“Well, if you can’t prove nothing, you can’t, that’s all,” Robin said. “You just got to lay low, and see which way the cat hops.”
“I’m goin’ to ask old Adam to-morrow if he’s got any idea what’s goin’ on around here,” Mayne growled. “An’ I’m goin’ to ride an’ watch. Ride an’ watch,” he repeated darkly. “Ride an’ watch!”
CHAPTER V
WATCHFUL WAITING
Robin rode to camp alone. The Block S riders were all gathered in the Silver Dollar when he came back to where his night horse stood with the others in a row by the hitching rack. Through the windows he could see that a poker game had started. Tex Matthews was playing. Robin didn’t want to drink. With his mind fully occupied he somehow didn’t care to talk. He was aware of a faint reluctance to facing Mark Steele while Mark was in that hair-trigger mood—a trouble-breeding temper, certainly quickened by a few drinks, that might or might not have been generated by something Mayne had said in his cups.
Steele was not rated a quarrelsome man. He could be arbitrary, high-handed, and he had never been known to give way an inch for any one. Even his ordinary genial manner could easily take on an edge. He had no known notches on his gun handle. But whatever obscure inner force it is, that makes some men positive, and others negative, in their human contracts, it resided in Mark Steele, and exacted a certain deference among men who were lightning-quick to resent any form of aggression.
So Robin, deep in his own reflections, swung into his saddle and rode away to camp. If Ivy had not been asleep in her room he would have tarried longer. But he would see her to-morrow. He fell asleep, in a bed unrolled on the grass, with his face turned to the stars. He wakened once when the riders came pattering into camp and got quietly into their beds. A cloudless sky brilliant with specks of silver arched over him, a luminous inverted bowl. Crickets chirped in the grass. Night horses tied to the bed wagon, on picket, made their usual noises. The bells on the remuda tinkled distantly. Small sounds in a deep hush overlying a lonely land. Robin turned over and slept again.
At daybreak the outfit mounted. There was a herd to trim. While the bulk of that seventeen hundred bore the Block S there were strays of half a dozen other brands to be shipped, and these cattle were not jammed indiscriminately into cars to be sorted in Chicago. The cattleman unscrambled his own eggs.
From dawn to noon the flat a mile outside the stockyards was a scurry of dust, flying riders, steers and cows being shot out of the main herd into little bunches held separate. Once sorted by brand and sex each group moved into the shipping pens. By four o’clock the last longhorn was on his way, two trainloads of him.
The riders were free until the following morning, when the Block S would pull south. Thirty miles beyond Birch Creek, beyond the Bar M Bar, Steele would throw his riders on circle again to comb the range for beef. The camp would move day by day toward the railroad as the riders gathered a herd.
But now, as the last door clanged shut on the last animal, the cowboys flung themselves on their horses and charged down on the Silver Dollar. For ten hours they had worked in heat and dust. They were hot and thirsty. Cold beer was nectar to their parched mouths.