CHAPTER II
“KEEP OFF THE GRASS!”
The range cattle had finished their siesta and grazed afar when Robin once more hid among the willows. He was hungry but he had the solace of tobacco. He waited with dogged patience. Perhaps the broom-tails Red Mike ran with would yet come. If not there was always the chance of others. If the cool of evening brought no mount within reach of his loop he could still walk home.
So Robin lay thinking about those dead cows and the men who shot them. He couldn’t get rid of the certainty that came over him when silver conchos on bit and spur and saddle flashed in the sun. He knew the man. He was aware that he could be mistaken. Other riders caparisoned with silver ornaments could be abroad on that range. But the first conviction held.
Hornets and wild bees hummed among the willows. Meadow larks swooped to the cold water, washed, preened their feathers, swung on low bushes and caroled their sweet, throaty songs within ten feet of him. Pungent odors from sagebrush bruised by hoofs, the faint smell of mud stirred by watering cattle, all the manifold airs off a wide, hot land wafted across his nostrils as he lay there. The sun dipped westward, fiery in the crystal blue. The willows supplied a grateful shade. He grew drowsy, dozed, and was wakened by nickering and the thud of hoofs.
Luck had come his way. His sorrel horse stood with forefeet in the mud, drinking from the cold trickle. The band was ranged about the spring. Red Mike had set himself as if posed to receive the waiting loop, within range of a short and easy throw for a hand as true as Robin Tyler’s, whose first toy had been a rawhide string.
He made one end of the rope fast to the root of a willow, edged clear, shook his loop out. Then he rose and threw in the same motion and the loop swished over Red Mike’s ears and tightened about his glossy neck before he could so much as toss his head.
One frightened surge against Robin’s weight on the reata and the red horse stood still, wide-eyed with surprise, but knowing himself a prisoner. Robin went up to him gently, patted his neck, stroked him, talked to him soothingly. The red horse nuzzled him. When Robin took a turn over his nose with the rawhide the beast followed him like a dog on a leash.
Half an hour later he was mounted. Red Mike pranced and side-stepped and pawed the earth with impatience, a thing of steel and whalebone with the fire of life in it and Robin’s spirits rose as if he had drunk wine.
The gray fed close by, nursing his lame leg. Robin left him without regret, much gainer by the exchange. Red Mike was his own horse. He had never felt another man’s steel in his ribs. He was worth two of the gray. So Robin turned lightly homeward.
But before the sorrel had spurned a mile of the dry earth with his eager hoofs Robin changed his course, and swung down into Birch Creek. He had to see the brand on those dead cows. Why he had to he didn’t trouble to define. In the back of his mind, unadmitted, there was a motive—and the motive was simple loyalty to his salt. Mostly the rustler preyed on the big outfits, and the riders of the big outfits sometimes did not see more than they chose to see on the range. But cattleman and cow-puncher alike despised a thief who stole from a poor man. And somehow Robin Tyler had to know if those dead cows carried Dan Mayne’s brand.
They did. At least one did. Robin dropped his rope over the stiffened legs, took a dally round the horn and turned the animal brand side up. He saw the Bar M Bar. He did not tarry to look at the other two lying fifty yards apart, for as he leaned from his saddle to free the noose something went phut in the sandy soil and scattered dust in his face. Red Mike jumped, snorted. A noise like the pop of a distant whiplash sounded away off and high above.
Robin bent low over his saddle horn and gave Red Mike his head. The sorrel crossed the Birch Creek flats like a candidate for the Derby. As the dust rolled out in a banner from under his flying feet Robin glanced back over his shoulder. He saw two riders standing bold against the sky line on the farther crest of the valley and one of these riders gave off faint shiny reflections when his horse moved in the sun, and there was also a glint of metal in this rider’s hand.
They didn’t shoot again. The range was too great to hit anything in motion except by a fluke. They had scared him off and that, Robin surmised, was all they wanted. They sat there while Robin put a mile between himself and those dead cows as speedily as a fast and powerful horse could cover the distance. Then he pulled Red Mike to a walk, took to the high ground west of Birch Creek and pointed his nose for another water hole.
He rode into the Mayne ranch in the cool dusk having jingled around the south end of Chase Hill to pick up three more saddle horses in their usual haunts. He turned them into a small pasture, put Red Mike in the stable, with an armful of hay to munch. Then he shed his spurs and chaps and walked over to the house. A light glowed in the kitchen windows.
Robin paused in the doorway to look at a girl lifting warm food from the stove and placing it on the table. Ivy Mayne was worth a look. For a long time now, wherever he rode, unless the business in hand required his undivided attention, Robin carried in his mind a picture of this eldest daughter of Mayne’s. He could have told you just how each separate coil of her glossy, dark hair wound about her head, what dimples came and went at the corners of her red mouth when she smiled. He knew that her skin was like satin and her voice a sweet treble like the thrushes that sang in the pine thickets of the Bear Paws. She was eighteen and Robin was twenty-two and they had lived under the same roof, galloped in the same hot sun and under the same silver moon, faced the blustering plains wind and lain in the grass together to stare silent at the winking stars, for a little over two years. There was not, Robin felt, her like for beauty and sweetness in all the pine-clad jumble of the mountains that loomed high in the velvet night to the northward of her father’s ranch.
He always felt a queer flutter inside him when he was away from her and came back. He felt it now as she looked over her shoulder at his step.
“Did you ride clean out of the country?” she asked. “Everybody’s gone to bed. I’ve been keepin’ your supper warm, but you’d ’a’ eaten cold stuff in another half hour, Mister Man. Hungry? Or did you strike some place to eat?”
“Uh-uh. I’m starved.” Robin never wasted words.
“Where’d you go?”
He told her briefly of his mishap with the badger hole, and his snaring of Red Mike at Cold Spring. Her eyes danced.
“You sure do go into jack-pots and out of them oftener than any rider in this country.”
Robin smiled. It was true. Old man Mayne had once irritably told him that if he didn’t go around dreaming he’d save himself a lot of trouble.
“Mark Steele and another fellow stopped in for supper,” Ivy remarked presently.
Robin halted his coffee cup in mid-air.
“What for?” he inquired mildly. “Thought Shining would be at the Block S getting organized for beef-gathering.”
“How would I know?” Ivy replied. “They said they were just ridin’ around. They come in from the south. I saw ’em a long way off. Mark asked where you were.”
“You tell him?”
Robin knew neither Ivy nor any one else could guess where he rode to look for Red Mike that day. He hadn’t known himself where he would go when he started.
“Dad said you were huntin’ horses.”
“Don’t you tell nobody, not a soul, not even the old man, what I just told you about lamin’ the gray and catching Red Mike by Cold Spring,” Robin warned. “Keep that to yourself, Ivy. Will you? Forget it.”
“Why?” she demanded instantly.
“Nothing a-tall,” he parried. “Well, I have got a reason.”
“All right, Robin, I won’t tell,” she agreed. Then, laughingly: “You haven’t started draggin’ the long rope, have you, that you don’t want nobody to know where you rode to-day?”
“Dragging the long rope”, is a range euphemism for stealing other men’s cattle, specifically unbranded calves.
“No,” Robin said shortly. “But somebody else is. Sabe?”
She nodded. Robin had seen something. He didn’t want it known he had been where he might have seen anything. Sometimes it was not good for a man’s health to see too much, or to talk openly about what he saw. Ivy herself was a child of the range. She understood, nodded comprehension.
“I won’t talk.”
Robin leaned over the table to kiss her.
“If that silver-spangled hombre rides this way too often I’ll get to worryin’,” he whispered. “Reckon you could get to like him, Ivy, the way you like me?”
The eternal feminine flickered in Ivy’s dusky eyes.
“I don’t know,” she murmured. “Maybe. I don’t think I’d want to. I reckon I’d be a little afraid of him. I guess he’d be a pretty bad actor if he got going.”
She put her elbows on the table and nursed her round face in her hands.
“Everybody sort of seems to step soft around Mark,” she said reflectively. “Dad’s a little bit afraid of him. So’s other men. Are you?”
“I wouldn’t advertise myself,” Robin said.
He sat tracing a formless pattern on the oilcloth with his finger for a minute. Then he rose. A faint, nameless depression afflicted him whenever he linked Ivy Mayne and Mark Steele in his mind.
“It’ll be daylight before you can sneeze twice,” he said. “I guess I’ll turn in. I’ll have to step high and wide to-morrow.”
He turned to put his arm across Ivy’s shoulders, to pat her smooth hair. She smiled at him and blew him a kiss from her finger tips as he went out the door. She herself was sound asleep in her bed within twenty minutes—while Robin lay on his blankets in a detached bunk house listening to the audible slumber of a ranch hand in the opposite corner. He lay tired but sleepless, turning over and over in his mind the connection between those dead cows, Mark Steele, Ivy’s father, Ivy herself, and his own part in the play.
Should he tell Mayne about those slaughtered cattle and voice his certainty about the man who shot them? Both Mayne and Robin knew that for two seasons now there had been a peculiar shortage in the Bar M Bar calf crop. What Robin saw that afternoon in Birch Creek bottom furnished the key to that shrinkage.
But he knew Mayne. Shining Mark Steele had Mayne buffaloed. He would grumble and swear when Robin told him. But would he act? And if he didn’t act the thing would fester in his mind and sometime when he was drunk he would talk. Once he opened his mouth Robin Tyler was a marked man.
Robin stared up at the dusky ridge logs. He had no desire to have his light put out by any bushwhacking cow thief. Then he shrugged his shoulders and tried to sleep. In the morning—Robin didn’t consciously say so, but he had a feeling that such problems could better be solved in broad day than by lying awake in the dark.
He rose with the sun. Sometime that day he was due to leave to join the Block S crew as a representative of the Bar M Bar on the fall round-up. He had a couple of tender-footed horses to shoe, a few odds and ends of gear to repair. He was a busy youth until noon. Not until dinner was past and his string was bunched in the corral with one horse saddled and his bed and war-bag packed across another did he have any extended conversation with Dan Mayne. They sat side by side on the top rail now, looking down on the sleek backs of Robin’s cow ponies. Mayne had given him instructions about shipping beeves and fallen silent.
“I seen a dead cow yesterday,” Robin said at last. “A Bar M Bar.”
“Wolves?” Mayne grunted.
“Yeah. Two-legged ones,” Robin exploded. The words rushed out of him. “She was bit with a .30-30.”
Mayne looked at him, growled something through his scraggly, dispirited mustache.
“I guess that’s how you’re short on calves,” Robin continued. “Probably there’s quite a few Bar M Bar cows dyin’ of heart failure that way—when they happen to have big, unbranded calves that was missed on the spring round-up.”
“The shrinkage ain’t natural, that’s a fact,” Mayne grumbled. “We tallied a hundred less calves this year than last. Should ’a’ been a good increase. It wasn’t no hard winter.”
They sat wordless a minute.
“Somebody’s stealin’ you blind,” Robin asserted at last.
“I guess so,” Mayne admitted peevishly. He bent a shrewd eye on his man. “You got an idea who, ain’t you?”
“That’s all I have got, just an idea,” Robin declared. “And if I go bellerin’ that idea out loud I might get daylight let through me some day when I ain’t lookin’. I’d ride a lot, if I was you, with a Winchester handy.”
“You seen more’n a dead cow yesterday, kid,” Mayne challenged. “Spit it out. Where was you? What happened?”
Robin told him. But he stopped short of uttering his conviction that one of the riders was Mark Steele. The information he did divulge he cautioned Mayne about keeping to himself. That was as far as he dared go. If Mayne took two drinks too many some day and shot off his mouth about Mark Steele, Shining Mark would go gunning for him, Robin Tyler, not for Dan Mayne.
The old man scowled, tugging at his mustache.
“I’ve suspicioned somebody was workin’ on me,” he said irritably. “This cinches it. Keep your eye peeled for fresh iron-work while you’re with the Block S. I’ll get out and ride. By God!” he snarled in a sudden gust of resentment, “I sure do hate a cow thief. And you ain’t got no hunch who these two was?”
Robin hesitated. There was no guile in him. He was loyal, with the peculiar, single-minded loyalty that speckled Western America with cow-puncher’s graves, from the Staked Plains of Texas to Milk River in the north. No feudal baron ever took the field with more devoted followers than the men who rode for the cattle kings when the range was in its full pastoral flower.
“One of ’em,” he blurted out, “the one that smoked me up, was right flashy with silver. I ain’t namin’ no names.”
Mayne stared at him. His faded blue eyes blinked rapidly.
“Great snakes!” he muttered. “I don’t blame you. That sure makes it bad.”
He scowled reflectively. “The question is——”
“The question is,” Robin finished the sentence in his own way, “is he stealin’ for the Block S or for himself.”
“If he’s stealin’ for the outfit I got about as much chance on this range as a snowball in hell,” Mayne answered moodily. “If it’s his own iron, I got a show. I wish you’d seen what brand went on them calves.”
“I was afoot, I told you. I don’t pack a gun. I ain’t a damn fool,” Robin protested.
“You’re all right, kid.” The old man put his hand on Robin’s shoulder. “You’re no gun man, but you’ll burn your share of powder if you ever have to, I guess. Keep your eyes open around the Block S. I’ll find them fresh-branded calves, if it takes me all fall. And if you’re right——”
He spat angrily into the dust and got down off the fence.
When Robin drew clear of the ranch, jogging behind his string of thirteen mounts, old man Mayne rode out the other way, headed for Cold Spring with a blanket on the back of his saddle and food in his saddle pockets. Robin waved his hat to Ivy a last time before a dip in the rolling land hid the ranch from sight.
A mile above the Bar M Bar he turned his horse back into the creek bed, the same fork of Birch Creek that flowed by Mayne’s house. Willows lined the course of the stream. Under a clump of thick-trunked cottonwoods stood a log cabin and a stable of peeled pine logs, a round corral, all on the edge of a few acres of natural meadow enclosed by a pole fence. Robin reined up at the door. His ponies ambled on a few rods and stopped to graze. He sat half-turned in his saddle, looking about him with a pleased expression.
Ripe grass, yellow in the sun, ran in a rippling wave to the door. Robin had crossed Illinois and Iowa, he had gone more or less hurriedly through the great tier of corn states once or twice in winter. He had never seen wheatfields nor forest nor farmland nor pleasant gardens in midsummer bloom. He knew best the range with its endless miles of grass and sagebrush, peopled sparsely by riders and lonely ranches, grazed by hoofed and horned beasts. He knew the Bear Paws and the Little Rockies and the Sweetgrass Hills, where pine trees grew and wild roses bloomed in thickets under a June sun. The Rocky Mountains were a faint blue wall on the western limit of his journeyings. He had spent most of his years on the great plains that spread east to the Dakotas and south to Wyoming and Nebraska, where northern bunch grass merged into the arid desert of the southwest.
But Robin had imagination, without which indeed few men functioned long on the range, and he could sometimes see this bit of rich black soil about his cabin blooming with color and tender green of grass and shrubs, a bit of the wilderness taking on the atmosphere of a home where beauty was something more than a casual word.
That was why he had claimed and homesteaded this—a half-mile square of creek bottom—in a day when America had millions of acres to bestow on her sons for the asking. Title to it had been issued Robin only a month since. He had proved up. It was his own. The first definite stirrings of the pride of ownership moved in him now. He didn’t see it so much as it was, but as it would be; and Ivy Mayne loomed in the forefront of the picture.
“She’ll be a ranch some day,” he said to Red Mike. “And we won’t have to steal nobody’s calves to get up a herd, either.”
Then he shook up the red horse, fell in behind the others and stirred them to a jog trot that carried him rapidly across the rolling land under the shoulder of the Bear Paw Mountains, toward the Block S camp.