Steve Yeager Part 4

"That's right. Why didn't I think of that? Then of course he would have laid off o' me."

"He--Mr. Harrison--is quick-tempered. I suppose all brave men are. But he's generous, too. If you had explained--"

"I reckon you're right. He sure is generous, even in the whalings he gives. But don't worry about me. I'm all right, and much obliged for your kindness in asking."

Steve found his cigar and retired. He carried with him in memory a picture of a troubled young creature with soft, tender eyes gleaming starlike from beneath waves of dark hair.

Yeager met Harrison swaggering up the gravel walk toward the house. A malevolent gleam lit in the cold black eyes of the bully.

"How you feeling, young fella?"

"A hundred and eighty years old," answered the cowpuncher promptly with a grin. "Every time I open my mouth my face cracks. You ce'tainly did give me a proper tr.i.m.m.i.n.g. I don't know sic-'em about this scientific fight game."

Harrison scowled. "There's more at the same address any time you need it."

"Not if I see you coming in time to make a getaway," retorted Steve with a laugh.

As the range-rider pa.s.sed lightly down the walk there drifted back to the prizefighter the words of a cowboy song:--

"Oh, bury me out on the lone prairee, In a narrow grave just six by three, Where the wild coyotes will howl o'er me-- Oh, bury me out on the lone prairee."

Harrison ripped out an oath. There was a note of gentle irony about the minor strain of the song that he resented. He had given this youth the thrashing of his life, but he had apparently left his spirit quite uncrushed. What he liked was to have men walk in fear of him.

The song presently died on the lips of Steve. Harrison was on his way to call on Ruth. The man had somehow won her promise to marry him. It was impossible for Yeager to believe that the child knew what she was doing.

To think of her as the future wife of Chad Harrison moved him to resentment at life's satiric paradoxes. To give this sweet young innocent to such a man was to mate a lamb with a tiger or a wolf. The outrage of it cried to Heaven. What could her mother be thinking of to allow such a wanton sacrifice?

CHAPTER IV

THE EXTRA

From the first Yeager enjoyed his work with the Lunar Company. Young and full-blooded, he liked novelty and adventure, life in the open, new scenes and faces. As a film actor he did not have to seek sensations.

They came to him unsought. He had the faculty of projecting himself with all his mind into the business of the moment, so that he soon knew what it was to be a n.o.ble and self-conscious hero as well as an unmitigated villain.

One day he was a miner making his last stand against a band of Mexican banditti, the next he was crawling through the mesquite to strike down an intrepid ranger who laughed at death. He fought desperate single combats, leaped from cliffs into s.p.a.ce or across bridgeless chasms, took part in dozens of sets ill.u.s.trating scenes of frontier life as Billy Threewit conceived these. Sometimes Steve smiled. The director's ideas had largely been absorbed in New York from reading Western fiction. But so long as he drew down his two-fifty a day and had plenty of fun doing it, Steve was no stickler for naked realism. The "bad men" of Yeager's acquaintance had usually been quiet, soft-spoken citizens, notable chiefly for a certain chilliness of the eye and an efficient economy of expression that eliminated waste. Those that Threewit featured were of a different type. They strutted and bragged and made gun plays on every possible occasion.

Perhaps this was why Harrison's stuff got across. By nature a swaggering bully, he had only to turn loose his real impulses to register what the director wanted of a bad man. In the rough-and-tumble life he had led, it had been Yeager's business to know men. He made no mistake about Harrison. The fellow might be a loud-mouthed braggart; none the less he would go the limit. The man was game.

Lennox met Steve one day as the latter was returning from the property room with a saddle Threewit had asked him to adjust. The star stopped him good-naturedly.

"Care to put the gloves on with me some time, Yeager?"

The cowpuncher's face brightened. "I sure would. The boys say you're the best ever with the mitts."

"I'm a pretty good boxer, but I don't trail in your cla.s.s as a fighter.

What you need is to take some lessons. If you'd care to have me show you what I know--"

"Say, you've rung the bell first shot."

"Come up to the hotel to-night, then. No need advertising it. Harrison might pick another quarrel with you to show you what you don't know."

Steve laughed. "He's ce'tainly one tough citizen. He can look at a pine board so darned sultry it begins to smoke. All right. Be up there to-night, Mr. Lennox."

From that day the boxing lessons became a regular thing. The claim Lennox had made for himself had scarcely done him justice. He was one of the best amateur boxers in the West. In Yeager he had a pupil quick to learn. The extra was a perfect specimen physically, narrow of flank, broad of shoulder, with the well-packed muscles of one always trained to the minute. Fifteen years in the saddle had given him a toughness of fiber no city dweller could possibly equal. Nights under the multiple stars in the hills, cool, invigorating mornings with the pine-filled air strong as wine in his clean blood, long days of sunshine full of action, had all contributed to make him the young Hermes that he was. Cool and wary, supple as a wildcat, light as a dancing schoolgirl on his feet, he had the qualities which go to help both the fighter and the boxer.

Lennox had never seen a man with more natural apt.i.tude for the sport.

Sometimes Farrar was present at these lessons. Often Baldy c.u.mmings, who liked the cowpuncher because Steve was always willing to help him get the properties ready for the required sets, would put on the gloves with him and try him out for a round or two. Manderson, the melancholy comedian, occasionally dropped in with some other member of the company.

The same thought was in the mind of all of them except Yeager himself.

The extra was being trained to meet Harrison. It was apparent to all of them that the prizefighter was nursing a grudge. The jaunty insouciance of the young range-rider irritated him as a banderilla goads a bull in the ring.

"Steve gets under his hide. Some day he's going to break loose again,"

Farrar told Manderson as they watched Lennox and Yeager box.

"The kid shapes fine. If Mr. Chad Harrison waits long enough he's liable to find himself in trouble when he tackles that young tiger cub,"

answered the comedian. "Ever see anybody quicker on his feet? Reminds me of Jim Corbett when he was a youngster."

The news of the boxing lessons traveled to Harrison. He set his heavy jaw and waited. He intended that Yeager should go to the hospital after their next mix-up.

Meanwhile he found other causes for disliking the new man. Always a vain man, his jealousy was inflamed because Steve was a better rider than he. At any time he was ready with a sneer for what he called the cowpuncher's "grandstanding."

"It gets across, Harrison," Threewit told him bluntly one day. "We've never had a rider whose work was so snappy. He's doing fine."

"Watch him blow up one of these days--nothing to him," growled the heavy.

"There's a whole lot to him," disagreed the producing director as he walked away to superintend the arrangement of a set.

Several days after this some new horses were added to the remuda of the Lunar Company. Harrison picked a young mustang to ride in a chase scene they were going to pull off. The pony was a wiry buckskin with powerful flanks and withers. The prizefighter was no sooner in the saddle than it developed that the animal had not been half broken. It took to pitching at once and presently spilled the rider.

Steve, sitting on the corral fence with Jackson and Orman, two other riders for the company, called across cheerfully,--

"Not hurt, are you?"

The heavy got up swearing. "Any of your d.a.m.ned business, is it?"

He caught at the pony bridle, jerked it violently, and hammered the lifted head of the dancing mustang with his fist. After several attempts he succeeded in kicking its ribs. Yeager said nothing, but his eyes gleamed. In the cow country men interfere rarely when a vicious rider abuses his mount, but such a man soon finds himself under an unvoiced ban.

Harrison backed the mustang to a corner, swung to the saddle, and tugged savagely at the reins. Two minutes later he took the dust again. The horse had spent the interval in a choice variety of pitching that included sun-fishing, fence-rowing, and pile-driving.

To Jackson Steve made comment. "Most generally it don't pay to beat up a horse. A man's liable to get piled, and if he gets tromped on folks don't go into mourning."

Harrison could not hear the words, but he made a fair guess at their meaning. He turned toward Yeager with a snarl.

"Got anything to say out loud, young fella?"