Dark found him sitting with his feet on his own stove, in a house without food or bedding, thinking, thinking! To-morrow he would ride back to town. But to-night—here—he was not conscious of hunger nor of physical discomfort as he sat with hands clasped over his knees with an ache in his breast and a turmoil in his brain.

Sometimes it was bad for a man to see things too clearly.

CHAPTER XVII
A CHALLENGE

Before dawn Robin saddled and headed south on the trail of Red Mike. Minus supper and breakfast he was hungry. But his mount was fresh and fed with grazing in the little pasture. Robin was tough. A meal more or less didn’t greatly matter. And sunrise brought him a happier mood. Luck also bestowed a double quantum as if to make up for past niggardliness. Ten miles from the Bar M Bar he ate hot cakes and coffee with a lowly sheep herder tending his flock on the northern flank of Chase Hill. Within an hour of that camp he found his sorrel horse, ranging as the cow horse at liberty was wont to range, with a band of the untamed.

The wild bunch broke headlong in the general direction of the Bar M Bar. Robin fell in behind them. The direction suited his book. He had a bed roll and a packsaddle still at Mayne’s, and a cow-puncher’s bed was part of his working outfit. He would need that bedding.

So he loped behind the wild horses until they ran themselves out. Once Robin caught up and jogged at their heels he headed them where he wished. With rope ready he watched his chance. A touch of the spurs, a deft throw, and the rawhide noose closed about Red Mike’s burnished copper neck.

Robin led him on to Mayne’s, changed his saddle to Red Mike’s back and lashed his bedding on the livery horse. He saw Ivy’s face for a moment at a window. Her father strolled over to say a word or two. Robin answered in monosyllables, not because he was still angry or resentful—that had all evaporated—but because there was nothing more to say. When the last hitch was taken in the pack rope he rode on.

He slept that night at a horse ranch in the foothills halfway between Shadow Butte and Big Sandy. Before noon he was in sight of the town, the pack horse trotting to keep up with Red Mike’s running walk. He did not know what he was going to do but that uncertainty sat lightly on his mind. He had money in his pocket. An able range rider was welcome anywhere. In all the long tier of states bordering the east slope of the Rockies a man who could ride and rope could be a rolling stone and still gather moss. If the Bar M Bar and the Block S were both taboo there was still the Bear Paw Pool, the Shonkin, the YT and the Circle within a radius of seventy miles. He did not have to quit Montana, only that immediate section of the Bear Paw mountains—and that merely because he chose, because the south side of the hills had grown distasteful as well as dangerous. On the latter count alone he would not have retreated. He was not even sure he would leave. He would never run again. Once was enough.

But still he was minded to leave Birch Creek and Little Eagle and Chase Hill, all that varied region he had haunted for three happy years. Robin wanted to go clean, to be rid of every tie. Most of them were broken. There remained only that hundred and sixty acres which he had dreamed of making a home. He would sell it if he could, for what he could get. Since the Block S was the only outfit that set any store by land Robin thought he might sell it to Adam Sutherland. Looking far-sightedly into a future that should long outlast himself Sutherland had increased his acreage as his herds increased. Sutherland would give him something for that homestead, although old Adam owned thousands of acres he had got for a song and sung the song himself. Robin didn’t want to see it again. Shining Mark in partnership with Dan Mayne. Mark marrying Ivy. Pah!

Yet in spite of these dolors riding across earth that exhaled the odor of new growth under a sun blazing yellow in a sapphire sky, Robin’s spirits gradually rose. A man couldn’t be sad in the spring astride of a horse that bounced under him like a rubber ball. Robin whistled. He sang little snatches of song. He pulled up on a hill to stare across the flat in which Big Sandy lay. Space and freedom! Room to move and breathe—and some to spare. The sunrise plains before they were fenced and trammeled. A new, new land but yesterday wrested by the cattleman with his herds from the Indian and the buffalo. Robin could not wholly and consciously visualize the old wild west of which he was a part. He could only feel instinctively that as it was it was good.