CHAPTER VIII
“ON WITH THE DANCE”
Without incident the Block S trailed its bulky herd across the rolling country between Eagle Creek and Big Sandy. Late September was on the land. The days were still and warm, the air full of a tenuous haze. When the riders went on guard there was a sharp coolness in the night wind, a harbinger of other nights to come when they would grumble and wipe the hoar frost from the seats of their saddles before mounting.
But as yet summer held on. The grass waved yellow where it grew tall in the foothills, curled like a brown mat on the wide reach of the plains. Out of these unfenced pastures the Montana beef herds went to market daily in their tens of thousands from a score of shipping points, rolling east to feed a multitude in urban centers and to fatten the bank accounts of the cattle barons. To this stream of outgoing stock the Block S added its quota on a bright autumn day, a week after Robin rode in the twilight with May Sutherland.
They did not tarry in town. There was a rising market in Chicago and it was a season of prime beef on the range. Twenty-four hours after the last steer clicked his polished horns against the walls of a slatted car the Block S pitched camp at sundown on Little Eagle, two miles below the Sutherland ranch. The cowboys were going to a dance. It was not to interfere with their work. They would dance instead of sleeping, that was all. A few hours sleep more or less——
Robin didn’t wait to eat supper. When the last tent stake was driven he mounted and bore away for home, a matter of ten miles. Twelve miles from Mayne’s to the schoolhouse. He would ride that twenty-two miles, dance all night, take Ivy three miles above the schoolhouse to a neighbor’s where she could sleep till noon and ride home at her leisure. He, himself, would get to the roundup in time to swallow a cup of coffee, catch a fresh horse and ride again. And he would enjoy every minute of it. So would Ivy Mayne. Music and a smooth floor. They both loved dancing. A dance in the summer was rare. There was always the important seasonal work of the range in summer. Winter was the time for play. Robin would not have missed that night’s fun for a month’s pay. And Ivy would never forgive him if he let her miss it. She wouldn’t go with any other man, and it wasn’t the thing in the cow country for nice girls to attend dances unescorted. So Robin rode his best horse, Red Mike, and whistled as he burned up the miles.
A little after nine o’clock he was helping Ivy off her horse. Other saddle ponies, a score of them, were hitched to the rail fence that kept wild cattle out of the schoolhouse yard. Buggies and spring wagons loomed in the darkness. Light shone in the yellow squares from the windows. No one could ever accuse range folk of taking their pleasures sadly. Within rose a cheerful clatter of voices, laughter, the tuneful blend of a fiddle and a piano, the slither of feet on a floor made smooth by candlescrapings.
They hurried in.
While Ivy went into a sort of side room to change her riding boots for a pair of slippers carried in her hand, Robin stood in a short entryway, looking in. As a practiced cowman sweeps a bunch of stock and at a single glance notes marks and brands, so he took in the different faces, most of which he knew—the Davis girls, from the ranch nearby where Ivy’s small brother and sister lived while they attended school, the whole Santerre family from Sand Creek, a sprinkling of small cowmen and ranchers from within a radius of twenty miles, even a contingent from Big Sandy.
Over in one corner, bulking large, his big face rosy like a rising sun sat Adam Sutherland, one leg crossed over the other, conversing with another man. Down at the far end Robin marked two couples just a little different, very subtly, indefinably so, from the general run of the crowd gathered for this merry-making. Of the quartette Robin knew one—Sutherland’s girl. The other three, two young men and a girl of twenty, he had never seen before. They were waltzing. As they came down the length of the floor May saw Robin in the doorway. She smiled, nodded over her partner’s shoulder. Just abreast of him the music ceased. May turned to him.
“Hello, Robin Tyler.”
“Howdy, Miss Sutherland.”
“Let me introduce you—Mr. Stevens, Mr. Tyler.”
Robin took a second look at young Stevens.
“You happen to be connected with the Long S down in the Larb Hills country?” he inquired.
“Well, sort of,” young Stevens grinned. “My father’s outfit. You know anybody with the Long S?”
“Oh, I expect I know some of your men,” Robin said. “But I wasn’t thinkin’ of that. It just struck me that it’s kind of funny to come across you. Bob Terry is a cousin of mine.”
“The dickens he is! Then we’re kin by marriage. You’re a Texan too, then?”
Robin shook his head.
“My father was. I was born in the Black Hills; grew up there.”
“Wonder you never showed up round the Long S.” Stevens gazed at him. “Or are you on your own here?”
“Uh-uh. Punchin’ cows. I was with Bob one season over on the Big Dry.”
“You know my sister, then?”
“Oh sure. Liked her a heap, too.”
Young Stevens smiled at May and Robin impartially.
“You’ve heard about Bob Terry chasing all the way from the Panhandle to kill young Joe Stevens, haven’t you?”
May laughed.
“Certainly. I was a little girl here when it happened. Is there any one on the range in Montana who hasn’t heard that story about Bob Terry and young Joe Stevens? And Mr. Tyler is Bob Terry’s cousin, eh? Since Joe is your sister, what ‘in-law’ relation does that make you two?”
“Give it up.”
“Too complicated,” Robin murmured. “I’d have to go to school some more to figure that out.”
“As usual,” May changed the subject, “there aren’t enough girls to go around. Did you bring one?”
“Yes. She’s getting organized,” Robin answered.
He looked around. Ivy stood just inside the door of the little side room looking at him. He beckoned. She didn’t move, except to lift her hands and finger her hair with deft little patting touches. The handclapping brought an encore from the fiddler and the coatless pianist who pawed the ivory with gay abandon even if his technique left something to be desired. Stevens and May went on with their dance. Robin joined Ivy where she stood. He was impatient to get his feet on that smooth floor.
“Who was that towhead you were talkin’ to?” she asked—it seemed to Robin a trifle resentfully. That amused him, perhaps even flattered his vanity a trifle. He had known Ivy to be jealous before on slight grounds, or none at all.
“Oh, that’s Adam Sutherland’s girl,” he said carelessly. “Come on. Let’s dance.”
“I never knew you knew her,” Ivy said.
“I met her once. What’s the odds?”
They moved out on the floor. Mark Steele passed them with the schoolma’am clasped in his manly arms. The school-teacher was very good-looking, a vivacious person with a mass of dark auburn hair and gray eyes and Mark was supposed to like her rather well. He smiled and spoke to Ivy over his partner’s shoulder and Ivy bestowed on Mark her sweetest smile and a pert reply.
Robin looked down at her. Her dark head didn’t come more than halfway up his breast, so he couldn’t see her eyes. But he felt a strange stiffness in her attitude, a resentment. Robin had a faculty of gauging Ivy’s moods without a word from her. Almost at once the anticipated pleasure of the evening began to wane. Ivy was sore because he knew May Sutherland well enough to speak to her. She would go out of her way to make him feel her displeasure. She would want to hurt him, and she would be extremely nice to Mark Steele, or some other man, just to spite him. More than likely she would choose to use Steele as a foil. With what Robin knew of Mark’s raiding Mayne’s stock and Mark’s attitude toward himself Robin foresaw some unpleasant moments ahead. For a fleeting instant he wished he hadn’t come. Then he felt ashamed of himself for such a weakness, annoyed at anticipation of trouble and a wish to avoid it. Time enough to worry when trouble lifted its ugly head.
“Floor’s good,” he remarked to Ivy. “I feel like I had wings on.”
“Yes,” she drawled with a rising inflection. “Look out you don’t fly too high.”
“Wha’s a molla, hon?” he wheedled. “You’re not goin’ to have a grouch about nothin’, are you?”
Ivy looked up at him. It happened that at that precise instant Robin’s gaze was on May and her partner. Ivy’s dark eyes glowed.
“I will if you dance with that stuck-up thing,” she whispered tensely. “Promise me you won’t.”
“Ivy,” he protested. “What the dickens has got into you all at once?”
“She thinks she’s so darned smart,” Ivy muttered.
Robin had fully intended to dance with May Sutherland because dancing with her would afford the only opportunity they would have to talk and he had scarcely realized how eager he was to talk to May Sutherland until Ivy began taking measures to forestall anything of the kind. Robin was both irritated and puzzled. But he had a nimble wit and a touch of diplomacy. He was willing to concede a point, to make a concession.
“If I give her the go-by will you promise not to dance with Mark Steele?”
“Why, how can I,” Ivy manifested surprise, “if he asks me?”
“You can tell him you got another partner,” Robin suggested, “or say you’re tired. Any darned fool thing girls say when they don’t want to dance with a man.”
“I can’t,” Ivy declared.
“You mean you won’t. What’s the difference in you dancin’ with Shinin’ Mark when you know I’d rather you wouldn’t and me dancin’ with Miss Sutherland?”
Robin kept his tone gentle although he had an impulse to shake soundly this morsel of perverse prettiness he held in his arms. He even managed to get a jocular note into what he said.
“Lots of difference. I’ve often danced with Mark. You never kicked. You never said you didn’t want me to dance with him.”
Robin was dumb. He couldn’t tell Ivy why. He couldn’t explain to her that he had never liked Mark Steele, nor why that dislike had suddenly become acute.
“Well,” he said unhappily, “what’s fair for one ought to be fair for the other. If you’re dead set on being mean, go ahead.”
“I suppose you will dance with her?” the storm tone was growing in Ivy’s voice.
“I didn’t say I was going to.”
“I know you. You never do anything I want.”
“Oh, for the Lord’s sake let’s not spoil this with a row,” Robin pleaded. “You know darned well I love you too much to bother my head about any other girl. What’s wrong with May Sutherland more than any other girl here? You never asked me not to dance with Minnie Davis nor Bessie Santerre nor the school-teacher.”
“I don’t like her. I don’t like the way she looked at you,” Ivy muttered sullenly.
“Neither do I like the way Mark Steele looks at you, old girl,” Robin lowered his voice. “And he looks at you that way every time he’s around you. I never kicked about it before. I never acted like I wanted to put you in a glass case. I give you credit for havin’ sense about men.”
“Aw, pouf!”
There was an angry finality in Ivy’s exclamation. They finished the waltz in silence and it was not a particularly enjoyable Terpsichorean effort for Robin Tyler. When they sat down he tried to talk about different matters but Ivy confined herself to “yes” or “no” or an occasional sarcastic “you don’t say” until Robin gave up in despair. When the music began again Mark Steele slid across the floor and Ivy rose to dance with him. There was a defiant sidelong flicker in her eyes toward Robin as she got up.
His first impulse was to go outside and smoke a cigarette. Robin was disturbed and uneasy and resentful. He knew that was no frame of mind for dancing. The night, the stars, and a cigarette would drive that mood away. Like a wounded animal Robin instinctively sought solitude when he was hurt. All his minor victories over whatever griefs and disappointment had come his way had been won by thinking it out alone, on the plains, in lonely camps, in night watches under a quiet sky.
But as Robin rose to go his glance, taking in the room, fell upon May, sitting by her father. She was looking squarely at him. Moreover, from the other side of the room a large, ungainly stock hand from the head of Sand Creek, who had taken one drink too many before he came to the dance, was staring earnestly at May, evidently meditating descent, since she was the only woman not already on the floor.
Robin’s mood changed in the flick of an eyelash. If Ivy wanted to—well, let her! He strode over to May.
“I thought you were going to beat a retreat,” she murmured, when they were on the floor. “You aren’t shy, are you?”
“You don’t know me very well,” Robin replied. “The only time you ever saw me I didn’t act very shy, did I?”
“That was different,” she laughed. “A cow-puncher on a horse, on his own ground—that is different. Some of these nice-looking boys act as if they weren’t sure it was safe to approach me.”
“A fellow hates to get turned down,” Robin observed. “You’re a big, strange toad in the puddle—oh, darn it, I didn’t mean that.”
“It’s a perfectly proper simile,” she hastened to assure him. “I know what you mean. I am. But no one need be afraid of splashing me. I like to dance. I like fun as well as any other girl in these hills.”
“I expect you do,” Robin somehow found it easy to talk to her. “But you cut a lot of ice in this country, or your dad does, and it’s the same thing. I expect after the kind of dances you’re used to and the people you’ve lived among this don’t exactly look like no Fourth of July celebration to you. A cow-puncher may be wild and woolly but he’s no fool. He knows when he’s outclassed—as far as a girl is concerned.”
“You are a rather wide-awake young man in some respects,” she said thoughtfully. Then after a momentary silence she changed the subject. “Who is the pretty little dark-haired girl you brought?”
“That’s Ivy Mayne.”
“Oh, so that’s Ivy. She doesn’t seem to know me. Well, I don’t suppose she would.”
“You know Ivy?” Robin pricked up his ears. He had never heard Ivy so much as mention May Sutherland.
“Why, we began school together right here in this room. At least I had been going a couple of years when Ivy commenced. There were only six pupils. I attended this school until I was twelve. Then I went away to boarding school.”
“Were you two chummy at all?” Robin inquired.
May wrinkled her brows slightly.
“It seems to me we agreed to disagree on various occasions,” she replied. “I was a good deal of a spitfire in those days. If I remember correctly I used to flare up and then Ivy would sulk. What silly things girls do when they’re kids,” she laughed reminiscently. “I shouldn’t have known her. She’s awfully good looking, isn’t she? Perfect features and beautiful eyes. How has she escaped capture here in the Bear Paws where there are six men for every woman? Dad says no schoolteacher has ever taught more than a single term. They always get married. How has Ivy kept her freedom?”
“Hard to catch, I guess,” Robin made a noncommittal reply.
He did not say that he had tentatively captured Ivy. Here, to-night, for the first time in the six months they had been formally engaged he had a doubt of his capture being complete. And besides that doubt he did not want to talk about Ivy Mayne to this fair-haired girl who floated in his clasp light as a feather.
When that dance ended May left him to go straight to Ivy. Robin saw her shake hands and sit down beside Dan Mayne’s daughter and talk with a gracious smile. He didn’t stay to see the outcome of that. He was a little uneasy. He knew Ivy. She could be gracious when she chose, but she could also be very difficult with members of her own sex. Robin let his desire for a smoke take him outside. There, as he leaned against the building he overheard a snatch of conversation just around the corner. He knew one of the voices—Tex Matthews. The other was strange. Robin would have moved instantly, but the first sentence held him.
“Who was the good-lookin’ kid dancin’ with Sutherland’s daughter. I don’t mean young Stevens or the other one—the boy with the wavy hair?”
“Robin Tyler. You know—I told you.”
“I see. An’ that was his girl Shinin’ danced with. Say, they make well-matched couples paired that way, eh? Looked to me like the blond princess likes the kid. An’ I don’t reckon the red-headed school-teacher better be too sure of Mark, eh? Two pair, queens up.”
The man chuckled at his fancy.
“Queens all right,” Matthews drawled. “Well, I’ve seen two pair, queens up, hard to beat before now.”
“Old Adam Sutherland could beat any two pair in the deck with an ace in the hole, the way he’s fixed,” the other man laughed. “I don’t suppose old Adam aims his girl to marry no common cow hand. Still, you never can tell. I’d play that curly-headed kid for a king any time.”
“And the other one’s a jack—a measly jack,” Matthews said harshly. “Remember that old jingle ‘The queen of hearts, she made some tarts upon a summer day. The jack of hearts, he stole those tarts and carried them away.’ Well——”
“Say,” the other man lowered his voice discreetly, “don’t talk like that out loud, Tex. Cracks like that can make trouble. I guess we better not hit that bottle again.”
“It wasn’t whisky made me say that,” Tex replied. “And I don’t ever talk in my sleep. There won’t be no trouble until—well, until I know better where we’re at. Then maybe I’ll start her myself.”
Robin withdrew softly, a little ashamed for listening, a little disturbed by what he had heard—and puzzled also by the last exchange of sentences. But it seemed to have no bearing on his affairs. There was a two-step playing now and Robin sought a partner.
By midnight he had been unable to claim more than a couple of dances from Ivy and these she quite patently danced under protest, refusing to smile at him, scarcely condescending to talk. This sullen resentment she kept for him alone. With every other man she was bright as new-minted gold, even gay. And she danced oftenest of all with Mark Steele. Slowly there grew in Robin’s breast a curiously mingled ache and anger. She wouldn’t play fair and he was impotent to do anything about it.
For the supper dance Ivy flatly turned him down.
“Go dance it with May Sutherland,” she said tartly. “I got a partner.”
“What you tryin’ to do to me, Ivy?” he asked soberly.
“Nothin’ at all. I’m just having a good time. Isn’t that what we come to a dance for?”
Go dance it with May Sutherland! All right, Robin said to himself. He would—if he could. If it was to be everybody for himself and the devil take the hindmost, why not be in the van? He knew what partner Ivy meant. He knew what construction every man and woman there would put on Ivy’s eating supper with Shining Mark. They would infer that Mark had cut him out, and there would be just the faintest anticipation of trouble. Robin grimly promised to fool them there. He would never jump Mark Steele over a woman’s fickle whim. If Ivy was fool enough to throw herself at Shining Mark in a fit of groundless jealousy—she could! No, if and when he clashed with Mark Steele it would be over something more serious than a girl’s favor.
So Robin stood by and when Mark did claim Ivy for the supper dance he looked about for May. On second thought he expected to find her dancing with young Stevens or young Harper. But Stevens was paired with Miss Rose Barton and young Harper had appropriated the auburn-haired school-teacher. Robin had in the course of the evening been introduced to all three. He had danced with Rose, a gay and lightsome damsel from Helena, who confided to Robin that she had come there in some trepidation since she had never before seen the cowboy on his native heath. Having been told sundry tales by Adam Sutherland and young Stevens she half expected the Block S riders to take the floor in woolly chaps and jingling spurs, to make the welkin ring with shouts and perhaps occasionally fire a shot through the roof in their unrestrained exuberance.
“Too bad,” Robin had sympathized mockingly. “And you find us a tame outfit wearin’ store clothes and collars and patent leather shoes and actin’ like anybody at any ordinary dance. Maybe some of the boys might put on a little wild west specially for your benefit if you mentioned it.”
But Miss Barton hastened to assure him that she wanted no such displays. The Block S men were good dancers. She liked cow-punchers, she informed him archly, if several of those present were a fair sample.
For the moment the rest of the Sutherland crowd had vanished. He didn’t see Adam anywhere. Looking about he got a flash of May in the lean-to helping two or three older women arrange sandwiches on platters. The smell of coffee floated out of this room.
Robin went outside. He didn’t want to dance. He didn’t want to eat. He was acutely uncomfortable. He boiled within and the accumulated pressure of emotion was a long time yielding to the solace of tobacco and the quiet night. Under the dusky pines, the high hills that walled in the little valley, the soundless velvet sky, Robin presently regained his poise. He knew Ivy through and through. She was acting like a fool. She knew it and to-morrow or the next day she would be sorrowful and contrite. Since he could never hold a grudge against her it would be all right. No use getting all “het up,” as old Mayne would say. Robin was no philosopher. But he did have certain qualities of mind which made him patient, resourceful, an unconscious practitioner of the saying that what cannot be cured must be endured. He could wait and hold on, without losing heart.
The lilt of the fiddle and the thump of the piano presently apprised him that supper was over. He thought he might as well go in. There was a chilly comfort in the reflection that no one would have missed him, or wondered where he was. So he lingered to smoke another cigarette. Strangely his mental images were not of Ivy and Shining, nor of May Sutherland, nor indeed of anything pertaining to the night and the hour. His mind went back to the day he lamed Stormy by Cold Spring and what he saw in the Birch Creek bottom. He thought of cows dead of sudden death, of stolen calves, of many other trifling incidents which somehow all seemed to be falling into a definite sequence that must lead to some sort of climax in which he was bound to be involved. He knew what desperate chances rustlers take once they embark on the quick road to a bigger herd than comes by natural growth. Theft led to killing, as the cornered highwayman kills. That was the history of the cattle thief all the way from the Staked Plains to the forty-ninth parallel. Robin wondered where this unlawful venture of Mark Steele’s was going to lead all of them, more particularly himself. He knew, moreover, as matters stood, that if Ivy gave Mark Steele a definite impression that she could be his for the taking—and Mark wanted her—he and Mark Steele couldn’t live in the same country. It wasn’t big enough.
He threw away his cigarette and went back to the schoolhouse. There was a quicker tempo in evidence. There had been three or four bottles of whisky cached around outside. No one was drunk, but high spirits were being more freely manifested. That was a custom of the country, seldom lacking observance.
In the entry-way, a sort of lobby, Robin met Ivy. She had on her riding boots and coat.
“You going now?” he said in surprise. “Wait till I get my hat.”
“Never mind,” she answered stiffly. “Mr. Steele is going to take me up to Davis’s.”
For a breath Robin literally saw red, a red mist that momentarily fogged his vision. By an effort he shook that off. That gust of unreasoning fury had a double effect. It was like a physical pain—and it frightened him. He understood in that moment why men strangely run amuck. Yet in one corner of his brain a small, weak voice seemed to be saying, “Don’t act like a damn fool. Don’t act like a damn fool.”
He forced himself to say with a smile, “Oh, all right.”
Then Steele appeared, hat in hand, jaunty. He flashed a look that Robin read as amused triumph—and Robin let that pass.
“Good-night,” he said to Ivy quite casually and went on in, straight to where he saw May Sutherland talking to another girl. He wouldn’t give either Ivy or Steele the satisfaction of looking back, though he knew instinctively that both were watching him while Mark leaned against the wall buckling on his silver spurs.
“Will you dance this?” Robin asked May.
She didn’t say she would. She rose with a faint smile and put her hand on his arm. As they turned the first corner of the room Robin saw the other two pass out, Ivy flinging a last glance over her shoulder.
“If they think I’m going to care a curse——” he didn’t finish the sentence in his mind. It wasn’t true. He did care. His pride as well as his affection was involved in that episode. Any other man but Shining Mark! Then he put it resolutely aside and talked to May.
“I’m going home after this number,” May told him presently. “Some of these men have had one drink too many. I’m a little bit tired. I’ve danced everything but the supper dance.”
“They do get lit up once in a while,” Robin admitted. “How did you come? Buggy?”
“No, we all rode up. Dad and Bill Harper went home before supper. Billy doesn’t care much about dancing, and I think he had a little tiff with Rose.”
“I’m about ready to go myself,” Robin said. “I’ll ride down with you if you like.”
“Didn’t you bring a girl?” May looked at him curiously. “Isn’t it proper to take her home?”
“Sure. But she’s gone home already,” Robin answered evenly, “with another wild cowboy.”
May said nothing to that for a minute. Then: “All right, if you are going. Rose and Joe are having too good a time to leave yet.”
“I’ll find your horse and bring him to the door.”
“Thanks. It’s the chestnut I rode the other day. Will you know him?”
“Sure. I’d know your saddle anyhow, by those funny little tapaderos.”
The music stopped. Robin got his hat and went out. When he led the two horses to the steps in front May was waiting. Rose Barton and Ed Stevens were with her. Three or four other dancers had come out for a breath of air. They stood chatting and laughing in the light from the open doorway. Robin suspected that tongues would wag freely about himself and Mark Steele and Ivy and May. But he didn’t care—if May didn’t. It struck him that probably May would never know that people were wagging their tongues, and that she would only be amused if she did know. If a king—whether a king in cattleland or a monarch by right divine—could do no wrong, a king’s daughter wore no lesser mantle.
“Take care you don’t get lost,” Rose Barton teased. “You’ll see that bandits don’t carry her off and hold her for ransom, won’t you, Mr. Tyler?”
“Oh, sure,” Robin flung back, as he swung into his saddle. “If we meet up with outlaws I’ll be the cowboy hero. Good-night, everybody.”
They rode down that dark creek bottom. Little Eagle muttered in its pebbly channel between lines of drooping willow. Smells of pine came down from hills black against the paler sky. They rode silently, side by side, each seeing the other’s face as a pale blur in the darkness.
It wasn’t far to the Block S. They crossed a horse pasture, came into another enclosure where loomed a diversity of dim buildings, a great monument of a barn. Beyond these on a little knoll rose the king’s castle, a one-story structure sprawling in three wings added from time to time in the last fifteen years as the Sutherland fortunes expanded. A light glowed in one window.
“Have a good time?” Robin asked when they dismounted.
“Oh, splendid,” she murmured. “Everybody seemed to enjoy it so.”
“They generally do.”
“And I was lucky besides,” May laughed. “I got through the whole evening without having to dance with the Block S range foreman. I wonder if that man affects anybody else the way he does me? When I look at him I’d as soon have a snake touch me. It’s queer.”
“I guess there’s others don’t like him much,” Robin agreed. “And I don’t suppose he cares. Will I put your horse in the barn, Miss Sutherland?”
“Oh, no, don’t bother. Just lay the saddle by the steps and turn him loose.”
Robin did so. May stood by until the chestnut went free.
“Well, I reckon you want to get in your little trundle bed.” Robin lifted his hat. “So, I’ll ramble.”
“Good-night,” said May softly. “Take care of yourself, Robin Tyler. Don’t let any bad horses fall on you so you won’t be able to go to dances in the Bear Paws this winter.”
“No fear,” Robin shook the extended hand and turned to his stirrup. “It won’t be bad horses that’ll keep me from dancin’. Good-night.”
In twenty minutes Robin was in his blankets, in a camp still all but deserted. Sleep came slowly. When he did fall asleep he dreamed a lot of fantastic stuff in which Mark Steele, Ivy, himself, May Sutherland, dead cows, lonely sage-grown bottoms, herds of T Bar S’s and dancing couples mixed and whirled in a disorderly fantasy. And somehow he seemed to move amid these scenes and persons with his hands tied behind his back, the sport of all the others.