The Big-Town Round-Up | Page 5

get a job there. They wouldn't have no use
for a puncher, I reckon," Slim drawled.
"Betcha Clay could get a job all right," answered Johnnie Green
promptly. "He'd be top hand anywhere, Clay would."
Johnnie was the lost dog of the B-in-a-Box ranch. It was his nature to
follow somebody and lick his hand whenever it was permitted. The
somebody he followed was Clay Lindsay. Johnnie was his slave, the
echo of his opinions, the booster of his merits. He asked no greater
happiness than to trail in the wake of his friend and get a kind word
occasionally.
The Runt had chosen as his Admirable Crichton a most engaging youth.
It never had been hard for any girl to look at Clay Lindsay. His
sun-tanned, good looks, the warmth of his gay smile, the poise and the
easy stride of him, made Lindsay a marked man even in a country
where men of splendid physique were no exception.
"I'd take a li'l' bet that New York ain't lookin' for no champeen ropers

or bronco-busters," said Stace. "Now if Clay was a cabby-ret dancer or
a Wall Street wolf--"
"There's no street in the world twelve miles long where Clay couldn't
run down and hogtie a job if he wanted to," insisted Johnnie loyally.
"Ain't that right, Clay?"
Clay was not listening. His eyes were watching the leap of the fire glow.
The talk of New York had carried him back to a night on the round-up
three years before. He was thinking about a slim girl standing on a sand
spit with a wild steer rushing toward her, of her warm, slender body
lying in his arms for five immortal seconds, of her dark, shy eyes
shining out of the dusk at him like live coals. He remembered--and it
hurt him to recall it--how his wounded pride had lashed out in
resentment of the patronage of these New Yorkers. The younger man
had insulted him, but he knew in his heart now that the girl's father had
meant nothing of the kind. Of course the girl had forgotten him long
since. If he ever came to her mind as a fugitive memory it would be in
the guise of a churlish boor as impossible as his own hill cattle.
"Question is, could you land a job in New York if you wanted one,"
explained Stace to the dreamer.
"If it's neck meat or nothin' a fellow can 'most always get somethin' to
do," said Lindsay in the gentle voice he used. The vague impulses of
many days crystallized suddenly into a resolution. "Anyhow I'm goin'
to try. Soon as the rodeo is over I'm goin' to hit the trail for the big
town."
"Tucson?" interpreted Johnnie dubiously.
"New York."
The bow-legged little puncher looked at his friend and gasped. Denver
was the limit of Johnnie's imagination. New York was terra incognita,
inhabited by a species who were as foreign to him as if they had dwelt
in Mars.

"You ain't really aimin' to go to New York sure enough?" he asked.
Clay flashed on him the warm smile that endeared him to all his friends.
"I'm goin' to ride down Broadway and shoot up the town, Johnnie.
Want to come along?"
CHAPTER II
CLAY APPOINTS HIMSELF CHAPERON
As he traveled east Clay began to slough the outward marks of his
calling. He gave his spurs to Johnnie before he left the ranch. At
Tucson he shed his chaps and left them in care of a friend at the
Longhorn Corral. The six-gun with which he had shot rattlesnakes he
packed into his suitcase at El Paso. His wide-rimmed felt hat flew off
while the head beneath it was stuck out of a window of the coach
somewhere south of Denver. Before he passed under the Welcome
Arch in that city the silk kerchief had been removed from his brown
neck and retired to the hip pocket which formerly held his forty-five.
The young cattleman began to flatter himself that nobody could now
tell he was a wild man from the hills who had never been curried. He
might have spared himself the illusion. Everybody he met knew that
this clean-cut young athlete, with the heavy coat of tan on his
good-looking face, was a product of the open range. The lightness of
his stride, the breadth of the well-packed shoulders, the frankness of the
steady eyes, all advertised him a son of Arizona.
It was just before noon at one of the small plains towns east of Denver
that a girl got on the train and was taken by the porter to a section back
of Clay Lindsay. The man from Arizona noticed that she was
refreshingly pretty in an unsophisticated way.
A little later he had a chance to