There were few trails and those dim ones over that sparsely settled land. One rider acted as pilot across country. In his wake the chuck wagon led the van. Behind this rattled the bed wagon driven by the nighthawk. Behind these came the saddle herd, urged on by the horse wrangler with a trailing rope. Last of all the riders mounted, shook the kinks out of their fractious horses and broke into a gallop. Some passed the _remuda_ and the wagons. Some jogged leisurely. They rode as they pleased, in pairs, in clusters, at a walk or a gallop. Robin found himself riding elbow to elbow with Mark Steele, “Shining” Steele. Appropriate name, apart from the beaten silver ornaments with which he adorned his gear, even to a row of conchos down the outer seam of his leathern chaps, for the man himself was like a steel blade, tall, lithe, thin-faced, a rider born and a cowman from his heels up. Mark Steele had come into the Bear Paws unheralded and unsung, and in two years had become range boss of the Block S over the heads of older hands. He jogged beside Robin, hat pushed back, swaying to the gait of his horse, humming a little tune, his eyes roving over what spread before them as they topped each little rise. “Mayne give you a good mount, kid?” he asked presently. “Thirteen head. And I brought along a ridge runner of my own,” Robin answered. “Uh-huh. You won’t be afoot, then, half the time, like you was with the Pool last spring.” Mark said it with a smile but there was a sting in the remark, an implied sneer. Robin had joined the general round-up with the Bear Paw Pool that spring, having only ten horses in his mount. Of these one had gone crazy with loco weed, another grew lame. He rode the remaining eight to a standstill trying to hold up his end with men far better mounted. It was neither his fault nor Dan Mayne’s--just ill luck. Saddle horses had vanished, others had got crippled. There was no time to break colts. But both Robin and the Bar M Bar had lost a modicum of prestige. He didn’t thank Steele for reminding him. He knew that with his present string he could take the outside circle and come into camp with the best of the Block S. So he kept silent. “I was down to Mayne’s night before last,” Steele observed. “You weren’t in sight.” “Hunting horses,” Robin explained. He knew Mayne, or Ivy, or both, had told Steele that. What business of Mark’s was it, anyway? “Where’d you ride?” Shining asked quite casually. “So _that’s_ it,” Robin thought--recalling the dead cows and the rifle shot that put him on the run out of Birch Creek bottom. Aloud he said: “Sand Coulee, Boggy Spring, west side of Chase Hill.” “Much stock in sight?” “Quite a lot.” They rode two hundred yards in silence. “There’s thieves workin’ on this range,” Shining Mark broke out suddenly. “The hell you say!” Robin’s surprise was not simulated, but it was surprise at information coming to him from this source.