Steve Yeager | Page 5

read her hesitation with an inner amusement that found expression in his gray-blue eyes.
"Tell her I'll be much obliged if she'll take me," Yeager said in his gentle drawl.
Considering his request, she stripped the gauntlet without purpose from one of her little brown hands. A solitaire sparkled on the third finger. Again she murmured, "I'll ask mother"; then turned and flashed up the steps, her slender limbs carrying with fluent grace the pliant young body.
Presently appeared on the porch a plump, matronly woman of a wholesome cleanness without and within. Judging by fugitive dabs of flour which decorated her temple and her forehead, she had been making bread or pies at the time she had been called by her daughter. Much of her life she had lived in the Southwest, and one glance at Yeager was enough to satisfy her. Through the dust and tarnished clothes of him youth shone resplendent. The sun was still in his brindle hair, in his gay eyes. She had a boy of her own, and the heart of her warmed to him.
In five sentences they had come to an arrangement. The barn behind the house had been remodeled so that it contained several bedrooms. Into one of these Yeager was to move his scant effects at once.
He and Farrar walked back to the hotel together. Harrison was waiting for them on the porch. As soon as he caught sight of the cowpuncher he strode forward. The straight line of his set mouth looked like a gash in a melon.
"Will you have it here or back of the garage?" he demanded, getting straight to business.
"Any place that suits you," agreed Steve affably. "Won't the bulls pinch us if we do a roughhouse here?"
Harrison turned with triumphant malice to Farrar.
"Get your camera. You say you don't like phony stuff. Good enough. I'll pull off the real goods for you in licking a rube. There's plenty of room back of the garage."
The camera man protested. "See here, Harrison. Yeager ain't looking for trouble. He told you he was sorry. It was an accident. What's the use of bearing a grudge?"
The heavy glared at him. "You in this, Mr. Farrar? You're liable to have a heluvatime if you butt into my business without an invite. Shack--and git that camera."
Yeager nodded to his new friend. "Go ahead and get it. We'll be waiting back of the garage."
Farrar hesitated, the professional instinct in him awake and active.
"If you're dead keen on a mix-up, Harrison, why not come over to the studio where I can get the best light? We'll make an indoor set of it."
"Go you," promptly agreed Harrison. His vanity craved a picture of him thrashing the extra, a good one that the public could see and that he could afterwards gloat over himself.
Yeager laughed in his slow way. "I'm to be massa-creed to make a Roman holiday, am I? All right. Might as well begin earning that two-fifty per I've been promised."
The news spread, as if on the wings of the wind. Before Farrar had a stage arranged to suit him and his camera ready, a dozen members of the company drifted in with a casual manner of having arrived accidentally. Fleming Lennox, leading man, appeared with Cliff Manderson, chief comedian for the Lunar border company. Baldy Cummings, the property man, strolled leisurely in to look over some costumes. But Steve observed that he was panting rapidly.
As he sat on a soap box waiting for Farrar to finish his preparations, Yeager became aware that Lennox was watching him closely. He did not know that the leading man would cheerfully have sacrificed a week's salary to see Harrison get the trimming he needed. The handsome young film actor was an athlete, a trained boxer, but the ex-prizefighter had given him the thrashing of his life two months before. He simply had lacked the physical stamina to weather the blows that came from those long, gorilla-like arms with the weight of the heavy, rounded shoulders back of them. The fight had not lasted five minutes.
"Shapes well," murmured Manderson, nodding toward the new extra.
The leading man agreed without much hope. He conceded the boyish cowpuncher a beautiful trim figure, with breadth of shoulder, grace of poise, and long, flowing muscles that rippled under the healthy skin like those of a panther in motion. But these would serve him little unless he was an experienced boxer. Harrison had tremendous strength and power; moreover, he knew the game from years of battle in the ring.
"He'll lose--won't be able to stand the gaff," Lennox replied gloomily, his eyes fixed on Yeager as the young fellow rose lightly and moved forward to meet his opponent.
The extra was as tall as Harrison, but he looked like a boy beside him, so large and massive did the