“It’ll be daylight before you can sneeze twice,” he said. “I guess I’ll turn in. I’ll have to step high and wide to-morrow.”
He turned to put his arm across Ivy’s shoulders, to pat her smooth hair. She smiled at him and blew him a kiss from her finger tips as he went out the door. She herself was sound asleep in her bed within twenty minutes—while Robin lay on his blankets in a detached bunk house listening to the audible slumber of a ranch hand in the opposite corner. He lay tired but sleepless, turning over and over in his mind the connection between those dead cows, Mark Steele, Ivy’s father, Ivy herself, and his own part in the play.
Should he tell Mayne about those slaughtered cattle and voice his certainty about the man who shot them? Both Mayne and Robin knew that for two seasons now there had been a peculiar shortage in the Bar M Bar calf crop. What Robin saw that afternoon in Birch Creek bottom furnished the key to that shrinkage.
But he knew Mayne. Shining Mark Steele had Mayne buffaloed. He would grumble and swear when Robin told him. But would he act? And if he didn’t act the thing would fester in his mind and sometime when he was drunk he would talk. Once he opened his mouth Robin Tyler was a marked man.
Robin stared up at the dusky ridge logs. He had no desire to have his light put out by any bushwhacking cow thief. Then he shrugged his shoulders and tried to sleep. In the morning—Robin didn’t consciously say so, but he had a feeling that such problems could better be solved in broad day than by lying awake in the dark.
He rose with the sun. Sometime that day he was due to leave to join the Block S crew as a representative of the Bar M Bar on the fall round-up. He had a couple of tender-footed horses to shoe, a few odds and ends of gear to repair. He was a busy youth until noon. Not until dinner was past and his string was bunched in the corral with one horse saddled and his bed and war-bag packed across another did he have any extended conversation with Dan Mayne. They sat side by side on the top rail now, looking down on the sleek backs of Robin’s cow ponies. Mayne had given him instructions about shipping beeves and fallen silent.
“I seen a dead cow yesterday,” Robin said at last. “A Bar M Bar.”
“Wolves?” Mayne grunted.
“Yeah. Two-legged ones,” Robin exploded. The words rushed out of him. “She was bit with a .30-30.”
Mayne looked at him, growled something through his scraggly, dispirited mustache.