Steve Yeager Part 8

Ruth liked this brown, lithe cowpuncher, all sinew and bone and muscle.

His smile was so warm and friendly, his manner so boyish and yet so competent. To look into his kind, steady eyes was to know that he could be trusted.

She moved in his direction shyly, a touch of pink blooming in her soft cheeks. Ruth was charmingly unsure of herself. It was always easy to disturb her composure. Even a casual encounter with the slim, brown-faced range-rider was an adventure for her. Now her pansy eyes deepened in color with excitement, with the tremulous fear of what she was to learn.

"Mr. Yeager, I--wanted to ask you about--about the holdup."

"What about it, Miss Ruth?"

"Did you--know any of them?"

"How could I? They were masked." His eyes had taken on a film of wariness that blotted out for the moment their kindness.

"I didn't know--I thought, perhaps,--" She tried a new start. "Did you say that three of them were Mexicans?"

"Two of them," he corrected.

There was the least quiver of her lip. "The others were--both big men, didn't you say?"

"I didn't say."

A footstep sounded on the crisp gravel walk. Steve looked up, in time to catch the flash of warning menace Harrison sent toward the girl.

"Mr. Yeager has been having a pipe-dream, Ruth. Don't wake him up,"

jeered the heavy.

Ruth fled un.o.btrusively and left the men alone.

"Hear you're going on a vacation," said Harrison gruffly.

"You've heard correct." Yeager pleated his hatband with steady fingers.

His voice was even and placid.

Harrison looked him over with indolent insolence. "Some folks find this climate don't agree with them. Some folks find it better to drift out, casual-like, y' understand?"

"Yes?"

"I'm tellin' it to you straight."

"That you're going to leave? The Lunar Company will miss you," suggested the range-rider politely.

"Think you're darned clever, don't you? It's you that's leaving the company, Mr. Yeager."

"For a week."

"For good."

"Hadn't heard of it. News to me," answered Steve lightly.

"I'm givin' you the tip. See?"

"Oncet I knew a fellow who lived to be 'most ninety minding his own business," observed the cowpuncher to the world in general as he held up and examined his work.

"It ain't considered safe to get gay with me. I'm liable to lam your head off," threatened the big man sullenly.

"And then again you're liable not to. I'm not freightin' with your outfit, Mr. Harrison. Kindly lay off of me and you'll find we get along fine."

Steve rose and pa.s.sed on his way to the street. Harrison was in two minds whether to force an issue again with him, but something in the contour of that close-gripped jaw, in the gleam of the steady eyes, was more potent than the dull rage surging in him. He let the opportunity pa.s.s.

Four Bits carried Yeager away from Los Robles at a road gait. Horse and rider were taking the border trail. It led them through a desolate country of desert where the flat-leafed p.r.i.c.kly pear and the occasional pudgy creosote were the chief forms of vegetable life. Now and again a swift might be seen basking on a rock or a Gila monster motionless on the hillside. The ominous buzz of a rattler more than once made the pony sidestep. Mesa and flat and wash succeeded each other monotonously.

It was after sunset when they drew up at a feed corral in Arixico. Steve looked after his horse and sauntered down the little adobe street to a Chinese restaurant which ostentatiously announced itself as the "New York Cafe." This side of the business street was in the territory of Uncle Sam, the other half floated the Mexican flag. After he had eaten, the young man drifted across to one of the gambling-houses that invited the patronage of Americans and natives alike.

He found within the heterogeneous gathering usually to be observed in such a place. Vaqueros brushed shoulders with Chinese laundrymen, cowpunchers with soldiers, peons with cattlemen from Arizona and Texas.

Here were miners and soldiers of fortune and plain tramps. More than one of the shining-eyed gamblers had a price upon his head. Several were outlaws. A score or more had taken part in the rapine and the pillage of the guerrilla warfare that has of late years been the curse of the country. It would have been hard in a day's travel to find an a.s.sembly where human life was held at less value.

Among these lawless, turbulent siftings of the continent Yeager was very much at home. He merged inconspicuously into the picture, a quiet, brown-faced man with cool, alert eyes. n.o.body paid the least attention to him. He might be a horse-thief or an honest cowpuncher. It was a matter of supreme indifference to those present. Experience in that outdoor frontier school which always keeps open session had taught them that a man lived longer here when he minded his own business.

Steve stood close to the bar. A prospector leaned against it and talked to an acquaintance while they drank their beer.

"This here's how I figure it," he was saying. "I had a little dough when I begun digging gopher holes in these here hills. Not much--say fifteen hundred, mebbe. I sure ain't got it now. Lost it in a hole in the ground. Well; I reckon I'll go on looking for it where I lost it."

Casually Yeager sauntered over to the roulette table. A fat man in duck trousers--he was the agent for a firm of rifle manufacturers, Steve learned later--was bucking the wheel hard. In front of him lay a pile of gold-pieces and several stacks of chips. He was very red in the face from excitement and c.o.c.ktails. The range-rider put a half-dollar on the red and won. He let it ride, won again, and shifted the chips to the black. Once more the G.o.ddess of luck favored him. He divided his pile.

Half went on the red, the rest on the first number his eye caught. It happened to be seventeen. The croupier spun the wheel again. The ball whirled round, dipped down once or twice, and plumped into the compartment numbered seventeen.

"Enough's a-plenty. Here's where I cash in," announced Steve cheerfully.

He stuffed the bills carelessly into his pocket and strolled over to the faro table. Yeager had come on business, not for pleasure. He intended to play just enough to give a colorable reason for his presence.

His roving eye settled upon the poker table at the rear of the room.

Five men were playing. Two were Mexicans, three white. Two of the Americans were dismissed from Steve's mind with a casual glance. They were negligible factors. The third had his back to the observer, but the figure had a slender, boyish trimness that spoke of youth. The Mexican sitting to his right was a square-built fellow of forty with a scar on the cheek running from mouth to ear. There was on his face a certain ugliness of expression, a furtive cruelty. That there was an understanding between him and the man opposite soon became apparent to Yeager. They cross-raised the boy, working together to mulct him of the pile of chips in front of him.

It was the Mexican who sat with his back to the wall that drew and held the cowpuncher's eye. He too was slender, not much past thirty, but with the youth long since stamped out of his face. Sleek and black, a dominant personality, he sat there warily as a rattlesnake, dark eyes gleaming from a masked, smiling countenance.

The boy was the pigeon, and it was the Mexicans that were plucking him.

So much Steve learned within two minutes. He had cut his eye teeth at poker, and he saw at a glance that this was no game for a youngster.

Quietly he moved a step or two closer along the wall. He observed the play without appearing to do so.

The tension of the game was relieved with casual conversation. The two negligibles, playing about even, contributed mostly to it. The bulky Mexican added his quota. The boy, a heavy loser, concealed his feelings under the bravado expected of a good sport.

They were playing jack pots with a stripped deck, the joker going as a fifth ace or to fill a straight or a flush. Several hands were dealt without any stayers. The slender Mexican was dealing when the sensation of the game was handed out.

One of the negligibles opened the pot. The bulky Mexican stayed.

In the slow, easy drawl of the Southwest the boy spoke. "Me, I reckon I'll have to tilt it. Got to protect your hand from these wolves, Dave."

He pushed in a stack of blue chips.

The third American did not stay. It was now up to the dealer--his name, it appeared, was Ramon Culvera. After a moment's hesitation he measured a stack of blues by those the boy had put in the pot and added to it another pile of yellows. With a grunt of protest the older Mexican stayed. The man who had opened the pot dropped out.