She nodded. Robin had seen something. He didn’t want it known he had been where he might have seen anything. Sometimes it was not good for a man’s health to see too much, or to talk openly about what he saw. Ivy herself was a child of the range. She understood, nodded comprehension.
“I won’t talk.”
Robin leaned over the table to kiss her.
“If that silver-spangled hombre rides this way too often I’ll get to worryin’,” he whispered. “Reckon you could get to like him, Ivy, the way you like me?”
The eternal feminine flickered in Ivy’s dusky eyes.
“I don’t know,” she murmured. “Maybe. I don’t think I’d want to. I reckon I’d be a little afraid of him. I guess he’d be a pretty bad actor if he got going.”
She put her elbows on the table and nursed her round face in her hands.
“Everybody sort of seems to step soft around Mark,” she said reflectively. “Dad’s a little bit afraid of him. So’s other men. Are you?”
“I wouldn’t advertise myself,” Robin said.
He sat tracing a formless pattern on the oilcloth with his finger for a minute. Then he rose. A faint, nameless depression afflicted him whenever he linked Ivy Mayne and Mark Steele in his mind.