Steve Yeager | Page 4

no answer, but as the door was ajar the camera man stepped across the threshold.
Steve lay on the bed asleep, his lithe, compact figure stretched at negligent ease. The flannel shirt was open at the throat, the strong muscles of which sloped beautifully into the splendid shoulders. There was strength in the clean-cut jaw of the brown face. It was an easy guess that he had wandered by paths crooked as well as straight, that he had taken the loose pleasures of his kind joyously. But when he had followed forbidden trails it had been from the sheer youthful exuberance of life in him and not from weakness. Farrar judged that the heart of the young vagabond was sound, that the desert winds and suns had kept his head washed clean of shameful thoughts.
The cowpuncher opened his eyes. He looked at his visitor without speaking.
"Didn't expect to find you asleep," apologized the camera man.
Yeager got up and stretched his supple body in a yawn. "That's all right. Just making up the sleep I lost last night on the road. No matter a-tall."
He was in blue overalls, the worn shiny chaps tossed across the back of a chair. On the table lay the dusty, pinched-in hat, through the disreputable crown of which Farrar had lately seen a lock of his brindle hair rising like an aigrette.
"Glad to have you join us. We need riders like you. Say, it was worth five dollars to me to see the way you laid out Harrison."
The cowpuncher's boyish face clouded.
"I'm right sorry about that. It ce'tainly was a fool play. I don't blame Harrison for getting sore."
"He's sore all right. That's what I came to see you about. He's a rowdy, Harrison is. And he'll make you trouble."
"Most generally I don't pack a gun," Yeager observed casually.
"It won't be a gun play; not to start with, anyhow. He used to be a prizefighter. He'll beat you up."
"Well, it don't hurt a man's system to absorb a licking once in a blue moon."
The cowpuncher said it smilingly, with a manner of negligent competence that came from an experience of many dangers faced, of many perilous ways safely trodden.
Farrar had not yet quite discharged his mind. "There's nothing to prevent you from slipping round to the stable and pulling your freight quietly."
"Except that I don't want to," added the new extra. "No, sir. I've got a job and I'm staying with it. I'll sit here like a horned toad till the boss gives me my time."
The camera man beamed. To meet so debonair and care-free a specimen of humanity warmed the cockles of his heart.
"I'll bet you're some scrapper yourself," he suggested.
"Oh, no. He'll lick me, I reckon. Say, what do they hold you up for at this hacienda?"
The lank camera man supplied information, adding that he knew of a good cheap boarding-place where one or two of the company put up.
"If you say so, I'll take you right round there."
Yeager reached promptly for his hat. "You talk like a dollar's worth of nickels rattling out of a slot machine--right straight to the point."
They walked together down the white, dusty street, crossed the outskirts of the old Mexican adobe town, and came to a suburb of bungalows. In front of one of these Farrar stopped. He unlatched the gate.
"Here we are."
There was an old-fashioned garden of roses and mignonettes and hollyhocks, with crimson ramblers rioting over the wire trellis in front of the broad porch. A girl with soft, thick, blue-black hair was bending over a rosebush. She was snipping dead shoots with a pair of scissors. At the sound of their feet crunching the gravel of the walk, her slender figure straightened and she turned to them. The ripe lips parted above pearly teeth in a smile of welcome to the camera man.
"I've come begging again, Miss Ruth," explained Farrar. "This is Mr. Yeager, a new member of our company. He wants to find a good boarding-place, so of course I thought of your mother. Don't tell me that you can't take him."
A little frown of doubt furrowed her forehead. "I don't know, Mr. Farrar. Our tables are about full. I'll ask mother."
The eyes of the girl rested for an instant on the brown-faced youth whose application the camera man was backing. He had taken off his hat, and the sun-pour was on his tawny hair, on the lean, bronzed face and broad, muscular shoulders. In his torn, discolored hat, his stained and travel-worn clothes, he looked a very prince of tramps. But in his quiet, steady gaze was the dynamic spark of self-respect that forebade her to judge him by his garb.
A faint flush burned in the dusky cheeks to which the long lashes drooped because of a touch of embarrassment. He had seemed to