Over westward he could see a little dark cluster moving rapidly across the rolling land. That was Sam Connors and his prisoner with two J7 men for bodyguard. Connors could make the evening train by riding hard. Nightfall would see the Texan safe in the county jail. Nightfall, Robin hoped, would also see Mark Steele at the end of his tether. The blank warrant in his pocket Robin had already filled in. He meant to leave no loopholes because he meant to take Mark Steele wherever he found him. If Mark anticipated his purpose and resisted then the outcome was on the knees of the gods.
Shining Mark might be at the Bar M Bar; he might be at the Block S camp, he might be in town. He was bold and crafty. He might indeed be anywhere, but in those three places in the order named Robin proposed to look for him. He had a grim satisfaction to stiffen his purpose. There was no loophole left for Shining Mark now. Robin had been patient, he had endured much, and he did not love his enemies.
Steele was not at the Bar M Bar. Neither was Mayne nor his daughter. A ranch hand told Robin they had gone to town. He bore on up to the Block S. The round-up tents stood white on the green border of an irrigated meadow but the Sutherland riders knew nothing of Mark. Jack Boyd did inform Robin that old Adam and May had departed in the buggy three or four days earlier. Robin knew that the bay trotters were likely to have but one destination.
“Me for Big Sandy,” he reflected—and borrowed a fresh horse out of the Block S remuda.
Thus mounted he burned the earth, in range parlance, toward town. As he rode his personal danger from ambush became less of moment than the possibility of Mark Steele slipping through his fingers. Mark would do one of two things the moment he learned that Thatcher had been taken red-handed; either he would go gunning for Robin or he would jump the country. He had money. That inheritance of fifteen thousand dollars which he had not put into the Bar M Bar partnership would take him far and fast—if he chose to own himself beaten and quit the field.
That contingency worried Robin. He had made two definite promises both to himself and Shining Mark, one in anger, the other in cold blood, to kill him or put him in the penitentiary. He meant to keep one or the other.
In the freshness of his anger that morning with Thatcher’s fear-wrung story to cap the climax, Robin had set out to take his man single-handed.
Now, as he loped out of the foothills, he was not so sure of the wisdom of that plan. To act alone savored a little of satisfying a personal grudge, which he admitted to himself—and he reflected that making Steele’s arrest a personal, single-handed affair might easily permit Mark to evade justice altogether.
Wherefore, by the time town loomed in the tenuous heat haze that quivered above a parched earth, Robin had decided to consult Adam Sutherland first. He could still grab Steele wherever he found him, but perhaps the entire machinery of the sheriff’s office had better be in motion. Montana covered a lot of territory. If Shining Mark went on the dodge he would take some catching.
So he rode to the store on an angle that took him between the stockyards and the rows of houses that formed the one short street. A clerk stood in the door that Robin had to pass on his way to the front. He pulled up.