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.