Steve Yeager | Page 9

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 noble 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 space or across bridgeless chasms, took part in dozens of sets illustrating 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 class 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 aptitude for the sport.
Sometimes Farrar was present at these lessons. Often Baldy Cummings, 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