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.