“Dragging the long rope”, is a range euphemism for stealing other men’s cattle, specifically unbranded calves. “No,” Robin said shortly. “But somebody else is. _Sabe?_” She nodded. Robin had seen something. He didn’t want it known he had been where he _might_ have seen anything. Sometimes it was not good for a man’s health to see too much, or to talk openly about what he saw. Ivy herself was a child of the range. She understood, nodded comprehension. “I won’t talk.” Robin leaned over the table to kiss her. “If that silver-spangled _hombre_ rides this way too often I’ll get to worryin’,” he whispered. “Reckon you could get to like him, Ivy, the way you like me?” The eternal feminine flickered in Ivy’s dusky eyes. “I don’t know,” she murmured. “Maybe. I don’t think I’d want to. I reckon I’d be a little afraid of him. I guess he’d be a pretty bad actor if he got going.” She put her elbows on the table and nursed her round face in her hands. “Everybody sort of seems to step soft around Mark,” she said reflectively. “Dad’s a little bit afraid of him. So’s other men. Are you?” “I wouldn’t advertise myself,” Robin said. He sat tracing a formless pattern on the oilcloth with his finger for a minute. Then he rose. A faint, nameless depression afflicted him whenever he linked Ivy Mayne and Mark Steele in his mind. “It’ll be daylight before you can sneeze twice,” he said. “I guess I’ll turn in. I’ll have to step high and wide to-morrow.” He turned to put his arm across Ivy’s shoulders, to pat her smooth hair. She smiled at him and blew him a kiss from her finger tips as he went out the door. She herself was sound asleep in her bed within twenty minutes--while Robin lay on his blankets in a detached bunk house listening to the audible slumber of a ranch hand in the opposite corner. He lay tired but sleepless, turning over and over in his mind the connection between those dead cows, Mark Steele, Ivy’s father, Ivy herself, and his own part in the play. Should he tell Mayne about those slaughtered cattle and voice his certainty about the man who shot them? Both Mayne and Robin knew that for two seasons now there had been a peculiar shortage in the Bar M Bar calf crop. What Robin saw that afternoon in Birch Creek bottom furnished the key to that shrinkage. But he knew Mayne. Shining Mark Steele had Mayne buffaloed. He would grumble and swear when Robin told him. But would he act? And if he didn’t act the thing would fester in his mind and sometime when he was drunk he would talk. Once he opened his mouth Robin Tyler was a marked man. Robin stared up at the dusky ridge logs. He had no desire to have his light put out by any bushwhacking cow thief. Then he shrugged his shoulders and tried to sleep. In the morning--Robin didn’t consciously say so, but he had a feeling that such problems could better be solved in broad day than by lying awake in the dark.