He rose with the sun. Sometime that day he was due to leave to join the Block S crew as a representative of the Bar M Bar on the fall round-up. He had a couple of tender-footed horses to shoe, a few odds and ends of gear to repair. He was a busy youth until noon. Not until dinner was past and his string was bunched in the corral with one horse saddled and his bed and war-bag packed across another did he have any extended conversation with Dan Mayne. They sat side by side on the top rail now, looking down on the sleek backs of Robin’s cow ponies. Mayne had given him instructions about shipping beeves and fallen silent. “I seen a dead cow yesterday,” Robin said at last. “A Bar M Bar.” “Wolves?” Mayne grunted. “Yeah. Two-legged ones,” Robin exploded. The words rushed out of him. “She was bit with a .30-30.” Mayne looked at him, growled something through his scraggly, dispirited mustache. “I guess that’s how you’re short on calves,” Robin continued. “Probably there’s quite a few Bar M Bar cows dyin’ of heart failure that way--when they happen to have big, unbranded calves that was missed on the spring round-up.” “The shrinkage ain’t natural, that’s a fact,” Mayne grumbled. “We tallied a hundred less calves this year than last. Should ’a’ been a good increase. It wasn’t no hard winter.” They sat wordless a minute. “Somebody’s stealin’ you blind,” Robin asserted at last. “I guess so,” Mayne admitted peevishly. He bent a shrewd eye on his man. “You got an idea who, ain’t you?” “That’s all I have got, just an idea,” Robin declared. “And if I go bellerin’ that idea out loud I might get daylight let through me some day when I ain’t lookin’. I’d ride a lot, if I was you, with a Winchester handy.” “You seen more’n a dead cow yesterday, kid,” Mayne challenged. “Spit it out. Where was you? What happened?” Robin told him. But he stopped short of uttering his conviction that one of the riders was Mark Steele. The information he did divulge he cautioned Mayne about keeping to himself. That was as far as he dared go. If Mayne took two drinks too many some day and shot off his mouth about Mark Steele, Shining Mark would go gunning for him, Robin Tyler, not for Dan Mayne. The old man scowled, tugging at his mustache. “I’ve suspicioned somebody was workin’ on me,” he said irritably. “This cinches it. Keep your eye peeled for fresh iron-work while you’re with the Block S. I’ll get out and ride. By God!” he snarled in a sudden gust of resentment, “I sure do hate a cow thief. And you ain’t got _no_ hunch who these two was?” Robin hesitated. There was no guile in him. He was loyal, with the peculiar, single-minded loyalty that speckled Western America with cow-puncher’s graves, from the Staked Plains of Texas to Milk River in the north. No feudal baron ever took the field with more devoted followers than the men who rode for the cattle kings when the range was in its full pastoral flower.