“What do you think?” she asked, a touch of color rising in her cheeks. “Try me.”
Bluntly, baldly, with a cow-puncher’s vivid terseness of phrase, Robin, sitting on the rock beside her, the embossed scabbard of his .45 resting against her skirt, told her the tale from the beginning, from the hour he lay on the bank below Cold Spring and watched thieves at work. When he recounted the episode in the Birch Creek line camp May shivered. When he finished she sat staring fixedly at the ground, her hands in her lap, the white fingers locked tight together. Robin bent his head to peer into her face. Her eyes were bright-wet, troubled. He remembered the Coleridge of his school days, ruefully.
“Shucks,” he said, “I didn’t mean to be like the Ancient Mariner, to fix you with my glitterin’ eye and make you listen to my tale of woe. I shouldn’t ’a’ worried you with all that stuff.”
“I’m not—not a worrier,” May whispered. “Only I can see it all so clearly. I knew there was some good reason for my hating that man so. It must have been simply hell for you.”
Robin swallowed something that came up in his throat. It had been hell. It moved him deeply that this slim wisp of a girl understood so clearly what it had been like. He sat silent for a minute.
Then some unreasoned impulse made him put his arms around her, draw her up close to him. For one long second May looked searchingly into his face. What she saw there must have satisfied her, for she smiled. When Robin’s lips touched hers she returned his kiss with a pressure that made his heart leap. And then she snuggled her yellow head against his neck with a contented, happy sigh.
CHAPTER XIX
A COURSE DEFLECTED
Many a time in the next two days did Robin’s eyes turn on the King’s castle, sprawling brown and green and white on its knoll above the ranch buildings. Like a fire that had been smoldering a long time and broken at last into flames under the winds of circumstance, so love burned in his breast, a new love beside which the old one seemed only a pale flicker—something feeble, born of propinquity and unconscious desire.
Yet for all the commotion that made his heart flutter and set him to dreaming whenever his hands were idle, Robin did not let the spring grass grow under his feet in shouldering the new responsibility Sutherland had laid on him. He set his men diligently attending to the various details that would enable the Block S to start the spring round-up as a smoothly functioning machine.
If the Block S riders wondered at the lightning change in wagon bosses they wondered silently and accepted Robin at his face value. They knew that he had somehow beaten Shining Mark and any man who could do that was to be respected in any capacity. Robin had no strain put on his authority. The Block S crew knew its business. They knew a cowman when they saw him. Robin was born to the range and running a round-up was only a logical step up.