“No.” There was an unavoidable crispness in Robin’s tone. “I’ve seen him off and on the last three years. I never worked with him till this fall.”
“You don’t like him, do you?” she observed. Her blue eyes burrowed into Robin’s.
“I guess I like him as well as he likes me,” Robin said slowly. He didn’t want to talk about Mark Steele.
“I don’t like him either,” May murmured. “I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. Yet my father thinks he’s the only thing that ever happened around the Block S.”
Robin sat silent. He could discuss Shining Mark to a limited extent with Ivy, freely with old man Mayne—somehow, not with this girl.
“I hate the man,” she said sharply. “You won’t repeat what I say?”
“You know I won’t—or you wouldn’t say it to me,” Robin told her bluntly. “If you hate him it’s because you’re afraid of him.”
May looked down at the ground for a second. She lifted her eyes again to Robin thoughtfully.
“I wonder if that’s it? It didn’t occur to me. I have no reason to be afraid of him. But I find myself wanting to avoid him although I’ve only met him three or four times. I rode away from home this evening because my father expected him at the ranch.”
“I know men in the Bear Paws that walk away around Mark Steele,” Robin said. “And some that step easy where he is. Some just naturally don’t like him. Most everybody figures he’s a bad man to cross. I guess he knows that, an’ it makes him think quite a heap of himself. I don’t know.”