The Big-Town Round-Up | Page 6

confirm this judgment, for the
dining-car manager seated her opposite him at a table for two. When
Clay handed her the menu card she murmured "Thank you!" with a
rush of color to her cheeks and looked helplessly at the list in her hand.
Quite plainly she was taking her first long journey.

"Do I have to order everything that is here?" she presently asked shyly
after a tentative and furtive glance at her table companion.
Clay felt no inclination to smile at her naïveté. He was not very much
more experienced than she was in such things, but his ignorance of
forms never embarrassed him. They were details that seemed to him to
have no importance.
The cowpuncher helped her fill the order card. She put herself entirely
in his hands and was willing to eat whatever he suggested unbiased by
preferences of her own. He included chicken salad and ice cream. From
the justice she did her lunch he concluded that his choice had been a
wise one.
She was a round, soft, little person with constant intimations of a
childhood not long outgrown. Dimples ran in and out her pink cheeks
at the slightest excuse. The blue eyes were innocently wide and the
Cupid's-bow mouth invitingly sweet. The girl from Brush, Colorado,
was about as worldly-wise as a plump, cooing infant or a fluffy kitten,
and instinctively the eye caressed her with the same tenderness.
During the course of lunch she confided that her name was Kitty
Mason, that she was an orphan, and that she was on her way to New
York to study at a school for moving-picture actresses.
"I sent my photograph and the manager wrote back that my face was
one hundred per cent perfect for the movies," the girl explained.
It was clear that she was expecting to be manufactured into a film star
in a week or two. Clay doubted whether the process was quite so easy,
even with a young woman who bloomed in the diner like a rose of the
desert.
After they had finished eating, the range-rider turned in at the smoking
compartment and enjoyed a cigar. He fell into casual talk with an army
officer who had served in the Southwest, and it was three hours later
when he returned to his own seat in the car.

A hard-faced man in a suit of checks more than a shade too loud was
sitting in the section beside the girl from Brush. He was making talk in
an assured, familiar way, and the girl was listening to him shyly and yet
eagerly. The man was a variation of a type known to Lindsay. That type
was the Arizona bad-man. If this expensively dressed fellow was not
the Eastern equivalent of the Western gunman, Clay's experience was
badly at fault. The fishy, expressionless eyes, the colorless face, the
tight-lipped jaw, expressed a sinister personality and a dangerous one.
Just now a suave good-humor veiled the evil of him, but the
cowpuncher knew him for a wolf none the less.
Clay had already made friends with the Pullman conductor. He drifted
to him now on the search for information.
"The hard-faced guy with the little girl?" he asked casually after the
proffer of a cigar. "The one with the muscles bulging out all over
him--who is he?"
"He comes by that tough mug honestly. That's Jerry Durand."
"The prize-fighter?"
"Yep. Used to be. He's a gang leader in New York now. On his way
back from the big fight in 'Frisco."
"He was some scrapper," admitted the range-rider. "Almost won the
championship once, didn't he?"
"Lost on a foul. He always was a dirty fighter. I saw him the time he
knocked out Reddy Moran."
"What do you mean gang leader?"
"He's boss of his district, they say. Runs a gambling-house of his own,
I've heard. You can't prove it by me."
When Lindsay returned to his place he settled himself with a magazine
in a seat where he could see Kitty and her new friend. The very vitality

of the girl's young life was no doubt a temptation to this man. The soft,
rounded throat line, the oval cheek's rich coloring so easily moved to
ebb and flow, the carmine of the full red lips: every detail helped to
confirm the impression of a sensuous young creature, innocent as a
wild thing of the forests and as yet almost as unspiritual. She was a
child of the senses, and the man sitting beside her was weighing and
appraising her with a keen and hungry avidity.
Durand took the girl in to dinner with him and they sat not far from
Lindsay. Kitty was lost to any memory of those about her. She was
flirting joyously with a sense of newly awakened powers.