Sutherland mused, pulling at his walrus mustache, his rubicund face glowing behind the smoke cloud of his cigar.
“Yes, sir,” he continued. “You’ll be the youngest wagon boss in Montana. I’m kinda disappointed in Mark. He was a slashin’ good cowman. Maybe gettin’ some money left him has spoiled him. He’s quit. Least that’s how I take it. He drew all the money he had comin’, put Jack Boyd in charge of the outfit, and got on the train this afternoon. So you go out an’ take charge. The wagons’ll be camped by the ranch. I’ll give you a note to Jack.”
“All right,” Robin said quietly.
“Now look,” Sutherland continued. “I don’t want you to take up with the idea you’ve scared Mark Steele outa the country, because that’d be a bad mistake. If he didn’t have it out with you right then and there he had his own reasons besides bein’ afraid to take a chance. Mark’s got a money interest on this range now. He’ll be back. I’d be watchful,” Sutherland said very slowly, “if I was you.”
Robin had no mind to contradict that. He merely nodded.
“I don’t want to crowd you,” the old man went on in the kindliest tone Robin had ever heard him use. “I ain’t got to be near sixty and own thirty thousand cattle by goin’ through the world blind, deaf and dumb. Maybe a man here and there fools me for awhile. See you don’t. If I trust a man and he knifes me, I don’t forget. You say you can show me somethin’ if you have a round-up crew to work with. Well, you got it. And I’m from Missouri. I’m waitin’ to be shown.”
“I don’t want to talk big,” Robin murmured. “I’m kinda dizzy right now. But when I spread my hand on the table I think you’ll say it’s good.”
On a ridge overlooking the home ranch on Little Eagle, Robin drew rein for a look. The painted roofs of barn and out buildings and rambling house glowed in the sun. Windows flashed like beacons. The willows fringing creek and irrigating ditch were one shade of green, the wide meadows another, the pines that clothed the hills above still a darker hue. And there were the white tents of the round-up glistening against the sward, the scattered grazing horses. He could hear far off the sweet tinkle of bells. His outfit! The youngest range boss in Montana. Twenty riders, thirty thousand cattle, a thousand square miles of range under his hand! Robin could have whooped. Yet there was a sobering effect in the magnitude of his task. It wasn’t simple. There were added complications no one knew but himself, himself and Mark Steele and Tommy Thatcher. Perhaps Adam Sutherland shrewdly guessed that where so much smoke arose there must be fire.
Robin looked away down Birch Creek toward the Bar M Bar, thinking of Ivy Mayne being urged along a way that promised unhappiness, driven by impulses her dumb sullen heart could never fathom. Robin had lived all his young life close to nature, striving with nature. He had no bookish sophistication, but he was keenly alive, his mind kindled easily. He had a keen sense of the remorselessness of natural law. Nature’s ways were sometimes dark in getting her business done. The individual wasn’t so much, just as a single animal in a herd was of no great consequence—but the herd counted. The pain and passion of mating and begetting and dying were no mysteries to Robin. What he didn’t know he could dimly grasp. Passion was sometimes wrapped up and obscured in material complexities. Conflict was inherent in life itself, from the time a man drew his first breath until he breathed his last.