by Unknown
"Corking bit of riding--never saw better. I'll give you my hand on that, my man."
The cowpuncher found a bunch of manicured fingers in his rough brown paw. He found something else, for after the pink hand had gone there remained a fifty-dollar bill. He looked at it helplessly for a moment; then, beneath the brown outdoor tan, a flush of anger beat into his face. Without a word he leaned forward and pressed the note into the mouth of the bronco.
The buckskin knew its master for a very good friend. If he gave it something to eat--well, there was no harm in trying it once. The buckskin chewed placidly for a few seconds, decided that this was a practical joke, and ejected from its mouth a slimy green pulp that had recently been a treasury note.
The father stammered his thanks to the rescuer of the girl. "I don't know what I can ever do to let you know . . . I don't know how I can ever pay you for saving . . ."
"Forget it!" snapped the brown man curtly. He was an even-tempered youth, as genial and friendly as a half-grown pup, but just now the word "pay" irritated him as a red rag does a sulky bull.
"If there's anything at all I can do for you--"
"Not a thing."
The New Yorker felt that he was not expressing himself at all happily. What he wanted was to show this young fellow that he had put him under a lifelong obligation he could never hope to wipe out.
"If you ever come to New York--"
"I'm not liable to go there. I don't belong there any more than you do here. Better drift back to Tucson, stranger. The parada is no place for a tenderfoot. You're in luck you're not shy one li'l' girl tromped to death. Take a fool's advice and hit the trail for town pronto before you bump into more trouble."
The rider swung round his pony and cantered back to the beef herd.
He left behind him a much-annoyed clubman, a perplexed and distressed father, and a girl both hurt and indignant at his brusque rejection of her father's friendly advances. The episode of the fifty-dollar bill had taken place entirely under cover. The man who had given the note and the one who had refused to accept it were the only ones who knew of it. The girl saw only that this splendid horseman who had snatched her from under the very feet of the ladino had shown a boorish discourtesy. The savor had gone out of her adventure. Her heart was sick with disappointment and indignation.
CHAPTER I
CONCERNING A STREET TWELVE MILES LONG
"I like yore outfit," Red Hollister grumbled. "You're nice boys, and good to yore mothers--what few of you ain't wore their gray hairs to the grave with yore frolicsome ways. You know yore business and you got a good cook. But I'm darned if I like this thing of two meals a day, one at a quarter to twelve at night and the other a quarter past twelve, also and likewise at night."
A tenderfoot might have thought that Hollister had some grounds for complaint. For weeks he had been crawling out of his blankets in the pre-dawn darkness of 3 A.M. He had sat shivering down beside a camp-fire to swallow a hurried breakfast and had swung into the saddle while night was still heavy over the land. He had ridden after cattle wild as deer and had wrestled with ladino steers till long after the stars were up. In the chill night he had eaten another meal, rolled up in his blankets, and fallen into instant heavy sleep. And five minutes later--or so at least it seemed to him--the cook had pounded on the triangle for him to get up.
None the less Red's grumbling was a pretense. He would not have been anywhere else for twice the pay. This was what he lived for.
Johnnie Green, commonly known as "the Runt," helped himself to another flank steak. He was not much of a cow-hand, but when it came to eating Johnnie was always conscientiously on the job.
"These here New Yorkers must be awful hardy," he ventured, apropos of nothing. "Seems like they're night birds for fair. Never do go to bed, far as I can make out. They tromp the streets all day and dance at them cabby-rets all night. My feet would be all wore out."
Stace Wallis grinned. "So would my pocketbook. I've heard tell how a fellow can pay as high as four or five dollars for an eat at them places."
"Nothin' to it--nothin' a-tall," pronounced Red dogmatically. Hollister always knew everything. Nothing in the heavens above or the earth below could stump him. The only trouble with his knowledge was that he knew so much that wasn't true. "Can't be did. Do you reckon any o' them New Yorkers could get away with five dollars' worth of ham and aigs? Why, the Runt here couldn't eat more'n a dollar's worth."
"Sure," assented Johnnie. It was the habit of his life to agree with the last speaker. "You're damn whistlin', Red. Why, at the Harvey House they only charge a dollar for a square, and a man couldn't get a better meal than that."
"Onct in Denver, when I went to the stock show, I blowed myself for a meal at the Cambridge Hotel that set me back one-fifty," said Slim Leroy reminiscently. "They et dinner at night."
"They did?" scoffed Johnnie. "Don't they know a fellow eats dinner at noon and supper at night?"
"I ain't noticed any dinner at noon for se-ve-real weeks," Hollister contributed.
"Some feed that," ruminated Leroy, with memories of the Cambridge Hotel still to the fore.
"With or without?" questioned Red.
"I reckon I had one li'l' drink with it. No more."
"Then they stung you," pronounced Hollister.
"Mebbeso, and mebbe not. I ain't kickin' none. I sure was in tony society. There was fellows sittin' at a table near us that had on them swallow-tail coats."
Johnnie ventured a suggestion. "Don't you reckon if a fellow et a couple o' plates of this here cavi-eer stuff and some ice cream and cake, he might run it up to two bucks or two and a half? Don't you reckon he might, Clay?"
Clay Lindsay laughed. "You boys know a lot about New York, just about as much as I do. I've read that a guy can drop a hundred dollars a night in a cabaret if he has a friend or two along, and never make a ripple on Broadway."
"Does that look reasonable to you, Clay?" argued Red. "We're not talkin' about buckin' the tiger or buyin' diamonds for no actresses. We're figurin' on a guy goin' out with some friends to eat and take a few drinks and have a good time. How could he spend fifty dollars--let alone a hundred--if he let the skirts and the wheel alone and didn't tamper with no straight flushes?"
"I'm tellin' you what I read. Take it or leave it," said Clay amiably.
"Well, I read there's a street there twelve miles long. If a fellow started at one end of that street with a thirst he'd sure be salivated before he reached the other end of it," Stace said with a grin.
"Wonder if a fellow could 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 f
or 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 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. The man from Graham County, Arizona, felt uneasy in his mind. The girl was flushed with fife. In a way she was celebrating her escape from the narrow horizon in which she had lived. It was in the horoscope of her temperament to run forward gayly to meet adventure, but when the man opposite her ordered wine and she sipped it reluctantly with a little grimace, the cowpuncher was of opinion that she was likely to get more of this adventure than was good for her. In her unsophistication danger lay. For she was plainly easily influenced, and in the beat of her healthy young blood probably there was latent passion.
They left the diner before Clay. He passed them later in the vestibule of the sleeper. They were looking out together on the moonlit plain through which the train was rushing. The arm of the man was stretched behind her to the railing and with the motion of the car the girl swayed back slightly against him.
Again Clay sought the smoking compartment and was led into talk by the officer. It was well past eleven when he rose, yawned, and announced, "I'm goin' to hit the hay."
Mo
st of the berths were made up and it was with a little shock of surprise that his eyes fell on Kitty Mason and her new friend, the sleek black head of the man close to her fair curls, his steady eyes holding her like a charmed bird while his caressing voice wove the fairy tale of New York to which she yielded herself in strange delight.
"Don't you-all want yo' berth made up, lady?"
It was the impatient porter who interrupted them. The girl sprang up tremulously to accept.
"Oh, please. Is it late?" Her glance swept down the car and took in the fact that her section alone was not made up. "I didn't know--why, what time is it?"
"Most twelve, ma'am," replied the aggrieved porter severely.