But once inside the door Robin Tyler had a strange intuition of something in the air. Mark Steele leaned on one end of the bar. Three or four Block S men stood or lounged about. A couple of strangers were present. And slumped in a chair against the farther wall sat Dan Mayne. His chin was sunk on his breast. His dispirited mustache drooped more dispiritedly than ever. But he was neither asleep nor in a stupor. Mark Steele regarded him with a smile that was a mixture of contempt and calculation. “Hello cowboys,” Steele greeted the two. “Couldn’t resist temptation eh? C’mon. Have a drink. Ho, Dan!” He called Mayne. “Line up, old-timer. Have a shot.” “I ain’t drinkin’,” Mayne snarled. Robin, who had started toward him, and so stood between the two, heard Mayne add a rider to the sentence under his breath--“not with you, damn your soul!” “No, you don’t drink, do you?” Mark laughed unpleasantly. “You just pour it down, that’s all. Come on, kid,” he spoke to Robin, “line up here. The old man’s on the prod, but the rest of us are sociable.” Robin hesitated a moment. There _was_ something in the air. There was a subtle shade of the peremptory in that “line up here.” The tone nettled him out of all reason. And he didn’t like the conjunction of Dan Mayne drunk and resentful in the same room with Shining Mark Steele. “Leave me out this time,” he said casually. “Looks like I better put my boss to bed. I generally have to when he goes on a bust.” “Suit yourself,” Steele replied tartly. “All the same to me.” That muttered sentence of Mayne’s was apparently the last coherent speech he was capable of making. Robin got him out of the chair, steadied his uncertain progress across the way to the hotel and half-carried him up to a bedroom. He sat down beside him, and piled a wet towel on Mayne’s head. In the course of half an hour the thickness of tongue and brain partially cleared. “You been squabblin’ with Mark to-night?” Robin asked then. He wanted to know. If Mayne had jumped Steele, he, Robin, would be in a difficult situation, working under Steele. Somehow Mark’s attitude promised trouble. “Naw, not about _that_.” Mayne understood his meaning at once. “I ain’t a damn fool altogether. But I don’t like that _hombre_. And I _am_ drunk. When I’m drunk I ain’t got as much sense as I should have about some things. Ivy’s in town with me. Mark he comes ridin’ in about supper time and gets her corraled in the parlor an’ sets there talkin’ the kid black in the face. So I tell him to lay off, that I don’t want no flashy, silver-spangled wagon bosses in my family. I wanted to say cow thief instead uh wagon boss, but I didn’t. Least I don’t think I did.”