Nearly an hour after they threw their cattle on the round-up ground Steele and Thatcher came in with a couple of hundred head. They were the last drive. Their horses were rough with sweat, tired. When they rode into camp to catch fresh mounts to work the herd Mark commented on their ride. To Robin it seemed like overdoing the thing.
“Ten miles for nothing,” Mark observed to him casually. “There was a lot of stuff in the canyon, but hardly a dozen head in the river bottom.”
CHAPTER VII
A RIDER AND A LADY
When the Block S hauled in to a camp ground midway between the Bar M Bar and the Sutherland ranch its beef herd numbered close on two thousand head. They were pulling for the railroad. With that herd off their hands one more sweeping of the range between Mayne’s and Big Sandy would end the fall round-up.
Robin came off day herd at four thirty of a September afternoon. He was through for the day. He had no guard to stand that night. But when the wrangler bunched the remuda in the rope corral strung from the wheels of the bed wagon, he caught a horse just the same.
Steele looked at him inquiringly. Robin half expected him to ask the why of a horse. A cow-puncher free of appointed duty came and went as he pleased, giving no account of his movements unless he chose. A “rep” had even wider latitude.
It would not in the least have surprised Robin if Steele had overstepped a range boss’s privilege in regard to his movements. Each day in subtle, silent ways, Shining Mark evinced more of a tendency to “ride” him, and Robin couldn’t get away from the idea that Mark was slowly but deliberately working up to a point where the Bear Paws would not be big enough to hold them both. There was a definite limit to what a man could stand. To keep his peace, avoid friction, until Mark crowded him too hard was the only course Robin could see to pursue.
With a little more than two hours’ daylight ahead of him he pointed for the Bar M Bar. Whether Steele showed his teeth or not Robin would be true to his salt. If Shining Mark had been thundering on his trail to start a private war Robin would still have ridden home that night to tell Mayne he had better ride those river bottoms and get his calves before Steele and Thatcher got around to them.
Mayne would fume, but he would save his stock—unless there were other rustlers in league with Steele. Robin didn’t think that likely. Steele was a lone wolf, not a gangster. That was his clearest impression of the man; that Mark stood on his own feet, played his own hand strictly for his own benefit. If Thatcher was in with him it was simply because Steele could use Thatcher to advantage. Somehow, Robin gave little thought to this Texan confederate of Steele’s. In that he made a slight mistake for which he paid later.
He had ten miles to make. As he rode the faint uneasiness that afflicted him most of the time around the Block S, a feeling born of the conviction that Mark Steele would make some break when he least expected it, fell away from Robin. The cool evening air was pleasant on his face. He stood in his stirrups and chanted the interminable rhymed history of Sam Bass, who was born in Indiana but who roamed unto Texas a cowboy for to be. Robin was happy. His lusty young voice kept time to the beat of his horse’s hoofs. He was going to see Ivy for an hour or so. Sufficient unto the day——