Within twenty-four hours he was aboard a Great Northern train rolling east through a gloomy pass in the Coast Range. He lay in a berth, his face pressed to a window pane, watching the dark forest slip by, a formless blur in the night, listening to the click-clack of rail joints under the iron wheels. He felt shut in, oppressed by those walls of dusky timber draped with mossy streamers, clouds above and a darksome aisle in the forest down which the train thundered. No place for a man hungry for bright sun and blue skies.
At dawn the train dropped into the Yakima country. The land opened up in wide vistas. Cattle grazed on rolling hills, dark moving dots on pale green. Robin threw open a window. He leaned out sniffing. Sagebrush ran up to the right of way, receded into the distance, silver-gray in the first sunlight. He could smell it, sweet in his nostrils as camp fire smoke to an Arab.
He lay back in his berth with a strange sense of relief. As the sailor sick of shore sights and sounds goes gladly down to the sea so Robin returned to his own country.
CHAPTER XVI
RESURRECTION
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 of anqueros.”
“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.