Well below Cold Spring a sprinkling of T Bar S stuff began to show. There was no shipping beef in that brand. But every cow had her calf marked. Once or twice Robin noted a T Bar S calf without a mother, a little bit lean and scraggly—orphans. There would be others, he surmised, which he did not see. One man couldn’t see everything over a territory fifty miles wide and a hundred miles long. Not once in that region did he spot a Bar M Bar cow with an unbranded calf at side. Nor did Robin again have opportunity to see what Steele and Thatcher did when they took the outside circle by themselves. That happened less often. Robin knew Steele would be wary now anywhere within a few miles of the Mayne ranch. The man might take long chances but he was not a fool.
As they worked east of Chase Hill the T Bar S cattle grew more plentiful.
“For a man who lives in Helena, who don’t have no rider, who don’t ever show up himself, this here Jim Bond sure gets his stock well looked after,” Tex Matthews remarked to Robin one day. “He’ll do well in the cow business, I reckon.”
“How?” Robin inquired.
Tex shrugged his shoulders.
“If I didn’t know you, kid, I might think maybe you were asleep. There’s awful good care took in this country to see that all Jim Bond’s calves get branded.”
There was a slight emphasis on the “all.”
“You don’t reckon he gets branded for him more’n the law allows?” Robin hazarded.
The Texan looked hard at him for a second. Then he smiled.
“If it was anything to me; if I had stock in these parts, I’d be mighty curious about this T Bar S,” he drawled. “I sure would. As it is, it ain’t a Block S man’s business to be curious about anything but Block S stuff.”