Sitting on the hewed timber doorsill of the stable once the horses were munching hay, Robin told his boss bluntly just what he had seen and what he surmised.
Mayne cursed in impotent fury.
“But it might be worse,” he took heart after a bit. “We’re gettin’ onto him. I’ll ride them bottoms. You bet I will. I’ll have to get hold of another cow hand until you’re through round-up, I guess.”
“Be careful who you get and what you tell him,” Robin warned. “Steele suspicions me now. He don’t make no breaks but I know he’s thinkin’.”
“I wish it was ten years back.” Mayne’s anger rose again. “I’d ride to the Block S an’ shoot that dirty thief like I would a mad dog. But the country’s got so God damned civilized you can’t even kill a thief unless he pulls a gun on you first. They’d bury me in Deer Lodge for life. Adam Sutherland’d never let up. He’d spend a barrel of money to convict a man that shot that pet snake of his. Don’t you let him provoke you, Robin. If he thinks you know too much he’ll pick a row with you an’ make you start somethin’. Then he’ll put your light out an’ it’ll be a clear case of self-defense for him. Or he’ll make you quit the country.”
Robin didn’t need Mayne to tell him these things. It was only putting in plain English just what had been gathering in his own mind—just what he felt to be the secret thought Steele nursed. So he didn’t discuss that phase of it at all. He had said his say, had done his duty. He rose.
“I’m goin’ to see Ivy,” he told Mayne. “Then I guess I’ll split the breeze.”
An hour later he was loping steadily through the night, Ivy’s farewell kiss on his lips, but with his mind strangely divided between his sweetheart and May Sutherland.
May was beautiful and so was Ivy Mayne, each in her own fashion. But May’s liquid, throaty voice lingered like an echo of faint music in Robin’s ears. Robin was unread in the nuances of feeling but no man can escape the subtle thing called charm. May was so utterly free from archness, little coquetries. She was so honest and direct. If she had challenged something dormant in him with all the weapons of her sex, it was an unconscious challenge.
Spaces and freedom! Robin looked up at the stars and wondered how she would have described that luminous, silver-spangled sky, what feelings would have moved her and what she would have said if she had been riding knee to knee with him across those rolling plains, guided by the Big Dipper and an instinctive sense of location. He knew quite well what Ivy would say, but what she would feel he doubted if she would know herself, because Ivy was a curiously dumb soul. Expression was strangled in her. She could only act, and act often with the driving impulse terribly obscured. In all their companionship Robin had been compelled to gauge Ivy’s deepest thoughts and feelings by outward manifestation alone.