Robin paused in the doorway to look at a girl lifting warm food from the stove and placing it on the table. Ivy Mayne was worth a look. For a long time now, wherever he rode, unless the business in hand required his undivided attention, Robin carried in his mind a picture of this eldest daughter of Mayne’s. He could have told you just how each separate coil of her glossy, dark hair wound about her head, what dimples came and went at the corners of her red mouth when she smiled. He knew that her skin was like satin and her voice a sweet treble like the thrushes that sang in the pine thickets of the Bear Paws. She was eighteen and Robin was twenty-two and they had lived under the same roof, galloped in the same hot sun and under the same silver moon, faced the blustering plains wind and lain in the grass together to stare silent at the winking stars, for a little over two years. There was not, Robin felt, her like for beauty and sweetness in all the pine-clad jumble of the mountains that loomed high in the velvet night to the northward of her father’s ranch. He always felt a queer flutter inside him when he was away from her and came back. He felt it now as she looked over her shoulder at his step. “Did you ride clean out of the country?” she asked. “Everybody’s gone to bed. I’ve been keepin’ your supper warm, but you’d ’a’ eaten cold stuff in another half hour, Mister Man. Hungry? Or did you strike some place to eat?” “Uh-uh. I’m starved.” Robin never wasted words. “Where’d you go?” He told her briefly of his mishap with the badger hole, and his snaring of Red Mike at Cold Spring. Her eyes danced. “You sure do go into jack-pots and out of them oftener than any rider in this country.” Robin smiled. It was true. Old man Mayne had once irritably told him that if he didn’t go around dreaming he’d save himself a lot of trouble. “Mark Steele and another fellow stopped in for supper,” Ivy remarked presently. Robin halted his coffee cup in mid-air. “What for?” he inquired mildly. “Thought Shining would be at the Block S getting organized for beef-gathering.” “How would I know?” Ivy replied. “They said they were just ridin’ around. They come in from the south. I saw ’em a long way off. Mark asked where you were.” “You tell him?” Robin knew neither Ivy nor any one else could guess where he rode to look for Red Mike that day. He hadn’t known himself where he would go when he started. “Dad said you were huntin’ horses.” “Don’t you tell nobody, not a soul, not even the old man, what I just told you about lamin’ the gray and catching Red Mike by Cold Spring,” Robin warned. “Keep that to yourself, Ivy. Will you? Forget it.” “Why?” she demanded instantly. “Nothing a-tall,” he parried. “Well, I have got a reason.” “All right, Robin, I won’t tell,” she agreed. Then, laughingly: “You haven’t started draggin’ the long rope, have you, that you don’t want nobody to know where you rode to-day?”