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.
CHAPTER III
MACHIAVELLI?
From the Bar M Bar to Shadow Butte, where the Sutherland riders lay ready to start the fall work, was a matter of three hours’ riding. The round-up was camped under the Butte itself on a natural meadow in Little Eagle, a lovely spot ringed about by groves of poplars and clumps of willows, just where the foothills lifted sharply to the timbered slopes of the Bear Paw Mountains.
Robin’s string, heads up and ears erect at sight of the saddle bunch scattered on the flat, went downhill on the run. Robin himself drew up on the edge of the high bank to have a look. He had seen round-ups sweeping the plains, trail herds coming up from one horizon and vanishing below another ever since he could remember. Wild horses and wild cattle and wild riding had never grown old, commonplace, to Robin. He always thrilled a little to the sights and sounds of range work. Perhaps because he was and had always been a part of it, dimly conscious of its dramatic significance as the greatest pastoral movement in the history of the world, of himself as a minor figure playing a part in a spectacle bigger than any of its actors.