ground for two months.”
Robin listened, with a loud thumping in his breast, a feeling of relief that was like a great weight rolled off his back. He had seen the glaze of death gather in Mark Steele’s eyes as his knees sagged under him. He had stood there looking down at the red stain spreading and soaking into the dirt floor. He had seen Mark lie like a log for twenty minutes. It had never occurred to Robin that he wasn’t dead. How could a man, even an iron-hard man, survive a .45 slug through the base of his neck, in the region of his wishbone? Yet there he was, reining in a black horse that curvetted and twisted in eagerness to be off, while Mark talked to the stableman. Robin could see his lips move.
The old passion flickered up in Robin’s breast. All the indignity, the calculated insults, the treachery, Tex Matthews’ death, Steele’s bold thievery, stirred Robin’s blood again. The old sores reopened.
So that was how it went? He wondered why. What had caused Steele and Thatcher to take that tack? Accident! Didn’t want it known that an unarmed boy had shot him with his own gun. Vanity? Perhaps. It didn’t matter.
Tucked within the waistband of his trousers Robin’s .45 rested against his stomach. He slid his hand under his coat, felt the curved bone handle of the gun and took a step toward the door. Boyd’s eyes had been on his face, in which all unconsciously something of Robin’s feelings must have been reflected. Boyd caught his arm as he moved.
“Aw, look. Let him go for this time,” he counseled cheerfully. “You got all the time there is to carry on your private war. He’s pullin’ for Lonesome Prairie. They’re gatherin’ saddle stock. He wanted me to ride with him but I ain’t quite ready. Pass it up this time, Robin. Have a drink and let him go. Who wants to throw lead on a spring day like this?”
Robin laughed. He could scarcely have followed up that first impulse since at that very moment Shining Mark gave the black his head and broke away in a gallop. Robin watched him grow small until he was a bobbing dot on the out trail. Then he said to Jack Boyd:
“I guess he’ll keep for awhile.”
“Let’s amble across to the Silver Dollar,” Jack suggested. “There’s some fellows over there.”
The afternoon and evening Robin spent was like that of a prodigal son returned. He had not been in Big Sandy since the evening he cut his string and went home full of shame and impotent anger. He had come back under a cloud. That cloud was dispelled. Here on his own ground, among his own peers, he passed the first carefree hours that had fallen to his lot in weary months.
He went to bed at midnight and lay for a few minutes in the dark room staring at the dim walls, smiling to himself. He did not care what came next. Shining Mark was still to be reckoned with. He still had his own word to make good. But that would be man to man, if at all. In Robin’s mind the T Bar S and theft still remained a problem to be solved if he desired to remain in the Bear Paws. But the outcome of any personal clash with Mark Steele was something Robin could now accept with composure. Somehow, in his mind, Shining Mark had shrunk to normal proportions. Or perhaps he himself had grown. He couldn’t say. But he knew how he felt.
Robin ate breakfast in the morning, took horse and rode south, rode with a heart as light as the little clouds drifting around Shadow Butte. The Butte itself lifted its cone summit high above him. He rode past it on ground softened by spring rains, warmed by a spring sun, green with new grass and speckled with flowers. The creeks ran clear and strong. The Bear Paws nursed snowcaps on the highest peaks, white pyramids on a base of dusky pine. Crows sailed cawing around him. Meadow larks swung on sagebrush trilling their mating song. Robin lifted his lusty young voice in a ribald version of The Spanish Cavalier, a careless horseman chanting as he rode.
He pulled up a minute on the ridge where he had watched the sunset with May Sutherland, and the singing mood passed. It was all different now. His face turned toward the Bar M Bar. He rode on soberly wondering what his welcome would be like. He stopped once more to gaze at the closed door of his own cabin, but he did not dismount. The new grass was springing thick in the bluejoint meadow. He smiled. He might have a use for that place yet.
Ten minutes later he rode into Mayne’s. Old Dan himself stood in the stable door. He stared at Robin, speechless.
“Well, I’m back,” Robin announced the obvious.
Mayne shook his hand, but there was no heartiness in his grip.
“You ain’t exactly overcome with joy, are you?” Robin challenged. “What’s wrong with you—or with me?”
“Nothin’. Nothin’ a-tall,” Mayne protested. “Only—well, things is sorta different, I guess, from last fall.”
“How?” Robin’s tone was curt.
“Aw, hell,” Mayne growled. “I might as well give it to you straight. Me an’ Mark Steele has buried the hatchet. He’s bought a half interest in the Bar M Bar. We was a little wrong about them T Bar S’s. Anyway, that’s settled. So—well, you see how it is, don’t you?”
“You’ve took Mark Steele in as a partner?” Robin stared with narrowing eyes.
“Yeah. His old man died in Oklahoma an’ left him fifteen thousand cash. It come about kinda offhand. They hauled Mark up here after—after he got shot down Birch Creek, an’ we took care of him. He ain’t so bad when you know him.”
“I see,” Robin said slowly. “So because he has a bunch of money to put in with you you’ve overlooked a little thing like him stealin’ your stock. You’ve taken a cow thief for a partner!”
“That’s tall talk, young feller,” Mayne growled.
“Maybe. But I’ve said it. If it worries you I won’t talk no more. But you know what I think. Yes, it sure makes it different,” Robin muttered. “I’ll go see Ivy an’ ride on.”
“You better——” Mayne began, but Robin had turned his back and was striding toward the house. The old man stood leaning against the stable wall, twisting his scraggly mustache, poking absently at the soft earth with the toe of his boot. His expression was not precisely a happy one.
Robin stalked through the kitchen. Whether driven by eagerness or anxiety he did not consider. Of old Ivy would have run across the yard to meet him. He found her in the living room sitting beside a window which commanded the yard. He knew she had seen him. She rose as he entered but there was no welcome in her eyes. They were darkly sullen, a little frightened.
Robin didn’t speak. He came up to her, put his hands on her shoulders, looked searchingly into her face. What he saw there troubled him with a sudden heart heaviness. To be near her stirred him deeply. Yet as he looked at her he knew that something which had linked them close was gone, extinguished like a burned-out candle.
“You don’t seem noway glad to see me,” he said gently.
“Did you expect me to be?” she returned. “You never wrote.”
“How could I, the way things were?” he asked. “You know I would have sent word. It never struck you I’d either do that or come back because I couldn’t stay away from—from everybody and everything?”
“You ran like a scared coyote,” she said tensely. “An’ you didn’t shoot Mark, after all. He shot himself with his own gun. You were just scared of him.”
“Yes? Well?”
Robin paused on the interrogation. He shook her gently.
“Are you goin’ to bust everythin’ up between us?” he asked quietly. “Isthatthe way you feel? Did I have to camp right on your trail to hold you?”
“It’s already busted,” Ivy snapped.
She shook herself free of his hands, backed away a step or two, looking at Robin with a dumb implacable resentment smoldering in her eyes. She turned to a shelf on the wall, took something out of a box and handed it to Robin without a word. It was the little diamond he had given her—their engagement ring. Robin held it in the palm of his hand. A pang of sadness, mingled with a touch of anger stabbed him.
“Maybe it’ll do for another girl,” Ivy said spitefully. “I don’t need it no more.”
“Neither do I,” he said hotly, and flung the ring into the dead ash of the fireplace. For a moment they stared at the puff of ashes where it fell, at each other. The girl’s lips quivered. Robin turned on his heel and walked out of the house.
Old Mayne still leaned against the stable wall. Robin gathered up his reins, turned to ask a question.
“Ivy goin’ to marry Steele?”
He shot the words at Mayne with a harshness that made the old man start.
“I reckon so,” he said apologetically. “Ikain’t help it.”
“Nobody said you could,” Robin flung over his shoulder as he reached for his stirrup.
Dark found him sitting with his feet on his own stove, in a house without food or bedding, thinking, thinking! To-morrow he would ride back to town. But to-night—here—he was not conscious of hunger nor of physical discomfort as he sat with hands clasped over his knees with an ache in his breast and a turmoil in his brain.
Sometimes it was bad for a man to see things too clearly.