Ten days from the evening Tex Matthews died in the frozen bed of a lonely creek Robin rode again in the Bad Lands, this time alone. No one knew whither he went, nor why. He scarcely knew himself. If he could have embodied his feelings in words he would have said that he could not rest quietly under circumstances that drew about him like the crushing coil of a python, a dread thing which he could neither combat nor fly from. Sometimes a curious fear stirred in his heart, and again—when he thought of Tex—a resentful ache. His world was all askew. There was no faith nor honor nor even justice. Thieves flourished and murder went unchallenged.
“Shot to death by some person or persons unknown.”
That perfunctory verdict echoed in Robin’s ears like a damnable irony as he pulled up his horse once more in the pines which bounded the corral and cabins he and Tex had discovered. Robin knew those “persons unknown.” But a moral certainty does not establish guilt before the law.
He shivered a little, recalling that day and hour. He had lain on the edge of the washout with a dead man below him and he had prayed that the killers would show themselves. But nothing save a few cattle startled by the shots moved in that lonely place. He had lain until his fingers numbed and his body grew stiff with the cold, until the dark shut down. Then he had lashed the Texan’s corpse across his blood-stained saddle and groped his way out of the Bad Lands, rode the long night through leading a tired horse with a ghastly burden that had been a man.
Here he was again, urged against all reasoned judgment into the enemy’s territory. Robin was no fool to discount the chances he took. He had no plan. He trusted to luck. He would ride warily as a scalping Indian as long as the food in his saddlebags lasted. If only he could get something definite to go on—or better still if he could drop those two red-handed in their predatory activities. Given a crew of riders and two weeks Robin knew that a round-up of T Bar S cattle would show that their number had trebled in a twelvemonth. Nothing less than positive proof would shake Adam Sutherland’s fatuous belief in the integrity of his range boss.
Probably, in the end, Robin thought, he would have to kill Mark Steele—if Mark didn’t beat him to that outcome. Perhaps deep in Robin’s breast lurked the savage desire to stake all on an encounter and so end uncertainty. A man cannot always fathom his own motives. Still, in spite of the indignities Shining Mark had heaped upon him, a festering sore in his mind, and Matthews’ slaying added to the ugly total, Robin was not there for bushwhacking, but to learn if indeed Thatcher and Steele did use that lonely corral and for what purpose.
He viewed it now from the concealment of the timber. He had approached the place cautiously riding in a wide circle around it on high ground. A three-inch layer of new snow blanketed the earth. No track led in or out from the place. Robin turned away and bore off toward the river.
He made camp in a gulch at dusk. During the next day he jogged in and out of various bottoms, flats in which both with Mayne and Tex he had noted scores of Block S cows with their unbranded calves. The cows were there still. The calves were gone. Robin rode far and looked closely. The clean-up had been made. But where were the calves? Robin stared across the frozen reach of the Missouri and guessed the answer. He marked herd after herd of grazing cattle with never a sign of fresh iron work, nor a single unbranded calf. He would rest his hands on his saddle horn and ponder. Where would he dispose of a hundred-odd fresh branded yearlings if he were a cow thief.
Psychology to Robin was no more than a term occasionally encountered in his last year of a frontier grammar school, a word lightly taken and soon forgotten. But he knew his people and his time. And he had imagination, that penetrating vision which is at once a curse and a blessing to its possessor. He could put himself in another man’s shoes.
So he looked south of the river. In the end he crossed, leading a trembling horse that slipped and slid and once or twice fell on the glaring ice.