“Go dance it with May Sutherland,” she said tartly. “I got a partner.”
“What you tryin’ to do to me, Ivy?” he asked soberly.
“Nothin’ at all. I’m just having a good time. Isn’t that what we come to a dance for?”
Go dance it with May Sutherland! All right, Robin said to himself. He would—if he could. If it was to be everybody for himself and the devil take the hindmost, why not be in the van? He knew what partner Ivy meant. He knew what construction every man and woman there would put on Ivy’s eating supper with Shining Mark. They would infer that Mark had cut him out, and there would be just the faintest anticipation of trouble. Robin grimly promised to fool them there. He would never jump Mark Steele over a woman’s fickle whim. If Ivy was fool enough to throw herself at Shining Mark in a fit of groundless jealousy—she could! No, if and when he clashed with Mark Steele it would be over something more serious than a girl’s favor.
So Robin stood by and when Mark did claim Ivy for the supper dance he looked about for May. On second thought he expected to find her dancing with young Stevens or young Harper. But Stevens was paired with Miss Rose Barton and young Harper had appropriated the auburn-haired school-teacher. Robin had in the course of the evening been introduced to all three. He had danced with Rose, a gay and lightsome damsel from Helena, who confided to Robin that she had come there in some trepidation since she had never before seen the cowboy on his native heath. Having been told sundry tales by Adam Sutherland and young Stevens she half expected the Block S riders to take the floor in woolly chaps and jingling spurs, to make the welkin ring with shouts and perhaps occasionally fire a shot through the roof in their unrestrained exuberance.
“Too bad,” Robin had sympathized mockingly. “And you find us a tame outfit wearin’ store clothes and collars and patent leather shoes and actin’ like anybody at any ordinary dance. Maybe some of the boys might put on a little wild west specially for your benefit if you mentioned it.”
But Miss Barton hastened to assure him that she wanted no such displays. The Block S men were good dancers. She liked cow-punchers, she informed him archly, if several of those present were a fair sample.
For the moment the rest of the Sutherland crowd had vanished. He didn’t see Adam anywhere. Looking about he got a flash of May in the lean-to helping two or three older women arrange sandwiches on platters. The smell of coffee floated out of this room.
Robin went outside. He didn’t want to dance. He didn’t want to eat. He was acutely uncomfortable. He boiled within and the accumulated pressure of emotion was a long time yielding to the solace of tobacco and the quiet night. Under the dusky pines, the high hills that walled in the little valley, the soundless velvet sky, Robin presently regained his poise. He knew Ivy through and through. She was acting like a fool. She knew it and to-morrow or the next day she would be sorrowful and contrite. Since he could never hold a grudge against her it would be all right. No use getting all “het up,” as old Mayne would say. Robin was no philosopher. But he did have certain qualities of mind which made him patient, resourceful, an unconscious practitioner of the saying that what cannot be cured must be endured. He could wait and hold on, without losing heart.
The lilt of the fiddle and the thump of the piano presently apprised him that supper was over. He thought he might as well go in. There was a chilly comfort in the reflection that no one would have missed him, or wondered where he was. So he lingered to smoke another cigarette. Strangely his mental images were not of Ivy and Shining, nor of May Sutherland, nor indeed of anything pertaining to the night and the hour. His mind went back to the day he lamed Stormy by Cold Spring and what he saw in the Birch Creek bottom. He thought of cows dead of sudden death, of stolen calves, of many other trifling incidents which somehow all seemed to be falling into a definite sequence that must lead to some sort of climax in which he was bound to be involved. He knew what desperate chances rustlers take once they embark on the quick road to a bigger herd than comes by natural growth. Theft led to killing, as the cornered highwayman kills. That was the history of the cattle thief all the way from the Staked Plains to the forty-ninth parallel. Robin wondered where this unlawful venture of Mark Steele’s was going to lead all of them, more particularly himself. He knew, moreover, as matters stood, that if Ivy gave Mark Steele a definite impression that she could be his for the taking—and Mark wanted her—he and Mark Steele couldn’t live in the same country. It wasn’t big enough.