Robin caught him as he slid down, as the horse shied at the falling body. In an agony of sorrow and rage Robin looked once, bent to see the glaze gathering over the Texan’s blue eyes. Then he leaped to the edge of the bank. Lying flat with his rifle cocked and thrust out before him he waited for the assassins to follow up their advantage. CHAPTER XIII--CORNERED Ten days from the evening Tex Matthews died in the frozen bed of a lonely creek Robin rode again in the Bad Lands, this time alone. No one knew whither he went, nor why. He scarcely knew himself. If he could have embodied his feelings in words he would have said that he could not rest quietly under circumstances that drew about him like the crushing coil of a python, a dread thing which he could neither combat nor fly from. Sometimes a curious fear stirred in his heart, and again--when he thought of Tex--a resentful ache. His world was all askew. There was no faith nor honor nor even justice. Thieves flourished and murder went unchallenged. “Shot to death by some person or persons unknown.” That perfunctory verdict echoed in Robin’s ears like a damnable irony as he pulled up his horse once more in the pines which bounded the corral and cabins he and Tex had discovered. Robin knew those “persons unknown.” But a moral certainty does not establish guilt before the law. He shivered a little, recalling that day and hour. He had lain on the edge of the washout with a dead man below him and he had prayed that the killers would show themselves. But nothing save a few cattle startled by the shots moved in that lonely place. He had lain until his fingers numbed and his body grew stiff with the cold, until the dark shut down. Then he had lashed the Texan’s corpse across his blood-stained saddle and groped his way out of the Bad Lands, rode the long night through leading a tired horse with a ghastly burden that had been a man. Here he was again, urged against all reasoned judgment into the enemy’s territory. Robin was no fool to discount the chances he took. He had no plan. He trusted to luck. He would ride warily as a scalping Indian as long as the food in his saddlebags lasted. If only he could get something definite to go on--or better still if he could drop those two red-handed in their predatory activities. Given a crew of riders and two weeks Robin knew that a round-up of T Bar S cattle would show that their number had trebled in a twelvemonth. Nothing less than positive proof would shake Adam Sutherland’s fatuous belief in the integrity of his range boss.