“Sure. I’d know your saddle anyhow, by those funny little tapaderos.”
The music stopped. Robin got his hat and went out. When he led the two horses to the steps in front May was waiting. Rose Barton and Ed Stevens were with her. Three or four other dancers had come out for a breath of air. They stood chatting and laughing in the light from the open doorway. Robin suspected that tongues would wag freely about himself and Mark Steele and Ivy and May. But he didn’t care—if May didn’t. It struck him that probably May would never know that people were wagging their tongues, and that she would only be amused if she did know. If a king—whether a king in cattleland or a monarch by right divine—could do no wrong, a king’s daughter wore no lesser mantle.
“Take care you don’t get lost,” Rose Barton teased. “You’ll see that bandits don’t carry her off and hold her for ransom, won’t you, Mr. Tyler?”
“Oh, sure,” Robin flung back, as he swung into his saddle. “If we meet up with outlaws I’ll be the cowboy hero. Good-night, everybody.”
They rode down that dark creek bottom. Little Eagle muttered in its pebbly channel between lines of drooping willow. Smells of pine came down from hills black against the paler sky. They rode silently, side by side, each seeing the other’s face as a pale blur in the darkness.
It wasn’t far to the Block S. They crossed a horse pasture, came into another enclosure where loomed a diversity of dim buildings, a great monument of a barn. Beyond these on a little knoll rose the king’s castle, a one-story structure sprawling in three wings added from time to time in the last fifteen years as the Sutherland fortunes expanded. A light glowed in one window.
“Have a good time?” Robin asked when they dismounted.
“Oh, splendid,” she murmured. “Everybody seemed to enjoy it so.”
“They generally do.”
“And I was lucky besides,” May laughed. “I got through the whole evening without having to dance with the Block S range foreman. I wonder if that man affects anybody else the way he does me? When I look at him I’d as soon have a snake touch me. It’s queer.”