Mail for the south hill region came by stage once a week to the ranch near Little Eagle. Robin posted an order for a .45 Colt to a store in Fort Benton. He rode up to mail that letter with a Winchester carbine under his stirrup leather, a short, handy weapon in a carved leather scabbard. Robin was fairly sure of his mark with a rifle. He had a good eye and a steady hand. Thereafter the carbine was never far from his reach. He and old Mayne rode far in the next few days, looking through the twisted and torn confusion of gulch and canyon for calves slipped out of various drives by Shining Mark and his Texan confederate. The days slid by without event. Ivy seemed happy once more, as if she had forgotten. She would laugh and tease, plague Robin as she had always done for the fun of having him catch her close in his arms and playfully threaten her with dire consequences. Sometimes Robin had to stop and assure himself that he hadn’t suffered from a waking nightmare, that Shining Mark’s sinister activity and all its aftermath were not some sort of evil dream. Once or twice he pulled up on the height of land where he parted that evening from May Sutherland to sit and ponder. He could visualize her so clearly. Then he would shake himself and ride on. There seemed to be a vague disloyalty involved in even thinking of May. Yet he wondered where she was, what she did, what she thought. Strangely he never indulged in such speculation about Ivy. He didn’t have to--he knew Ivy, all her moods and tenses; or he thought he did. Once he said to himself whimsically: “Wonder if everybody sometimes gets wishin’ for the moon?” That was as far as he went along that road. From the drift of gossip that ebbed and flowed through the Bear Paws, Robin learned, somewhat to his private satisfaction, that he had done Tommy Thatcher an uncommon amount of damage with one stout blow. Tommy had suffered a broken jaw. Incidentally the iron foot-rail had fractured his skull. They had shipped him to a Fort Benton hospital and he would not be about for at least a month. When he did come Robin surmised that he might come shooting. Still, that was no certainty. Tommy might let it ride. Tommy had started it, and he might conclude that it wasn’t worth following up--or at least inaugurate his private war under the rose, so to speak. In any case what Thatcher might do was less concern to Robin than what Mark Steele would certainly try to do as opportunity offered.