“So in order to protect me you’ll let me go before I have a chance to show you whether I’m any good or not,” Robin said ironically. “Thanks awful. Maybe you reckon I need to be spoon-fed awhile yet.” “If I did I wouldn’t waste no time on you,” Sutherland grinned. “By gosh, you get sore quick. Didn’t I say you still had a wagon boss’s job with me?” “I don’t _sabe_,” Robin said impatiently. “Listen, an’ maybe you will,” Sutherland replied. “Think you could do any good for yourself--an’ for me--if you were turned loose in the Judith Basin an’ Arrow Creek country with a round-up crew to gather up five or six thousand head of stock?” Into Robin’s mind flashed a picture of himself riding those lonely bottoms south of the Big Muddy, seeking through bitter weather day after day and finding here and there what he sought. He remembered the bite of the frost, the chill of the winter winds, the glare of ice. To cover that country again with a dozen riders at his back---- “Go on,” he said briefly. “I’ve bought the J7 brand from the Leland estate,” the old man explained. “It’s to be kept quiet. There’s reasons. Nobody knows it only the Leland executors, myself an’ you. It’s not to go any farther until I’m ready to have it known. I’ll send you to Benton with a letter to these people. There’s an outfit organized, a hundred an’ sixty saddle horses, some men--I don’t know how many. You’ll have to fill up your own crew. Supposedly you’ll be runnin’ the outfit for the Leland estate, but you’ll be runnin’ it for me, an’ you’ll report direct. There’ll be money in a Fort Benton bank for you to draw on for pay roll an’ runnin’ expenses. You’ll cover the usual J7 territory, an’ brand up the calves. In the fall you’ll ship out everything that’s fit for beef. That’s all the instructions there is just now. You’ll have a free hand.” “Why--if you don’t mind me askin’,” Robin put it directly to his employer, “don’t you send Mark Steele over the river and let me go through with what you started me in on here?” Sutherland leaned back in his chair, folded his hands across the generous round of his abdomen. He didn’t alter his placid expression in the slightest degree. “Darn it,” he said quite casually. “When it comes to Shinin’ Mark Steele you got somethin’ up your sleeve. You won’t tell me what it is. Well, I got somethin’ up my sleeve, an’ I won’t tell you what it is. But I tell you kid, as I told you in town, that I ain’t lived to be sixty, I ain’t made my way in the cow business by goin’ through the world deaf, dumb an’ blind. The reason I send you instead of Mark Steele into the Judith Basin is because I think you’re better qualified for that particular job. Will you go?” “Yes,” Robin said. “Sure, I’ll go.” “While you’re workin’ that south country,” Sutherland continued, “I reckon you better hold anything that belongs to this side of the river an’ throw ’em across when you’re through.”