Probably, in the end, Robin thought, he would have to kill Mark Steele--if Mark didn’t beat him to that outcome. Perhaps deep in Robin’s breast lurked the savage desire to stake all on an encounter and so end uncertainty. A man cannot always fathom his own motives. Still, in spite of the indignities Shining Mark had heaped upon him, a festering sore in his mind, and Matthews’ slaying added to the ugly total, Robin was not there for bushwhacking, but to learn if indeed Thatcher and Steele did use that lonely corral and for what purpose. He viewed it now from the concealment of the timber. He had approached the place cautiously riding in a wide circle around it on high ground. A three-inch layer of new snow blanketed the earth. No track led in or out from the place. Robin turned away and bore off toward the river. He made camp in a gulch at dusk. During the next day he jogged in and out of various bottoms, flats in which both with Mayne and Tex he had noted scores of Block S cows with their unbranded calves. The cows were there still. The calves were gone. Robin rode far and looked closely. The clean-up had been made. But where were the calves? Robin stared across the frozen reach of the Missouri and guessed the answer. He marked herd after herd of grazing cattle with never a sign of fresh iron work, nor a single unbranded calf. He would rest his hands on his saddle horn and ponder. Where would _he_ dispose of a hundred-odd fresh branded yearlings if he were a cow thief. Psychology to Robin was no more than a term occasionally encountered in his last year of a frontier grammar school, a word lightly taken and soon forgotten. But he knew his people and his time. And he had imagination, that penetrating vision which is at once a curse and a blessing to its possessor. He could put himself in another man’s shoes. So he looked south of the river. In the end he crossed, leading a trembling horse that slipped and slid and once or twice fell on the glaring ice. From far below Boiler Bottom he rode westward on the Judith Basin side, in a region where no man lived. He passed the mouth of Armells, Arrow Creek, other small, nameless streams. He rode in still, wide-floored canyons where cattle grazed, over benches, back to the river flats again, looking, looking. He ate the last of his food. He slept like a wild animal in the lee of a bank or a brush patch, he dozed over little sagewood fires. And he came out at last near the mouth of the Judith River opposite where Birch Creek flowed in from the Bear Paws. He was hungry and weary. The frost had touched his cheeks, for the thermometer at night dropped to twenty below. The range lay hard and wan under a bright moon, and glittered in the midday sun. But Robin was content to endure. He had found much that he desired to find. If he could only establish Mark Steele’s interest in the T Bar S brand he knew he could make good his word and put Mark Steele in the penitentiary.