It was, Robin felt sadly, a little late for purely vindictive reprisal. But there was still such a thing as simple justice, which must somewhere, sometime, overtake such a man as Mark Steele. CHAPTER XXIV--THE BACKWASH The J7 took a short swing eastward, turned back when T Bar S’s grew scarce, and pitched camp one evening on Birch Creek below Cold Spring within sight of where Robin first saw with a shock of surprise the flash of silver on a rustler’s gear. The Bad Lands lay in a tumbled stretch below. A few thickets of jack pine spotted the valley walls, made dark patches about the heads of those torn gulches. Birch Creek was a mere trickle in its alkali bed. It was like the jaws of hell for heat in that deep, sage-floored bottom. At dawn, when the riders saddled and mounted, the air was cool and scented with the odor of bruised sage. Robin sat half-turned in his saddle watching the wagons vanish up the steep pitch of a draw that led to high ground. The day herd and the saddle bunch climbed the slope in long files. Very soon he would finish that gathering. In and around Chase Hill he expected to end the clean-up. After that--he was wondering what would come after that, as he sat there. Some of his riders sat quietly resting gloved hands on their saddle horns. Some rolled a final cigarette. Two or three were giving the last tightening to their cinches. Something stung Robin in the side, like a hornet, or the touch of a live coal. Involuntarily he flinched. The prick of his spur, the lurch of his body, startled the nervous brute under him. Touch and movement were simultaneous. Already off balance, when the horse spun like an uncoiled spring, Robin lost his seat--went headlong to earth, precisely as if he had been shot. That was no mere conjecture flashing through his brain as he fell. He saw a dust spurt rise twenty feet beyond him while he was yet in mid-air. And he lay still where he had fallen, listening for a sound that made the tale complete--the clear, staccato report of a rifle. Every detail of what occurred, every possibility, stood clear in Robin’s mental and visual processes. He saw two other horses jump and swerve at the spurt of dust. He knew where his own horse stood when the shot was fired, and so marked the line of the bullet’s flight, a point on the eastern bank three hundred yards distant, perhaps three hundred feet above the flat, a spot masked by a clump of scrubby pines. He did not rise. He did not move. He lay watching, and his riders flung themselves off their horses to gather around him. His fall and that crack told them the story. “Are you hurt bad?” they cried. “Never mind me,” Robin said. “Look. See that bunch of pine? That’s where he fired from. Go get him. Get him alive if you can, but get him. Spread out and burn the earth. Quick, or he’ll slip you in the rough country.”