Steve Yeager | Page 3

your head off and learn you to mind your own business."
"Interesting if true," retorted Steve lightly. "And maybeso you're right. A man can't always most likely tell. Take a watermelon now. You can't tell how good it is till you thump it. Same way with a man, I've heard say."
He turned to the young woman, whose bright brown eyes were lingering upon him curiously. This was no novel experience to him. He wore his splendid youth so jauntily and yet so casually that the gaze of a girl was likely to be drawn in his direction a second and a third time. In spite of his youthfulness there was in his face a certain sun-and-wind-bitten maturity, a steadiness of the quiet eye that promised efficiency. The film actress sensed the same competent strength in the brown, untorn hand that assisted her to rise to her feet. His friendly smile showed the flash of white, regular teeth.
"The rube apologizes, ma'am. He's just in from Cactus Center and never did see one of those moving-picture outfits before. Thirty-eleven things were in sight as I happened round that bend, but the only one I glimmed was you being mistreated. Corking chance for a grandstand play. So I sailed in pronto. 'Course I should've known better, but I didn't."
Maisie Winters was the name of the young woman. She played the leads in one of the Southwest companies of the Lunar Film Manufacturers. Her charming face was known and liked on the screens of several continents. Now it broke into lines of mischievous amusement.
"I don't mind if Mr. Harrison doesn't." She flashed a gay, inquiring look toward that discomfited villain, who was leaning for support on his accomplice Jackson and glaring at Yeager. Impudently she tilted her chin back toward the puncher. "Are you always so--so impetuous? If so, there's a fortune waiting for you in the moving-picture field."
Yeager did not object to having so attractive a young woman as this one poke fun at him. He grinned joyfully.
"Me! I'm open to an engagement, ma'am."
The short fat man whom Maisie Winters had called Billie looked sharply at the cowpuncher out of shrewd gray eyes.
"Where you been working?" he demanded abruptly.
"With the Lone Star outfit."
"Get fired?"
"Company gone out of business--country getting too popular, what with homesteaders, forest rangers, and Mary's little lamb," explained Steve.
"Hm! Can you ride a bucker?"
"I can pull leather and kinder stick on."
"I'll try you out for a week at two-fifty a day if you like."
"You've hired Steve Yeager," promptly announced the owner of that name.
CHAPTER II
"ENOUGH'S A-PLENTY"
While driving his car back to Los Robles, Billie Threewit, producing director at the border studio of the Lunar Film Manufacturers, indulged in caustic comment on his own idiocy.
"Now, what in hell did I take on this Yeager rube for? He had just finished crabbing one scene. Wasn't that enough without me paying him good money to spoil more? Harrison's sore on him too. There's going to be trouble there. He ain't going to stand for that roughhouse stuff a little bit."
Frank Farrar, the camera man, took a more cheerful view of the situation.
"He's a find, if you ask me--the real thing in cowpunchers. And I don't know as this outfit has to be run to please Harrison. The big bully has got us all stepping sideways and tiptoeing so as not to offend him. I'm about fed up with the brute. Wish this rube would mop the earth up with him when Harrison gets gay."
"No chance. Harrison's a bully all right, but he's one grand little fighter too. You saw him clean up that bunch of greasers. He's there with both feet on the Marquis of Q. business, and don't you forget it. I put up with more from him than I ever did from a dozen other actors because he's so mean when he's sulky."
"Here too," agreed Farrar. "It's take your hat off when you speak to Mr. Chad Harrison. I can't yell at him that he's getting out of the picture; I've got to pull the Alphonse line of talk.--'Mr. Harrison, if you'd be so kind as to get that left hind hoof of yours six inches more to the right.' He makes me good and weary."
"He gets his stuff across good. Wasn't for that I wouldn't stand for him a minute. But we're down here, son, to get this three-reel Mexican war dope. As long as Harrison delivers the goods we'll have to put up with him."
"Well, I'm going to give this Yeager lad a tip what he's up against. Then if he wants to he can light out before Harrison gets to him."
Farrar was as good as his word. As soon as he reached the hotel he dropped around to the room where the new extra was staying. His knock brought