He made one end of the rope fast to the root of a willow, edged clear, shook his loop out. Then he rose and threw in the same motion and the loop swished over Red Mike’s ears and tightened about his glossy neck before he could so much as toss his head.
One frightened surge against Robin’s weight on the reata and the red horse stood still, wide-eyed with surprise, but knowing himself a prisoner. Robin went up to him gently, patted his neck, stroked him, talked to him soothingly. The red horse nuzzled him. When Robin took a turn over his nose with the rawhide the beast followed him like a dog on a leash.
Half an hour later he was mounted. Red Mike pranced and side-stepped and pawed the earth with impatience, a thing of steel and whalebone with the fire of life in it and Robin’s spirits rose as if he had drunk wine.
The gray fed close by, nursing his lame leg. Robin left him without regret, much gainer by the exchange. Red Mike was his own horse. He had never felt another man’s steel in his ribs. He was worth two of the gray. So Robin turned lightly homeward.
But before the sorrel had spurned a mile of the dry earth with his eager hoofs Robin changed his course, and swung down into Birch Creek. He had to see the brand on those dead cows. Why he had to he didn’t trouble to define. In the back of his mind, unadmitted, there was a motive—and the motive was simple loyalty to his salt. Mostly the rustler preyed on the big outfits, and the riders of the big outfits sometimes did not see more than they chose to see on the range. But cattleman and cow-puncher alike despised a thief who stole from a poor man. And somehow Robin Tyler had to know if those dead cows carried Dan Mayne’s brand.
They did. At least one did. Robin dropped his rope over the stiffened legs, took a dally round the horn and turned the animal brand side up. He saw the Bar M Bar. He did not tarry to look at the other two lying fifty yards apart, for as he leaned from his saddle to free the noose something went phut in the sandy soil and scattered dust in his face. Red Mike jumped, snorted. A noise like the pop of a distant whiplash sounded away off and high above.
Robin bent low over his saddle horn and gave Red Mike his head. The sorrel crossed the Birch Creek flats like a candidate for the Derby. As the dust rolled out in a banner from under his flying feet Robin glanced back over his shoulder. He saw two riders standing bold against the sky line on the farther crest of the valley and one of these riders gave off faint shiny reflections when his horse moved in the sun, and there was also a glint of metal in this rider’s hand.
They didn’t shoot again. The range was too great to hit anything in motion except by a fluke. They had scared him off and that, Robin surmised, was all they wanted. They sat there while Robin put a mile between himself and those dead cows as speedily as a fast and powerful horse could cover the distance. Then he pulled Red Mike to a walk, took to the high ground west of Birch Creek and pointed his nose for another water hole.
He rode into the Mayne ranch in the cool dusk having jingled around the south end of Chase Hill to pick up three more saddle horses in their usual haunts. He turned them into a small pasture, put Red Mike in the stable, with an armful of hay to munch. Then he shed his spurs and chaps and walked over to the house. A light glowed in the kitchen windows.
Robin paused in the doorway to look at a girl lifting warm food from the stove and placing it on the table. Ivy Mayne was worth a look. For a long time now, wherever he rode, unless the business in hand required his undivided attention, Robin carried in his mind a picture of this eldest daughter of Mayne’s. He could have told you just how each separate coil of her glossy, dark hair wound about her head, what dimples came and went at the corners of her red mouth when she smiled. He knew that her skin was like satin and her voice a sweet treble like the thrushes that sang in the pine thickets of the Bear Paws. She was eighteen and Robin was twenty-two and they had lived under the same roof, galloped in the same hot sun and under the same silver moon, faced the blustering plains wind and lain in the grass together to stare silent at the winking stars, for a little over two years. There was not, Robin felt, her like for beauty and sweetness in all the pine-clad jumble of the mountains that loomed high in the velvet night to the northward of her father’s ranch.