Robin went outside. He didn’t want to dance. He didn’t want to eat. He was acutely uncomfortable. He boiled within and the accumulated pressure of emotion was a long time yielding to the solace of tobacco and the quiet night. Under the dusky pines, the high hills that walled in the little valley, the soundless velvet sky, Robin presently regained his poise. He knew Ivy through and through. She was acting like a fool. She knew it and to-morrow or the next day she would be sorrowful and contrite. Since he could never hold a grudge against her it would be all right. No use getting all “het up,” as old Mayne would say. Robin was no philosopher. But he did have certain qualities of mind which made him patient, resourceful, an unconscious practitioner of the saying that what cannot be cured must be endured. He could wait and hold on, without losing heart. The lilt of the fiddle and the thump of the piano presently apprised him that supper was over. He thought he might as well go in. There was a chilly comfort in the reflection that no one would have missed him, or wondered where he was. So he lingered to smoke another cigarette. Strangely his mental images were not of Ivy and Shining, nor of May Sutherland, nor indeed of anything pertaining to the night and the hour. His mind went back to the day he lamed Stormy by Cold Spring and what he saw in the Birch Creek bottom. He thought of cows dead of sudden death, of stolen calves, of many other trifling incidents which somehow all seemed to be falling into a definite sequence that must lead to some sort of climax in which he was bound to be involved. He knew what desperate chances rustlers take once they embark on the quick road to a bigger herd than comes by natural growth. Theft led to killing, as the cornered highwayman kills. That was the history of the cattle thief all the way from the Staked Plains to the forty-ninth parallel. Robin wondered where this unlawful venture of Mark Steele’s was going to lead all of them, more particularly himself. He knew, moreover, as matters stood, that if Ivy gave Mark Steele a definite impression that she could be his for the taking--and Mark wanted her--he and Mark Steele couldn’t live in the same country. It wasn’t big enough. He threw away his cigarette and went back to the schoolhouse. There was a quicker tempo in evidence. There had been three or four bottles of whisky cached around outside. No one was drunk, but high spirits were being more freely manifested. That was a custom of the country, seldom lacking observance. In the entry-way, a sort of lobby, Robin met Ivy. She had on her riding boots and coat. “You going now?” he said in surprise. “Wait till I get my hat.” “Never mind,” she answered stiffly. “Mr. Steele is going to take me up to Davis’s.”