“If they’re down there, we better,” Robin agreed sleepily. “We’ll take a pack outfit and jog down that way to-morrow, maybe.” The morrow found them riding. It might be a fruitless quest but no range man ever caught a cow thief by sitting with his feet to the fire. So they bore away southeast from the Bar M Bar. Noon found them deep in the Bad Lands. Dusk would bring them as near the Block S line camp as they planned to go. For twenty miles or more north of the Big Muddy and eastward nearly to the Dakota line the Bad Lands spread, grim and desolate. Gouged and ripped and distorted in some past glacial period, the confusion heightened by centuries of erosion, it bared itself to the sky in a maze of canyons great and small, fantastic with layers of vari-colored earth, red, brown, gray, ochre, like painted bands on the precipitous earthen walls. Scrub pine timber grew in clumps, thickets, lodge-pole pine made small forests, wherever roots could find hold and sustenance. Many of these deep gashes were flat-bottomed, threaded by streams of bitter alkali-tainted water. On the narrow, winding benches that carried the plains level down to overlook the river bunch grass waved like fields of wheat. In midsummer it was hot, arid, the haunt and breeding ground of rattlesnakes and wolves. In winter, with snow to serve in place of water, the Bad Lands gave grazing and shelter to tens of thousands of cattle. To the stranger fresh from a kindlier land it was a lonely, abhorrent place, wrapped in a sinister silence, a maze in which the unwary traveler could lose himself and leave his bones for the coyotes. Even to the range men who worked it every round-up, riding the Bad Lands was far from plain sailing. A rider could get twisted, he could travel for hours and then find himself in a cul-de-sac. He could find himself within shouting distance of another horseman and be compelled to make a detour of fifteen miles if he wished to shake hands. Yet it was not all desolation. There are oases in the desert, atolls in the widest sea, harbors on the ruggedest coast. So in the Bad Lands the wayfarer came unexpectedly on little valleys, small basins, tiny grassed areas surrounding some cold spring, spots like friendly gardens. Men had dodged the law upon occasion down there, ever since law and order came laggardly behind the cowman and settler. The cow thief, the outlaw, the slayer who held himself justified in his homicide and would not brook arrest had from time to time made the Bad Lands a sanctuary. Riders faring through that wilderness upon legitimate business came now and then upon an abandoned cabin huddled in a gulch, perhaps masked by pine thickets. If it were abandoned to the rats and the weather they looked and rode on. If it showed signs of occupancy they rode on without looking.