Bertrand W. Sinclair

“ 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. ”

“ Nature’s ways were sometimes dark in getting her business done. The individual wasn’t so much, just as a single animal in a herd was of no great consequence—but the herd counted. The pain and passion of mating and begetting and dying were no mysteries to Robin. What he didn’t know he could dimly grasp. Passion was sometimes wrapped up and obscured in material complexities. Conflict was inherent in life itself, from the time a man drew his first breath until he breathed his last.
Looking away toward that hidden ranch he could visualize Ivy with Mark a sinister figure in the background. ”

“ In a month, during which he burned up forty dollars’ worth of ammunition, Robin found himself taking a genuine pleasure in mastery of the weapon. Simply to snap the gun at something on the ground, to see the can or whatever it was, jump in a blob of dust, gave him a peculiar satisfaction, very like the concealed pride a roper gets from putting his loop over a cow’s horns at the limit of his throw. If Shining Mark had never crossed his trail, he reflected, he would never have thought of getting fun out of pistol-practice with a Colt .45. ”

“ Robin’s string, heads up and ears erect at sight of the saddle bunch scattered on the flat, went downhill on the run. Robin himself drew up on the edge of the high bank to have a look. He had seen round-ups sweeping the plains, trail herds coming up from one horizon and vanishing below another ever since he could remember. Wild horses and wild cattle and wild riding had never grown old, commonplace, to Robin. He always thrilled a little to the sights and sounds of range work. ”

“ Robin and Tex headed for one such place which they had found while on circle two seasons earlier, and thought they could locate again. The curse of the Bad Lands is the ghastly similarity; one gulch, one canyon, one winding plateau is fellow to all the rest. There are no peaks, no hills; it is all etched deep in a general level, like a sunken garden planned by a madman. A man needed a keen sense of direction, a most acute sense of location to find his way to any given spot. ”

“ At such a moment a queer glowing gladness in simply being alive, in being there on the fringe of a sleepy herd with a good horse under him, would give Robin an odd sensation. He got the same feeling when they went thundering down a long ridge, twenty riders abreast, elbows out, reins swinging loose, to the music of jingling bits and spurs, the creak of saddle leather. He had a touch of that strange uplift now, for a moment. An artist with an analytical turn might have defined it as a dumb response to beauty. Robin didn’t attempt to define his feelings. ”

“ Robin inquired.
“Well,” Sutherland drawled. “You can go to work for the Block S for one thing. You said nobody loved you and you were out of a job. I’ll give you a job.”
“I couldn’t work for the Block S, as things stand,” Robin said impatiently. “You know that.”
“Don’t see why. You’re a cow-puncher. I can use you.”
“See here,” Robin told him bluntly. “I’ve ideas of my own. The only way I’d ever work for the Block S would be to run it.”
“All right,” Sutherland said abruptly. “I’ll give you a whirl at being a range boss. Mark Steele has quit me. Think you can fill his boots? It’ll take a man.” ”

“ Shining Mark in partnership with Dan Mayne. Mark marrying Ivy. Pah!
Yet in spite of these dolors riding across earth that exhaled the odor of new growth under a sun blazing yellow in a sapphire sky, Robin’s spirits gradually rose. A man couldn’t be sad in the spring astride of a horse that bounced under him like a rubber ball. Robin whistled. He sang little snatches of song. He pulled up on a hill to stare across the flat in which Big Sandy lay. Space and freedom! Room to move and breathe—and some to spare. The sunrise plains before they were fenced and trammeled. ”

“ Robin turned in his saddle when he was mounted on a strapping bay, to look back at the house. A light glowed in the windows of a room he knew was May’s. He hated to go without seeing her again. But until the issue between himself and Shining Mark was settled for good he could neither give himself up to love nor be easy in his mind. One thing at a time.
Yet it pleased him to know that Adam Sutherland treated him without question. Sutherland was right. Men had to be trusted. Life was impossible without that faith. If here and there it was betrayed—no matter. He hadn’t failed Mayne, for instance ”

“ It seemed to Robin a wonderful thing to meet a girl who could talk in clear simple words about what she thought and felt about such puzzling sensations as came over a man when he looked at the vastness and wonder and mystery of the world he lived in. That quality of wonder, of space and time in which man danced his little turn and danced no more, in which there seemed much disorder but in which there seemed also a Law and a Pattern and a Purpose if a man could only discover what it was, had troubled Robin for a long time. ”

“ Even if Thatcher or one of the others took horse and rode they could cover ground no faster than he. He would beat them to the railroad by hours. After that—well Robin knew the range men, banked for safety on that knowledge. They would look for him anywhere but on a train. And Robin meant in that hour to turn his back forever on the range and cattle and cow thieves—all that had been his life ever since he could remember. He rode over the high, moon-washed divide of the Bear Paws in snow three feet deep, with a maturing plan and a definite purpose and destination in mind. ”

“ Like a wolf at bay or a tiger in the circle of beaters pure savagery was driving Robin now. Every primitive instinct buried deep in man was on top. He opened the door. For the moment, rifle in hand, with that dark rage upon him, Robin would have faced all the fiends of hell itself—and Thatcher was only a man.
The Texan was walking rapidly toward the house. In Robin’s seething brain the thought arose: “They knew I was here. They followed me. He thinks Mark has downed me.” ”

“ The grass waved yellow where it grew tall in the foothills, curled like a brown mat on the wide reach of the plains. Out of these unfenced pastures the Montana beef herds went to market daily in their tens of thousands from a score of shipping points, rolling east to feed a multitude in urban centers and to fatten the bank accounts of the cattle barons. To this stream of outgoing stock the Block S added its quota on a bright autumn day, a week after Robin rode in the twilight with May Sutherland. ”

“ It would not in the least have surprised Robin if Steele had overstepped a range boss’s privilege in regard to his movements. Each day in subtle, silent ways, Shining Mark evinced more of a tendency to “ride” him, and Robin couldn’t get away from the idea that Mark was slowly but deliberately working up to a point where the Bear Paws would not be big enough to hold them both. There was a definite limit to what a man could stand. To keep his peace, avoid friction, until Mark crowded him too hard was the only course Robin could see to pursue. ”

“ To grab anybody’s gun and match himself against Shining Mark was the equivalent of self-destruction.
There was neither satisfaction nor glory in being shot by a cow thief merely because a cow thief considered that a good way to cover up his tracks. Yet short of killing Steele or being killed by him Robin could see no way out of this predicament except the unthinkable one Mark had suggested—that he quit the country. He might be afraid to tackle Steele but he was not sufficiently afraid to run. If he did not run Mark would eventually force him to burn powder. ”

“ Scrub pine timber grew in clumps, thickets, lodge-pole pine made small forests, wherever roots could find hold and sustenance. Many of these deep gashes were flat-bottomed, threaded by streams of bitter alkali-tainted water. On the narrow, winding benches that carried the plains level down to overlook the river bunch grass waved like fields of wheat. In midsummer it was hot, arid, the haunt and breeding ground of rattlesnakes and wolves. In winter, with snow to serve in place of water, the Bad Lands gave grazing and shelter to tens of thousands of cattle. ”

“ Go dance it with May Sutherland! All right, Robin said to himself. He would—if he could. If it was to be everybody for himself and the devil take the hindmost, why not be in the van? He knew what partner Ivy meant. He knew what construction every man and woman there would put on Ivy’s eating supper with Shining Mark. They would infer that Mark had cut him out, and there would be just the faintest anticipation of trouble. Robin grimly promised to fool them there. He would never jump Mark Steele over a woman’s fickle whim. ”

“ The sharp smell of bruised sage, the white tents of a round-up camp in a creek bottom, the howl of a wolf far off in the night—these Robin’s heart suddenly ached for—and for something else, that he felt deep within him but would never admit.
“By God, I’ve a mind to go back and face the music!” he said aloud. “They can’t hang me. I’d as soon spend two or three years in Deer Lodge as here.”
Of so little value did freedom seem to him in that moment. There was more than homesickness. A man’s liberty is dear but so is pride. Only cowards fled the field. ”

“ Robin replied. “The only time you ever saw me I didn’t act very shy, did I?”
“That was different,” she laughed. “A cow-puncher on a horse, on his own ground—that is different. Some of these nice-looking boys act as if they weren’t sure it was safe to approach me.”
“A fellow hates to get turned down,” Robin observed. “You’re a big, strange toad in the puddle—oh, darn it, I didn’t mean that.”
“It’s a perfectly proper simile,” she hastened to assure him. “I know what you mean. I am. But no one need be afraid of splashing me. I like to dance. I like fun as well as any other girl in these hills.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ At noon they camped two hours on a creek bottom, ate, caught fresh horses and moved on. Mid-afternoon saw the cavalcade top a rise below which, in the middle of a great gray stretch of sagebrush, the town of Big Sandy lifted a huddle of unpainted buildings. There the chuck wagon would take on a month’s grub, the cowboys would drink Bourbon whisky and play poker overnight, and at dawn the Block S would depart into the wide waste of Lonesome Prairie, to return again in due time with a herd of prime beef cattle two thousand strong. ”

“ Robin’s mother had hated guns. She blamed Colonel Colt, not the passions of men, for her untimely widowhood. Robin felt a little glad she was not alive to grieve over her son who was following in his father’s footsteps—perhaps to the same end. A woman, he reflected, couldn’t sabe. Ivy didn’t understand. Neither did May Sutherland. He doubted if even May knew that while a man might love life dearly, under certain conditions it wasn’t worth living—not if a man had to crawl before another to hold life in security. ”

“ No, in the face of those purple mountains lifting high in the southeast, the limitless stretch of lonesome Prairie spreading north to the Canada line, all those familiar places, the troublesome future didn’t seem to matter so much. Silent, lonely, sterile here and there, forbidding at first glance to such as were bred to field and lane and orchard, the plains wove their own charm about the hearts of men. All those leagues of grass and hill and canyon seemed to hold out invisible hands to Robin. ”

“ In two jumps the gray cow horse Robin bestrode bounded over the low ridge. Below and beyond, a bunch of range horses, twenty or more, as wild as the elk that once grazed those slopes, stretched themselves like hounds on the trail of a running wolf. They were headed for a water hole and Robin was cutting them off. They lay low to the ground, manes and tails streaming, their hoofs beating the turf with a roll like snare drums. The horse Robin had shouted at ran in the lead, a beautiful sorrel beast with four white stockings and a star in his forehead. ”

“ He was well mounted but he couldn’t quite head the wild bunch. They raced away northwest from the Bar M Bar and toward the Sutherland ranch as if the devil was on their heels. On the plains as well as the sea a stern chase is sometimes a long one. But after half an hour of headlong galloping he drew up on them. Whereupon the long-tailed mares gave up their frantic effort to get out of the country and settled to a docile trot, permitting themselves to be driven at will. Robin promptly hazed them into a wild-horse corral standing lonely in the creek bottom and there roped the gray. ”

“ Cattle and horses fed on high ground where the sun warmed them. When night came or harsh winds stung too bitterly they sought shelter in canyons, in the sparse timber of the foothills, in the rough tangle of the Bad Lands. Winter for the range herds was a period of endurance, a struggle to survive. In this dumb struggle man had little part. Cattleman and cowboy alike kept to warmed quarters. Their saddle horses munched hay in log stables. The range stock attended by their enemies, the blizzard and the prowling wolf, drifted at will until spring should bring green grass. ”

“ Adam Sutherland didn’t know what he, Robin, was doing, what he might do if given full opportunity. It rested solely on the personal integrity of the man trusted. The response to that unqualified trust bred at once the peculiar devotion of the cow-puncher to his salt and by contrast gave rise to the sweeping depredations that once in a blue moon shook some individual cattle owner’s faith in men. ”

“ THE OPENING GUN
In between the high moments of any man’s existence life seems to flow evenly, with a monotonous smoothness, like the placid reaches of a slow stream between foaming rapids. For a time it was like that with Robin. He rose before dawn, performed small tasks, rode abroad more or less perfunctorily during the day. Storms blew up and blew over. Between blizzards the range lay quiescent. ”