← catalogue

The Big-Town Round-Up

by William MacLeod Raine · English · Gutenberg #17205 · 425,548 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Big-Town Round-Up
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Big-Town Round-Up

Author: William MacLeod Raine


        
Release date: December 3, 2005 [eBook #17205]
                Most recently updated: December 13, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17205

Credits: E-text prepared by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BIG-TOWN ROUND-UP ***


E-text prepared by Al Haines



THE BIG-TOWN ROUND-UP

by

WILLIAM MACLEOD RAINE

Author of
A Man Four-Square, The Sheriff's Son, Oh, You Tex!, Etc.

Frontispiece by George Giguere







[Frontispiece: Hard knuckles pressed cruelly into the
soft throat of the Villager.  (Transcriber's note: most
of illustration missing; enough of its caption remaining
to locate its entirety in the book's text).]



Grosset & Dunlap
Publishers          New York
Made in the United States of America
Copyright, 1920, by William Macleod Raine
All Rights Reserved




CONTENTS


          FOREWORD
       I.  CONCERNING A STREET TWELVE MILES LONG
      II.  CLAY APPOINTS HIMSELF CHAPERON
     III.  THE BIG TOWN
      IV.  A NEW USE FOR A WATER HOSE
       V.  A CONTRIBUTION TO THE SALVATION ARMY
      VI.  CLAY TAKES A TRANSFER
     VII.  ARIZONA FOLLOWS ITS LAWLESS IMPULSE
    VIII.  "THE BEST SINGLE-BARRELED SPORT IVER I MET"
      IX.  BEATRICE UP STAGE
       X.  JOHNNIE SEES THE POSTMASTER
      XI.  JOHNNIE GREEN--MATCH-MAKER
     XII.  CLAY READS AN AD AND ANSWERS IT
    XIII.  A LATE EVENING CALL
     XIV.  STARRING AS A SECOND-STORY MAN
      XV.  THE GANGMAN SEES RED
     XVI.  A FACE IN THE NIGHT
    XVII.  JOHNNIE MAKES A JOKE
   XVIII.  BEATRICE GIVES AN OPTION
     XIX.  A LADY WEARS A RING
      XX.  THE CAUTIOUS GUY SLIPS UP
     XXI.  AT THE HEAD OF THE STAIRS
    XXII.  TWO MEN IN A LOCKED ROOM
   XXIII.  JOHNNIE COMES INTO HIS OWN
    XXIV.  CLAY LAYS DOWN THE LAW
     XXV.  JOHNNIE SAYS HE IS MUCH OBLIGED
    XXVI.  A LOCKED GATE
   XXVII.  "NO VIOLENCE"
  XXVIII.  IN BAD
    XXIX.  BAD NEWS
     XXX.  BEE MAKES A MORNING CALL
    XXXI.  INTO THE HANDS OF HIS ENEMY
   XXXII.  MR. LINDSAY RECEIVES
  XXXIII.  BROMFIELD MAKES AN OFFER
   XXXIV.  BEATRICE QUALIFIES AS A SHERLOCK HOLMES
    XXXV.  TWO AND TWO MAKE FOUR
   XXXVI.  A BOOMERANG
  XXXVII.  ON THE CARPET
 XXXVIII.  A CONVERSATION ABOUT STOCK
   XXXIX.  IN CENTRAL PARK
      XL.  CLAY PLAYS SECOND FIDDLE
     XLI.  THE NEW DAY




THE BIG-TOWN ROUND-UP


FOREWORD

The driver of the big car throttled down.  Since he had swung away from
the dusty road to follow a wagon track across the desert, the
speedometer had registered many miles.  His eyes searched the ground in
front to see whether the track led up the brow of the hill or dipped
into the sandy wash.

On the breeze there floated to him the faint, insistent bawl of thirsty
cattle.  The car leaped forward again, climbed the hill, and closed in
upon a _remuda_ of horses watched by two wranglers.

The chauffeur stopped the machine and shouted a question at the nearest
rider, who swung his mount and cantered up.  He was a lean, tanned
youth in overalls, jumper, wide sombrero, high-heeled boots, and shiny
leather chaps.  A girl in the tonneau appraised with quick, eager eyes
this horseman of the plains.  Perhaps she found him less picturesque
than she had hoped.  He was not there for moving-picture purposes.
Nothing on horse or man held its place for any reason except utility.
The leathers protected the legs of the boy from the spines of the
cactus and the thorns of the mesquite, the wide flap of the hat his
face from the slash of catclaws when he drove headlong through the
brush after flying cattle.  The steel horn of the saddle was built to
check a half-ton of bolting hill steer and fling it instantly.  The
rope, the Spanish bit, the _tapaderas_, all could justify their place
in his equipment.

"Where's the round-up?" asked the driver.

The coffee-brown youth gave a little lift of his head to the right.  He
was apparently a man of few words.  But his answer sufficed.  The
bawling of anxious cattle was now loud and persistent.

The car moved forward to the edge of the mesa and dropped into the
valley.  The girl in the back seat gave a little scream of delight.
Here at last was the West she had read about in books and seen on the
screen.

This was Cattleland's hour of hours.  The _parada_ grounds were
occupied by two circles of cattle, each fenced by eight or ten
horsemen.  The nearer one was the beef herd, beyond this--and closer to
the mouth of the canon from which they had all recently been
driven--was a mass of closely packed cows and calves.

The automobile swept around the beef herd and drew to a halt between it
and the noisier one beyond.  In a fire of mesquite wood branding-irons
were heating.  Several men were busy branding and marking the calves
dragged to them from the herd by the horsemen who were roping the
frightened little blatters.

It was a day beautiful even for Arizona.  The winey air called potently
to the youth in the girl.  Such a sky, such atmosphere, so much life
and color!  She could not sit still any longer.  With a movement of her
wrist she opened the door and stepped down from the car.

A man sitting beside the chauffeur turned in his seat.  "You'd better
stay where you are, honey."  He had an idea that this was not exactly
the scene a girl of seventeen ought to see at close range.

"I want to get the kinks out of my muscles, Dad," the girl called back.
"I'll not go far."

She walked along a ridge that ran from the mesa into the valley like an
outstretched tongue.  Her hands were in the pockets of her fawn-colored
coat.  There was a touch of unstudied jauntiness in the way the tips of
her golden curls escaped from beneath the little brown toque she wore.
A young man guarding the beef herd watched her curiously.  She moved
with the untamed, joyous freedom of a sun-worshiper just emerging from
the morning of the world.  Something in the poise of the light, boyish
figure struck a spark from his imagination.

A _vaquero_ was cantering toward the fire with a calf in his wake.
Another cowpuncher dropped the loop of his lariat on the ground, gave
it a little upward twist as the calf passed over it, jerked taut the
_riata_, and caught the animal by the hind leg.  In a moment the victim
lay stretched on the ground.  In the gathering gloom the girl could not
quite make out what the men were doing.  To her sensitive nostrils
drifted an acrid odor of burnt hair and flesh, the wail of an animal in
pain.  One of the men was using his knife on the ears of the helpless
creature.  She heard another say something about a crop and an
underbit.  Then she turned away, faint and indignant.  Three big men
torturing a month-old calf--was this the brave outdoor West she had
read about and remembered from her childhood days?  Tears of pity and
resentment blurred her sight.

As she stood on the spit of the ridge, a slim, light figure silhouetted
against the skyline, the young man guarding the beef herd called
something to her that was lost in the bawling of the cattle.  From the
motion of his hand she knew that he was telling her to get back to the
car.  But the girl saw no reason for obeying the orders of a
range-rider she had never seen before and never expected to see again.
Nobody had ever told her that a rider is fairly safe among the wildest
hill cattle, but a man on foot is liable to attack at any time when a
herd is excited.

She turned her shoulder a little more definitely to the man who had
warned her and looked across the _parada_ grounds to the hills swimming
in a haze of violet velvet.  Her heart throbbed to a keen delight in
them, as it might have done at the touch of a dear friend's hand long
absent.  For she had been born in the Rockies.  They belonged to her
and she to them.  Long years in New York had left her still an alien.

A shout of warning startled her.  Above the bellowing of the herd she
heard another yell.

"Hi-yi-ya-a!"

A red-eyed steer, tail up, was crashing through the small brush toward
the branders.  There was a wild scurry for safety.  The men dropped
iron and ropes and fled to their saddles.  Deflected by pursuers, the
animal turned.  By chance it thundered straight for the girl on the
sand spit.

She stood paralyzed for a moment.

Out of the gathering darkness a voice came to her sharp and clear.
"Don't move!"  It rang so vibrant with crisp command that the girl,
poised for flight, stood still and waited in white terror while the
huge steer lumbered toward her.

A cowpony, wheeled as on a dollar, jumped to an instant gallop.  The
man riding it was the one who had warned her back to the car.  Horse
and _ladino_ pounded over the ground toward her.  Each stride brought
them closer to each other as they converged toward the sand spit.  It
came to her with a gust of panicky despair that they would collide on
the very spot where she stood.  Yet she did not run.

The rider, lifting his bronco forward at full speed, won by a fraction
of a second.  He guided in such a way as to bring his horse between her
and the steer.  The girl noticed that he dropped his bridle rein and
crouched in the saddle, his eyes steadily upon her.  Without slackening
his pace in the least as he swept past, the man stooped low, caught the
girl beneath the armpits, and swung her in front of him to the back of
the horse.  The steer pounded past so close behind that one of its
horns grazed the tail of the cowpony.

It was a superb piece of horsemanship, perfectly timed, as perfectly
executed.

The girl lay breathless in the arms of the man, her heart beating
against his, her face buried in his shoulder.  She was dazed, half
fainting from the reaction of her fear.  The next she remembered
clearly was being lowered into the arms of her father.

He held her tight, his face tortured with emotion.  She was the very
light of his soul, and she had shaved death by a hair's breadth.  A
miracle had saved her, but he would never forget the terror that had
gripped him.  Naturally, shaken, as he was, his relief found vent in
scolding.

"I told you to stay by the car, honey.  But you're so willful.  You've
got to have your own way.  Thank God you're safe.  If . . . if . . ."
His voice broke as he thought of what had so nearly been.

The girl snuggled closer to him, her arms round his neck.  His anxiety
touched her nearly, and tears flooded her eyes.

"I know, Dad.  I . . . I'll be good."

A young man descended from the car, handsome, trim, and well got up.
He had been tailored by the best man's outfitter in New York.  Nobody
on Broadway could order a dinner better than he.  The latest dances he
could do perfectly.  He had the reputation of knowing exactly the best
thing to say on every occasion.  Now he proceeded to say it.

"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 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 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 naivete.  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."

Most 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.

She flashed a look of reproach at her companion and blushed again as
she fled with her bag to the ladies' dressing-room.  As for the man,
Lindsay presently came on him in the smoking-room where he sat with an
unlit cigar between his teeth and his feet on a chair.  Behind
half-shuttered lids his opaque eyes glittered with excitement.  Clearly
he was reviewing in his mind the progression of his triumph.  Clay
restrained a good, healthy impulse to pick a row with him and go to the
mat with the ex-prize-fighter.  But after all it was none of his
business.

The train was rolling through the cornfields of the Middle West when
the Arizonan awoke.  He was up early, but not long before Kitty Mason,
who was joined at once by Durand.

"Shucks!  Nothin' to it a-tall," the range-rider assured himself.
"That li'l' girl sure must have the number of this guy.  She's flirtin'
with him to beat three of a kind, but I'll bet a dogie she knows right
where she's at."

Clay did not in the least believe his own argument.  If he had come
from a city he would have dismissed the matter as none of his business.
But he came from the clean Southwest where every straight girl is under
the protection of every decent man.  If she was in danger because of
her innocence it was up to him to look after her.  There was no more
competent man in Graham County than Clay Lindsay, but he recognized
that this was a delicate affair in which he must move warily.

On his way to the diner at noon the range-rider passed her again.  She
was alone for the moment and as she leaned back her soft round throat
showed a beating pulse.  Her cheeks were burning and her starry eyes
were looking into the future with a happy smile.

"You pore little maverick," the man commented silently.

The two had the table opposite him.  As the wheels raced over a culvert
to the comparative quiet of the ballasted track beyond, the words of
the man reached Clay.

". . . and we'll have all day to see the city, kid."

Kitty shook her head.  There was hesitation in her manner, and the man
was quick to make the most of it.  She wanted to stay, wanted to skip a
train and let this competent guide show her Chicago.  But somewhere,
deep in her consciousness, a bell of warning was beginning to ring.
Some uneasy prescience of trouble was sifting into her light heart.
She was not so sure of her fairy tale, a good deal less sure of her
prince.

A second time the song of the rails lifted from a heavy, rumbling bass
to a lighter note, and again a snatch of words drifted across the diner.

". . . the time of your young life, honey."

The girl was crumbling a bread ball with her fingers as a vent to her
restless excitement.  The heavy hand of the man moved across the table
and rested on hers.  "And it won't cost you a cent, girlie," the New
Yorker added.

But the long lashes of the girl lifted and her baby-blue eyes met his
with shy reproach.  "I don't think I ought," she breathed, color
sweeping her face in a vivid flame.

"You should worry," he scoffed.

The chant of the wheels rose again, increased to a dull roar, and
deadened the sound of all talk.  But Lindsay knew the girl was
weakening.  She was no match for this big, dominant, two-fisted man.

The jaw of the cowpuncher set.  This child was not fair game for a man
like Durand.  When Clay rose to leave the diner he knew that he meant
to sit in and take a hand.

Either the Limited was ahead of its time schedule or the engineer had
orders to run into the city very slowly.  The train was creeping
through the thickly settled quarter where the poorer people are herded
when Clay touched Durand on the shoulder.

"Like to see you a moment in the vestibule," he said in his gentle
voice.

The eyes of the two men met and the gambler knew at once that this man
and he were destined to be enemies.  Some sixth sense of safety,
cultivated by a lifetime of battle, flashed him sure warning of this.
The fellow meant to make trouble of some kind.  The former
near-champion of the ring had not the least idea what about or in what
way.  Nor did he greatly care.  He had supreme confidence in his
ability to look after himself.  It was one factor of the stock in trade
that had made him a dominant figure in the underworld of New York.  He
was vain enough to think that if it came to the worst there were few
men living who could best him in a rough-and-tumble fight.  Certainly
no hill-billy from Arizona could do it.

No man had ever said that Jerry Durand was not game.  He rose promptly
and followed the Westerner from the car, swinging along with the light,
catlike tread acquired by many pugilists.

The floor of the vestibule had been raised and the outer door of the
car opened.  Durand found time to wonder why.

The cowpuncher turned on him with an abrupt question.  "Can you swim?"

The eyes of the ward boss narrowed.  "What's that to you?" he demanded
truculently.

"Nothin' to me, but a good deal to you.  I'm aimin' to drop you in the
river when we cross."

"Is that so?" snarled Durand.  "You're quite a joker, ain't you?  Well,
you can't start somethin' too soon to suit me.  But let's get this
clear so we'll know where we're at.  What's ailin' you, rube?"

"I don't like the color of yore hair or the cut of yore clothes,"
drawled Lindsay.  "You've got a sure-enough bad eye, and I'm tired of
travelin' in yore company.  Let's get off, me or you one."

In the slitted eyes of the Bowery graduate there was no heat at all.
They were bleak as a heavy winter morn.  "Suits me fine.  You'll not
travel with me much farther.  Here's where you beat the place."

The professional lashed out suddenly with his left.  But Clay was not
at the receiving end of the blow.  Always quick as chain lightning, he
had ducked and clinched.  His steel-muscled arms tightened about the
waist of the other.  A short-arm jolt to the cheek he disregarded.

Before Durand had set himself to meet the plunge he found himself
flying through space.  The gambler caught at the rail, missed it,
landed on the cinders beside the roadbed, was flung instantly from his
feet, and rolled over and over down an incline to a muddy gully.

Clay, hanging to the brass railing, leaned out and looked back.  Durand
had staggered to his feet, plastered with mud from head to knees, and
was shaking furiously a fist at him.  The face of the man was venomous
with rage.

The cowpuncher waved a debonair hand and mounted the steps again.  The
porter was standing in the vestibule looking at him with amazement.

"You throwed a man off'n this train, mistah," he charged.

"So I did," admitted Clay, and to save his life he could not keep from
smiling.

The porter sputtered.  This beat anything in his previous experience.
"But--but--it ain't allowed to open up the cah.  Was you-all havin'
trouble?"

"No trouble a-tall.  He bet me a cigar I couldn't put him off."

Clay palmed a dollar and handed it to the porter as he passed into the
car.  The eyes of that outraged official rolled after him.  The book of
rules did not say anything about wrestling-matches in the vestibule.
Besides, it happened that Durand had called him down sharply not an
hour before.  He decided to brush off his passengers and forget what he
had seen.

Clay stopped in front of Kitty and said he hoped she would have no
trouble making her transfer in the city.  The girl was no fool.  She
had sensed the antagonism that had flared up between them in that
moment when they had faced each other five minutes before.

"Where's Mr. Durand?" she asked.

"He got off."

"But the train hasn't stopped."

"It's just crawlin' along, and he was in a hurry."

Her gaze rested upon an angry bruise on his cheek.  It had not been
there when last she saw him.  She started to speak, then changed her
mind.

Clay seated himself beside her.  "Chicago is a right big town, I
reckon.  If I can help you any, Miss Kitty, I'd be glad to do what I
can."

The girl did not answer.  She was trying to work out this puzzle of why
a man should get off before the train reached the station.

"I'm a stranger myself, but I expect I can worry along somehow," he
went on cheerfully.

"Mr. Durand didn't say anything to me about getting off," she persisted.

"He made up his mind in a hurry.  Just took a sudden notion to go."

"Without saying anything about his suitcases?"

"Never mentioned 'em."

"You didn't have--any trouble with him?" she faltered.

"Not a bit," he told her genially.  "Sorry our tickets take us by
different roads to New York.  Maybe we'll meet up with each other
there, Miss Kitty."

"I don't understand it," she murmured, half to herself.  "Why would he
get off before we reach the depot?"

She was full of suspicions, and the bruise on the Westerner's cheek did
not tend to allay them.  They were still unsatisfied when the porter
took her to the end of the car to brush her clothes.

The discretion of that young man had its limits.  While he brushed the
girl he told her rapidly what he had seen in the vestibule.

"Was he hurt?" she asked breathlessly.

"No 'm.  I looked out and seen him standin' beside the track j'es'
a-cussin' a blue streak.  He's a sho-'nough bad actor, that Jerry
Durand."

Kitty marched straight to her section.  The eyes of the girl flashed
anger.

"Please leave my seat, sir," she told Clay.

The Arizonan rose at once.  He knew that she knew.  "I was intendin' to
help you off with yore grips," he said.

She flamed into passionate resentment of his interference.  "I'll
attend to them.  I can look out for myself, sir."

With that she turned her back on him.




CHAPTER III

THE BIG TOWN

When Clay stepped from the express into the Pennsylvania Station he
wondered for a moment if there was a circus or a frontier-day show in
town.  The shouts of the porters, the rush of men and women toward the
gates, the whirl and eddy of a vast life all about him, took him back
to the few hours he had spent in Chicago.

As he emerged at the Thirty-Fourth Street entrance New York burst upon
him with what seemed almost a threat.  He could hear the roar of it
like a river rushing down a canon.  Clay had faced a cattle stampede.
He had ridden out a blizzard hunched up with the drifting herd.  He had
lived rough all his young and joyous life.  But for a moment he felt a
chill drench at his heart that was almost dread.  He did not know a
soul in this vast populace.  He was alone among seven or eight million
crazy human beings.

He had checked his suitcase to be free to look about.  He had no
destination and was in no hurry.  All the day was before him, all of
many days.  He drifted down the street and across to Sixth Avenue.  He
clung to the safety of one of the L posts as the traffic surged past.
The clang of surface cars and the throb of motors filled the air
constantly.  He wondered at the daring of a pink-cheeked slip of a girl
driving an automobile with sure touch through all this tangle of
traffic.  While he waited to plunge across the street there came a roar
overhead that reminded him again of a wall of water he had once heard
tearing down a canon in his home land.

Instinctively one arm clutched at the post.  A monster went flying
through the air with a horrible, grinding menace.  It was only the
Elevated on its way uptown.  Clay looked around in whimsical admiration
of the hurrying people about him.  None of them seemed aware either of
the noise or the crush of vehicles.  They went on their preoccupied way
swiftly and surely.

"I never did see such a town, and me just hittin' the fringes of it
yet," Clay moaned aloud in comic despair, unaware that even New York
has no noisier street than Sixth Avenue.

Chance swept him up Sixth to Herald Square.  He was caught in the river
of humanity that races up Broadway.  His high-heeled boots clicked on
the pavement of one of the world's great thoroughfares as far as
Forty-Second Street.  Under the shadow of the Times Building he stopped
to look about him.  Motor-cars, street-cars, and trucks rolled past in
endless confusion.  Every instant the panorama shifted, yet it was
always the same.  He wondered where all this rush of people was going.
What crazy impulses sent them surging to and fro?  And the girls--Clay
surrendered to them at discretion.  He had not supposed there were so
many pretty, well-dressed girls in the world.

"I reckon money grows on trees in New York," he told himself aloud with
a grin.

Broadway fascinated him.  He followed it uptown toward Longacre Circle.
The street was as usual in a state of chronic excavation.  His foot
slipped and he fell into a trench while trying to cross.  When he
emerged it was with a pound or two of Manhattan mud on his corduroy
suit.  He looked at himself again with a sense that his garb did not
quite measure up to New York standards.

"First off I'm goin' to get me a real city suit of clothes," he
promised himself.  "This here wrinkled outfit is some too woolly for
the big town.  It's a good suit yet--'most as good as when I bought it
at the Boston Store in Tucson three years ago.  But I reckon I'll save
it to go home in."

To a policeman directing traffic at a crossing he applied for
information.

"Can you tell me where there's a dry-goods store in this man's town?"
he asked.  "I fell into this here Broadway and got kinda messed up."

"Watchawant?"

"Suit o' clothes."

The traffic cop sized him up in one swift glance.  "Siventh Avenue," he
said, and pointed in that direction.

Clay took his advice.  He stopped in front of a store above which was
the legend "I. Bernstein, Men's Garments."  A small man with sharp
little eyes and well-defined nose was standing in the doorway.

"Might you would want a good suit of qvality clothes, my friendt," he
suggested.

"You've pegged me right," agreed the Westerner with his ready smile.
"Lead me to it."

Mr. Bernstein personally conducted his customer to the suit department.
"I wait on you myself on account you was a stranger to the city," he
explained.

The little man took a suit from a rack and held it at arm's length to
admire it.  His fingers caressed the woof of it lovingly.  He evidently
could bring himself to part with it only after a struggle.

"Worsted.  Fine goods."  He leaned toward the range-rider and whispered
a secret.  "Imported."

Clay shook his head.  "Not what I want."  His eyes ranged the racks.
"This is more my notion of the sort of thing I like."  He pointed to a
blue serge with a little stripe in the pattern.

The eyes of Mr. Bernstein marveled at the discrimination of his
customer.  "If you had taken an advice from me, it would have been to
buy that suit.  A man gets a chance at a superior garment like that,
understan' me, only once in a while occasionally."

"How much?" asked Lindsay.

The dealer was too busy to hear this crass question.  That suit, Clay
gathered, had been the pride of his heart ever since he had seen it
first.  He detached the coat lovingly from the hanger and helped his
customer into it.  Then he fell back, eyes lit with enthusiastic
amazement.  Only fate could have brought together this man and this
suit, so manifestly destined for each other since the hour when Eve
began to patch up fig leaves for Adam.

"Like a coat of paint," he murmured aloud.

The cowpuncher grinned.  He understood the business that went with
selling a suit in some stores.  But it happened that he liked this suit
himself.  "How much?" he repeated.

The owner of the store dwelt on the merits of the suit, its style, its
durability, the perfect fit.  He covered his subject with artistic
thoroughness.  Then, reluctantly, he confided in a whisper the price at
which he was going to sacrifice this suit among suits.

"To you, my friendt, I make this garment for only sixty-five dollars."
He added another secret detail.  "Below wholesale cost."

A little devil of mirth lit in Lindsay's eye.  "I'd hate to have you
rob yoreself like that.  And me a perfect stranger to you too."

"Qvality, y' understan' me.  Which a man must got to live garments like
I done to appreciate such a suit.  All wool.  Every thread of it.
Unshrinkable.  This is a qvality town.  If you want the best it costs a
little more, but you got anyhow a suit which a man might be married in
without shame, understan' me."

The Arizonan backed off in apparent alarm.  "Say, is this a weddin'
garment you're onload'n' on me?  Do I have to sashay down a church
aisle and promise I do?"

Mr. Bernstein explained that this was not obligatory.  All he meant was
that the suit was good enough to be married in, or for that matter to
be buried in.

"Or to be born anew in when Billy Sunday comes to town and I hit the
sawdust trail," suggested the purchaser.

Mr. Bernstein caressed it again.  "One swell piece of goods," he told
himself softly, almost with tears in his eyes.

"All wool, you say?" asked Clay, feeling the texture.  He had made up
his mind to buy it, though he thought the price a bit stiff.

Mr. Bernstein protested on his honor that there was not a thread of
cotton in it.  "Which you could take it from me that when I sell a suit
of clothes it is like I am dealing with my own brother," he added.
"Every garment out of this store takes my personal guarantee."

Clay tried on the trousers and looked at himself in the glass.  So far
as he could tell he looked just like any other New Yorker.

The dealer leaned forward and spoke in a whisper.  Apparently he was
ashamed of his softness of heart.  "Fifty-five dollars--to you."

"I'll take it," the Westerner said.

The clothier called his tailor from the rear of the store to make an
adjustment in the trousers.  Meanwhile he deftly removed the tags which
told him in cipher that the suit had cost him just eleven dollars and
seventy-five cents.

Half an hour later Clay sat on top of a Fifth-Avenue bus which was
jerking its way uptown.  His shoes were shined to mirror brightness.
He was garbed in a blue serge suit with a little stripe running through
the pattern.  That suit just now was the apple of his eye.  It proved
him a New Yorker and not a wild man from the Arizona desert.




CHAPTER IV

A NEW USE FOR A WATER HOSE

The motor-bus ran up Fifth Avenue, cut across to Broadway, passed
Columbus Circle, and swept into the Drive.  It was a day divinely young
and fair.  The fragrance of a lingering spring was wafted to the
nostrils.  Only the evening before the trees had been given a bath of
rain and the refreshment of it showed in every quivering leaf.  From
its little waves the Hudson reflected a million sparkles of light.
Glimpses of the Park tempted Clay.  Its winding paths!  The children
playing on the grass while their maids in neat caps and aprons gossiped
together on the benches near!  This was the most human spot the man
from Arizona had seen in the metropolis.

Somewhere in the early three-figure streets he descended from the top
of the bus and let his footsteps follow his inclinations into the Park.
A little shaver in a sailor suit ran across the path and fell sprawling
at the feet of Clay.  He picked up and began to comfort the howling
four-year-old.

"That sure was a right hard fall, sonny, but you're not goin' to make
any fuss about it.  You're Daddy's little man and--"

A sharp, high voice cut into his consolation.

"Cedric, come here!"

The little boy went, bawling lustily to win sympathy.  The nursemaid
shook him impatiently.  "How many times have I told you to look where
you're going?  Serves you just right.  Now be still."

There was a deep instinct in Clay to stand by those in trouble when
they were weak.  A child or a woman in distress always had a claim on
him.

"I reckon the li'l' fellow was in a hurry, Miss," he said, smiling.  "I
'most always was at his age.  But he ain't hurt much."

The maid looked Clay up and down scornfully before she turned her back
on him and began to talk with another nurse.

Beneath the tan of the range-rider's cheeks the color flamed.  This
young woman had not mistaken the friendliness of the West for the
impudence of a street masher.  The impulse of snobbery had expressed
itself in her action.

The cowpuncher followed a path that took him back to the street.  He
grinned, but there was no smile in his heart.  He was ashamed of this
young woman who could meet good-will with scorn, and he wanted to get
away from her without any unnecessary delay.  What were the folks like
in this part of the country that you couldn't speak to them without
getting insulted?

He struck across the Drive into a side street.  An apartment house
occupied the corner, but from the other side a row of handsome private
dwellings faced him.

The janitor of the apartment house was watering the parking beyond the
sidewalk.  The edge of the stream from the nozzle of the hose sprayed
the path in front of Clay.  He hesitated for a moment to give the man
time to turn aside the hose.

But the janitor on this particular morning had been fed up with
trouble.  One of the tenants had complained of him to the agent of the
place.  Another had moved away without tipping him for an hour's help
in packing he had given her.  He was sulkily of the opinion that the
whole world was in a conspiracy to annoy him.  Just now the approaching
rube typified the world.

A little flirt of the hose deluged Clay's newly shined boots and the
lower six inches of his trousers.

"Look out what you're doing!" protested the man from Arizona.

"I tank you better look where you're going," retorted the one from
Sweden.  He was a heavy-set, muscular man with a sullen, obstinate face.

"My shoes and trousers are sopping wet."

"Yust you bate it oop street.  I ant look for no trouble with no rubes."

"I believe you did it on purpose."

"Tank so?  Val, yust one teng I lak to tell you.  I got no time for
damn fule talk."

The Westerner started on his way.  There was no use having a row with a
sulky janitor.

But the Swede misunderstood his purpose.  At Clay's first step forward
he jerked round the nozzle and let the range-rider have it with full
force.

Clay was swept back to the wall by the heavy pressure of water that
played over him.  The stream moved swiftly up and down him from head to
foot till it had drenched every inch of the perfect fifty-five-dollar
suit.  He drowned fathoms deep in a water spout.  He was swept over
Niagara Falls.  He came to life again to find himself the choking
center of a world flood.  He sputtered furiously while his arms flailed
like windmills to keep back the river of water that engulfed him.

The thought that brought him back to action was one that had to do with
the blue serge.  The best fifty-five-dollar suit in New York was ruined
in this submarine disaster.

He gave a strangled whoop and charged straight at the man behind the
hose.  The two clinched.  While they struggled, the writhing hose
slapped back and forth between them like an agitated snake.  Clay had
one advantage.  He was wet through anyhow.  It did not matter how much
of the deluge struck him.  The janitor fought to keep dry and he had
not a chance on earth to succeed.

For one hundred and seventy-five pounds of Arizona bone and muscle,
toughened by years of hard work in sun and wind, had clamped itself
upon him.  The nozzle twisted toward the janitor.  He ducked, went
down, and was instantly submerged.  When he tried to rise, the stream
beat him back.  He struggled halfway up, slipped, got again to his
feet, and came down sitting with a hard bump when his legs skated from
under him.

A smothered "Vat t'ell!" rose out of the waters.  It was both a yelp of
rage and a wail of puzzled chagrin.  The janitor could not understand
what was happening to him.  He did not know that he was being treated
to a new form of the water cure.

Before his dull brain had functioned to action an iron grip had him by
the back of the neck.  He was jerked to his feet and propelled forward
to the curb.  Every inch of the way the heavy stream from the nozzle
broke on his face and neck.  It paralyzed his resistance, jarred him so
that he could not gather himself to fight.  He was still sputtering "By
damn," when Clay bumped him up against a hitching-post, garroted him,
and swung the hose around the post in such a way as to encircle the
feet of the man.

The cowpuncher drew the hose tight, slipped the nozzle through the iron
ring, and caught the flapping arms of the man to his body.  With the
deft skill of a trained roper Clay swung the rubber pipe round the body
of the man again and again, drawing it close to the post and knotting
it securely behind.  The Swede struggled, but his furious rage availed
him nothing.  He was in the hands of the champion roper of Graham
County, a man who had hogtied a wild hill steer in thirty-three seconds
by the watch.

It took longer than this to rope up the husky janitor with a squirming
hose, but when Clay stepped back to inspect his job he knew he was
looking at one that had been done thoroughly.

"I keel you, by damn, ef you don't turn me loose!" roared the big man
in a rage.

The range-rider grinned gayly at him.  He was having the time of his
young life.  He did not even regret his fifty-five-dollar suit.
Already he could see that Arizona had nothing on New York when it came
to getting action for your money.

"Life's just loaded to the hocks with disappointment, Olie," he
explained, and his voice was full of genial sympathy.  "I'll bet a
dollar Mex you'd sure like to beat me on the haid with a two by four.
But I don't reckon you'll ever get that fond wish gratified.  We're not
liable to meet up with each other again _pronto_.  To-day we're here
and to-morrow we're at Yuma, Arizona, say, for life is short and darned
fleeting as the poet fellow says."

He waved a hand jauntily and turned to go.  But he changed his mind.
His eye had fallen on a young woman standing at a French window of the
house opposite.  She was beckoning to him imperiously.

The young woman disappeared as he crossed the street, but in a few
moments the door opened and she stood there waiting for him.  Clay
stared.  He had never before seen a girl dressed like this.  She was in
riding-boots, breeches, and coat.  Her eyes dilated while she looked at
him.

"Wyoming?" she asked at last in a low voice.

"Arizona," he answered.

"All one.  Knew it the moment I saw you tie him.  Come in."  She stood
aside to let him pass.

That hall, with its tapestried walls, its polished floors, and Oriental
rugs, was reminiscent of "the movies" to Clay.  Nowhere else had he
seen a home so stamped with the mark of ample means.

"Come in," she ordered again, a little sharply.

He came in and she closed the door.

"I'm sopping wet.  I'll drip all over the floor."

"What are you going to do?  You'll be arrested, you know."  She stood
straight and slim as a boy, and the frank directness of her gaze had a
boy's sexless unconsciousness.

"Thought I'd give myself up to the marshal."

She laughed outright at this.  "Not in this town.  A stranger like you
would have no chance.  Listen."  There came to them from outside the
tap-tap-tap-tap of a policeman's night stick rattling on the curbstone.
"He's calling help."

"I can explain how it happened."

"No.  He wouldn't understand.  They'd find you guilty."

He moved from the rug where he was standing to let the water drip on
the hardwood floor.

"Sho!  Folks are mostly reasonable.  I'd tell the judge how it come
about."

"No."

"Well, I can't stay here."

"Yes--till they've gone."

Her imperative warmed his heart, but he tried to explain gently why he
could not.  "I can't drag you into this.  Like as not the Swede saw me
come in."

To a manservant standing in the background the young woman spoke.
"Jenkins, have Nora clean up the floor and the steps outside.  And
remember--I don't want the police to know this gentleman is here."

"Yes, Miss."

"Come!" said the girl to her guest.  She led Clay to the massive
stairway, but stopped at the first tread to call back an order over her
shoulder.  "Refer the officers to me if they insist on coming into the
house."

"I'll see to it, Miss."

Clay followed his hostess to the stairs and went up them with her, but
he went protesting, though with a chuckle of mirth.  "He sure ruined my
clothes a heap.  I ain't fit to be seen."

The suit he had been so proud of was shrinking so that his arms and
legs stuck out like signposts.  The color had run and left the goods a
peculiar bilious-looking overall blue.

She lit a gas-log in a small library den.

"Just a minute, please."

She stepped briskly from the room.  In her manner was a crisp decision,
in her poise a trim gallantry that won him instantly.

"I'll bet she'd do to ride with," he told himself in a current Western
idiom.

When she came back it was to take him to a dressing-room.  A complete
change of clothing was laid out for him on a couch.  A man whom Clay
recognized as a valet--he had seen his duplicate in the moving-picture
theaters at Tucson--was there to supply his needs and attend to the
temperature of his bath.

"Stevens will look after you," she said; "when you are ready come back
to Dad's den."

His eyes followed to the door her resilient step.  Once, when he was a
boy, he had seen Ada Rehan play in "As You Like It."  Her acting had
entranced him.  This girl carried him back to that hour.  She was
boyish as Rosalind, woman in every motion of her slim and lissom body.

At the head of the stairway she paused.  Jenkins was moving hurriedly
up to meet her.

"It's a policeman, Miss.  'E's come about the--the person that came in,
and 'e's talkin' to Nora on the steps.  She's a-jollyin' 'im, as you
might say, Miss."

His young mistress nodded.  She swept the hall with the eye of a
general.  Swiftly she changed the position of a Turkish rug so as to
hide a spot on the polished floor that had been recently scrubbed and
was still moist.  It seemed best to discover Nora's plan of campaign
before taking over the charge of affairs.

"Many's the time I've met yuh goin' down the Avenoo with your heels
clickin' an' your head high," came the rich brogue of Nora O'Flannigan.
"An' I've said to myself, sez I, who's the handsome officer that sets
off his uniform so gr-rand?"

The girl leaned on her mop and gave the policeman a slant glance out of
eyes of Irish brown.  It was not Nora's fault that she was as pretty a
colleen as ever came out of Limerick, but there was no law that made
her send such a roguish come-hither look at the man in blue.

He beamed.  He was as pleased as a cat that has been stroked and fed
cream.

"Well, an' yuh 're not the only wan that notices, Miss Nora.  I'm a
noticin' lad mesilf.  An' it's the truth that I'd be glad enough to
meet yuh some fine evenin' when I'm off duty.  But about this
strong-arm guy that tied up the janitor.  The Swede says he went into
wan av these houses.  Now here's the wet color from his suit that ran
over the steps.  He musta come up here."

"Before he ran down the street.  Sure, an' that's just what he done.
Yuh're a janious, officer."

"Maybe he got into the house somehow."

"Now, how could he do that?  With all av us upstairs and down."

"I don't say he did.  But if I was to just take a look inside so as to
report that I'd searched--"

"Och!  Yuh 'd be wastin' your time, officer."

"Sure, I know that.  But for the report--"

The young woman in the riding costume chose this moment to open the
door and saunter out.

"Does the officer want something, Nora?" she asked innocently,
switching the end of a crop against her riding-boots.

"Yes, Miss.  There's been a ruffian batin' up Swedes an' tyin' 'em to
posts.  This officer thinks he came here," explained Nora.

"Does he want to look in the house?"

"Yes, Miss."

"Then let him come in."  The young mistress took the responsibility on
her own shoulders.  She led the policeman into the hall.  "I don't
really see how he could have got in here without some of us seeing him,
officer."

"No, ma'am.  I don't see how he could."  The patrolman scratched his
red head.  "The janitor's a Swede, anyhow.  He jist guessed it.  I came
to make sure av it.  I'll be sorry for troubling yuh, Miss."

The smile she gave him was warm and friendly.  "Oh, that's all right.
If you'd care to look around. . . .  But there really is no use."

"No."  The forehead under the red thatch wrinkled in thought.  "He said
he seen him come in here or next door, an' he came up the steps.  But
nobody could have got in without some of youse seein' him.  That's a
lead pipe."  The officer pushed any doubt that remained from his mind.
"Only a muddle-headed Swede."

"It was good of you to come.  It makes us feel safer to have officers
like you.  If you'll give me your name I'll call up the precinct
captain and tell him so."

The man in uniform turned beet red.  "McGuffey, Miss, and it's a
pleasure to serve the likes of yuh," he said, pleased and embarrassed.

He bowed himself out backward, skidded on the polished floor, and saved
himself from going down by a frantic fling of arms and some fancy
skating.  When he recovered, his foot caught in a rug and wadded it to
a knot.

Nora giggled behind her fingers, but her mistress did not even smile at
the awkwardness of Patrolman McGuffey.

"Thank you _so_ much," she said sweetly.




CHAPTER V

A CONTRIBUTION TO THE SALVATION ARMY

While Beatrice Whitford waited in the little library for the Arizonan
to join her, she sat in a deep chair, chin in hand, eyes fixed on the
jetting flames of the gas-log.  A little flush had crept into the oval
face.  In her blood there tingled the stimulus of excitement.  For into
her life an adventure had come from faraway Cattleland.

A crisp, strong footstep sounded in the hall.  Her fingers flew to pat
into place the soft golden hair coiled low at the nape of the neck.  At
times she had a boylike unconcern of sex; again, a spirit wholly
feminine.

The clothes of her father fitted Lindsay loosely, for Colin Whitford
had begun to take on the flesh of middle age and Clay was lean and
clean of build as an elk.  But the Westerner was one of those to whom
clothes are unimportant.  The splendid youth of him would have shone
through the rags of a beggar.

"My name is Clay Lindsay," he told her by way of introduction.

"Mine is Beatrice Whitford," she answered.

They shook hands.

"I'm to wait here till my clothes dry, yore man says."

"Then you'd better sit down," she suggested.

Within five minutes she knew that he had been in New York less than
three hours.  His impressions of the city amused and entertained her.
He was quite simple.  She could look into his mind as though it were a
deep, clear well.  There was something inextinguishably boyish and
buoyant about him.  But in his bronzed face and steady, humorous eyes
were strength and shrewdness.  He was the last man in the world a
bunco-steerer could play for a sucker.  She felt that.  Yet he made no
pretenses of a worldly wisdom he did not have.

A voice reached them from the top of the stairs.

"Do you know where Miss Whitford is, Jenkins?"

"Hin the Red Room, sir."  The answer was in the even, colorless voice
of a servant.

The girl rose at once.  "If you'll excuse me," she said, and stepped
out of the room.

"Hello, Bee.  What do you think?  I never saw such idiots as the police
of this town are.  They're watching this house for a desperado who
assaulted some one outside.  I met a sergeant on our steps.  Says he
doesn't think the man's here, but there's just a chance he slipped into
the basement.  It's absurd."

"Of course it is."  There was a ripple of mirth in the girl's voice.
"He didn't come in by the basement at all, but walked in at the front
door."

"Who are you talking about?"

"The desperado, Dad."

"The front door!" exploded her father.  "What do you mean?  Who let him
in?"

"I did.  He came as my guest, at my invitation."

"What?"

"Don't shout, Dad," she advised.  "I thought I had brought you up
better."

"But--but--but--what do you mean?" he sputtered.  "Is this ruffian in
the house now?"

"Oh, yes.  He's in the Red Room here--and unless he's very deaf he
hears everything we are saying," the girl answered calmly, much amused
at the amazement of her father.  "Won't you come in and see him?  He
doesn't seem very desperate."

Clay rose, pinpoints of laughter dancing in his eyes.  He liked the gay
audacity of this young woman, just as he liked the unconventional pluck
with which she had intruded herself into his affairs as a rescuer and
the businesslike efficiency that had got him out of his wet rags into
comfortable clothes.

A moment later he was offering a brown hand to Colin Whitford, who took
it reluctantly, with the same wariness a boxer does that of his
opponent in the ring.  His eyes said plainly, "What the deuce are you
doing here, sitting in my favorite chair, smoking one of my imported
cigars, wearing my clothes, and talking to my daughter?"

"Glad to meet you, Mr. Whitford.  Yore daughter has just saved my life
from the police," the Westerner said, and his friendly smile was very
much in evidence.

"You make yourself at home," answered the owner of a large per cent of
the stock of the famous Bird Cage mine.

"My guests do, Dad.  It's the proof that I'm a perfect hostess,"
retorted Beatrice, her dainty, provocative face flashing to mirth.

"Hmp!" grunted her father dryly.  "I'd like to know, young man, why the
police are shadowing this house?"

"I expect they're lookin' for me."

"I expect they are, and I'm not sure I won't help them find you.
You'll have to show cause if I don't."

"His bark is much worse than his bite," the girl explained to Clay,
just as though her father were not present.

"Hmp!" exploded the mining magnate a second time.  "Get busy, young
fellow."

Clay told the story of the fifty-five-dollar suit that I. Bernstein had
wished on him with near-tears of regret at parting from it.  The
cowpuncher dramatized the situation with some native talent for
mimicry.  His arms gestured like the lifted wings of a startled
cockerel.  "A man gets a chance at a garment like that only once in a
while occasionally.  Which you can take it from me that when I.
Bernstein sells a suit of clothes it is shust like he is dealing with
his own brother.  Qvality, my friendts, qvality!  Why, I got anyhow a
suit which I might be married in without shame, un'erstan' me."

Colin Whitford was of the West himself.  He had lived its
rough-and-tumble life for years before he made his lucky strike in the
Bird Cage.  He had moved from Colorado to New York only ten years
before.  The sound of Clay's drawling voice was like a message from
home.  He began to grin in spite of himself.  This man was too good to
be true.  It wasn't possible that anybody could come to the big town
and import into it so naively such a genuine touch of the outdoor West.
It was not possible, but it had happened just the same.  Of course
Manhattan would soon take the color out of him.  It always did out of
everybody.  The city was so big, so overpowering, so individual itself,
that it tolerated no individuality in its citizens.  Whitford had long
since become a conformist.  He was willing to bet a hat that this big
brown Arizonan would eat out of the city's hand within a week.  In the
meantime he wanted to be among those present while the process of
taming the wild man took place.  Long before the cowpuncher had
finished his story of hog-tying the Swede to a hitching-post with his
own hose, the mining man was sealed of the large tribe of Clay
Lindsay's admirers.  He was ready to hide him from all the police in
New York.

Whitford told Stevens to bring in the fifty-five-dollar suit so that he
could gloat over it.  He let out a whoop of delight at sight of its
still sodden appearance.  He examined its sickly hue with chuckles of
mirth.

"Guaranteed not to fade or shrink," murmured Clay sadly.

He managed to get the coat on with difficulty.  The sleeves reached
just below his elbows.

"You look like a lifer from Sing Sing," pronounced Whitford joyously.
"Get a hair-cut, and you won't have a chance on earth to fool the
police."

"The color did run and fade some," admitted Clay.

"Worth every cent of nine ninety-eight at a bargain sale before the
Swede got busy with it--and he let you have it at a sacrifice for
fifty-five dollars!"  The millionaire wept happy tears as a climax of
his rapture.  He swallowed his cigar smoke and had to be pounded on the
back by his daughter.

"Would you mind getting yore man to wrop it up for me?  I'm goin' to
have a few pleasant words with I. Bernstein," said Clay with mock
mournfulness.

"When?" asked Whitford promptly.

"Never you mind when, sah.  I'm not issuin' any tickets of admission.
It's goin' to be a strictly private entertainment."

"Are you going to take a water hose along?"

"That's right," reproached Clay.  "Make fun of me because I'm a
stranger and come right from the alfalfa country."  He turned to
Beatrice cheerfully.  "O' course he bit me good and proper.  I'm green.
But I'll bet he loses that smile awful quick when he sees me again."

"You're not going to--"

"Me, I'm the gentlest citizen in Arizona.  Never in trouble.  Always
peaceable and quiet.  Don't you get to thinkin' me a bad-man, for I
ain't."

Jenkins came to the door and announced "Mr. Bromfield."

Almost on his heels a young man in immaculate riding-clothes sauntered
into the room.  He had the assured ease of one who has the run of the
house.  Miss Whitford introduced the two young men and Bromfield looked
the Westerner over with a suave insolence in his dark, handsome eyes.

Clay recognized him immediately.  He had shaken hands once before with
this well-satisfied young man, and on that occasion a fifty-dollar bill
had passed from one to the other.  The New Yorker evidently did not
know him.

It became apparent at once that Bromfield had called to go riding in
the Park with Miss Whitford.  That young woman came up to say good-bye
to her new acquaintance.

"Will you be here when I get back?"

"Not if our friends outside give me a chance for a getaway," he told
her.

Her bright, unflinching eyes looked into his.  "You'll come again and
let us know how you escaped," she invited.

"I'll ce'tainly do that, Miss Whitford."

"Then we'll look for you Thursday afternoon, say."

"I'll be here."

"If the police don't get you."

"They won't," he promised serenely.

"When you're quite ready, Bee," suggested Bromfield in a bored voice.

She nodded casually and walked out of the room like a young Diana,
straight as a dart in her trim slenderness.

Clay slipped out of the house by the back way, cut across to the
subway, and took a downtown train.  He got out at Forty-Second Street
and made his way back to the clothing establishment of I. Bernstein.

That gentleman was in his office in the rear of the store.  Lindsay
walked back to it, opened and closed the door, locked it, and put the
key in his pocket.

The owner of the place rose in alarm from the stool where he was
sitting.  "What right do you got to lock that door?" he demanded.

"I don't want to be interrupted while I'm sellin' you this suit, Mr.
Bernstein," the cowpuncher told him easily, and he proceeded to unwrap
the damp package under his arm.  "It's a pippin of a suit.  The color
won't run or fade, and it's absolutely unshrinkable.  You won't often
get a chance at a suit like this.  Notice the style, the cut, the
quality of the goods.  And it's only goin' to cost you fifty-five
dollars."

The clothing man looked at the misshapen thing with eyes that bulged.
"Where is it you been with this suit--in the East River, my friendt?"
he wanted to know.

"I took a walk along Riverside Drive.  That's all.  I got a strong
guarantee with this suit when I bought it.  I'm goin' to give you the
same one I got.  It won't shrink or fade and it will wear to beat a
'Pache pup.  Oh, you won't make any mistake buyin' this suit."

"You take from me an advice.  Unlock that door and get out."

"I can give you better advice than that.  Buy this suit right away.
You'll find it's a bargain."

The steady eyes of the Westerner daunted the merchant, but he did not
intend to give up fifty-five dollars without a murmur.

"If you don't right avay soon open that door I call the police.  Then
you go to jail, ain't it?"

"How's yore heart, Mr. Bernstein?" asked Clay tenderly.

"What?"

"I'm askin' about yore heart.  I don't know as you're hardly strong
enough to stand what I'll do to you if you let a single yelp out of
you.  I kinda hate to hurry yore funeral," he added regretfully, still
in his accustomed soft drawl.

The man beside the stool attempted one shout.  Instantly Clay filled
his mouth with a bunch of suit samples that had been lying on the desk.
With one arm he held the struggling little man close to his body.  With
his foot and the other hand he broke in two a yardstick and fitted the
two parts together.

"Here's the programme," he said by way of explanation.  "I'm goin' to
put you over my knee and paddle you real thorough.  When you make up
yore mind that you want to buy that suit for fifty-five dollars, it
will be up to you to let me know.  Take yore own time about it.  Don't
let me hurry you."

Before the programme had more than well started, the victim of it
signified his willingness to treat with the foe.  To part with
fifty-five dollars was a painful business, but not to part with it was
going to hurt a good deal more.  He chose the lesser of two evils.

While he was counting out the bills Clay bragged up the suit.  He
praised its merits fluently and cheerfully.  When he left he locked the
door of the office behind him and handed the key to one of the clerks.

"I've got a kinda notion Mr. Bernstein wants to get out of his office.
He's actin' sort o' restless, seems like."

Restless was hardly the word.  He was banging on the door like a wild
man.  "Police!  Murder!  Help!" he shouted in a high falsetto.

Clay wasted no time.  He and the fifty-five dollars vanished into the
street.  In his haste he bumped into a Salvation Army lassie with a
tambourine.

She held it out to him for a donation, and was given the shock of her
life.  For into that tambourine the big brown man crammed a fistful of
bills.  He waited for no thanks, but cut round the corner toward
Broadway in a hurry.

When the girl reached headquarters and counted the contribution she
found it amounted to just fifty-five dollars.




CHAPTER VI

CLAY TAKES A TRANSFER

From the top of a bus Clay Lindsay looked down a canon which angled
across the great city like a river of light.

He had come from one land of gorges to another.  In the walls of this
one, thousands and tens of thousands of cliff-dwellers hid themselves
during the day like animals of some queer breed and poured out into the
canon at sunset.

Now the river in its bed was alive with a throbbing tide.
Cross-currents of humanity flowed into it from side streets and ebbed
out of it into others.  Streams of people were swept down, caught here
and there in swirling eddies.  Taxis, private motors, and trolley-cars
struggled in the raceway.

Electric sky-signs flashed and changed.  From the foyer of theaters and
moving-picture palaces thousands of bulbs flung their glow to the
gorge.  A mist of light hung like an atmosphere above the Great White
Way.

All this Clay saw in a flash while his bus crossed Broadway on its way
to the Avenue.  His eyes had become accustomed to this brilliance in
the weeks that had passed since his descent upon New York, but
familiarity had not yet dulled the wonder of it.

The Avenue offered a more subdued picture.  This facet showed a glimpse
of the city lovelier and more leisurely, though not one so feverishly
gay.  It carried his mind to Beatrice Whitford.  Some touch of the
quality of Fifth Avenue was in her soul.  It expressed itself in the
simple elegance of her dress and in the fineness of the graceful, vital
body.  Her gayety was not at all the high spirits of Broadway, but
there were times when her kinship to Fifth Avenue knifed the foolish
hopes in his heart.

He had become a fast friend of Miss Whitford.  Together they had
tramped through Central Park and motored up the Hudson in one of her
father's cars.  They had explored each other's minds along with the
country and each had known the surprise and delight of discoveries, of
finding in the other a quality of freshness and candor.

Clay sensed in this young woman a spirit that had a way of sweeping up
on gay young wings to sudden joys stirred by the simplest causes.  Her
outlook on life was as gallant as that of a fine-tempered schoolboy.  A
gallop in the Park could whip the flag of happiness into her cheeks.  A
wild flower nestling in a bed of moss could bring the quick light to
her eyes.  Her responsiveness was a continual delight to him just as
her culture was his despair.  Of books, pictures, and music she knew
much more than he.

The bus jerked down Fifth Avenue like a boat in heavy seas, pausing
here and there at the curb to take on a passenger.  While it was
getting under way after one such stop, another downtown bus rolled past.

Clay came to a sudden alert attention.  His eyes focused on a girl
sitting on a back seat.  In the pretty, childish face he read a wistful
helplessness, a pathetic hint of misery that called for sympathy.

Arizona takes short cuts to its ends.  Clay rose instantly, put his
foot on the railing, and leaped across to the top of the bus rolling
parallel with the one he was on.  In another second he had dropped into
the seat beside the girl.

"Glad to meet you again, Miss Kitty," he said cheerfully.  "How's the
big town been using you?"

The girl looked at him with a little gasp of surprise.  "Mr. Lindsay!"
Sudden tears filmed her eyes.  She forgot that she had left him with
the promise never again to speak to him.  She was in a far country, and
he was a friend from home.

The conductor bustled down the aisle.  "Say, where do you get this
movie-stunt stuff?  You can't jump from the top of one bus to another."

Clay smiled genially.  "I can't, but I did."

"That ain't the system of transfers we use in this town.  You might 'a'
got killed."

"Oh, well, let's not worry about that now."

"I'd ought to have you pulled.  Three years I've been on this run and--"

"Nice run.  Wages good?"

"Don't get gay, young fellow.  I can tell you one thing.  You've got to
pay another fare."

Clay paid it.

The conductor retired to his post.  He grinned in spite of his official
dignity.  There was something about this young fellow he liked.  After
he had been in New York awhile he would be properly tamed.

"What about that movie job?  Is it pannin' out pay gold?" Lindsay asked
Kitty.

Bit by bit her story came out.  It was a common enough one.  She had
been flim-flammed out of her money by the alleged school of
moving-picture actors, and the sharpers had decamped with it.

As she looked at her recovered friend, Kitty gradually realized an
outward transformation in his appearance.  He was dressed quietly in
clothes of perfect fit made for him by Colin Whitford's tailor.  From
shoes to hat he was a New Yorker got up regardless of expense.  But the
warm smile, the strong, tanned face, the grip of the big brown hand
that buried her small one--all these were from her own West.  So too
had been the nonchalance with which he had stepped from the rail of one
moving bus to that of the other, just as though this were his usual
method of transfer.

"I've got a job at last," she explained to him.  "I couldn't hardly
find one.  They say I'm not trained to do anything."

"What sort of a job have you?"

"I'm working downtown in Greenwich Village, selling cigarettes.  I'm
Sylvia the Cigarette Girl.  At least that's what they call me.  I carry
a tray of them evenings into the cafes."

"Greenwich Village?" asked Clay.

Kitty was not able to explain that the Village is a state of mind which
is the habitat of long-haired men and short-haired women, the brains of
whom functioned in a way totally alien to all her methods of thought.
The meaning of Bohemianism was quite lost on her simple soul.

"They're jist queer," she told him.  "The women bob their hair and wear
smocks and sandals.  The men are long-haired softies.  They all talk
kinda foolish."  Kitty despaired of making the situation clear to him
and resorted to the personal.  "Can't you come down to-night to The
Purple Pup or The Sea Siren and see for yourself?" she proposed, and
gave him directions for finding the classic resorts.

"I reckon they must be medicine fakirs," decided Clay.  "I've met up
with these long-haired guys before.  Sure I'll come."

"To-night?"

"You betcha, little pardner, I'll be there."

"I'm dressed silly--in bare feet and sandals and what they call a
smock.  You won't mind that, will you?"

"You'll look good to me, no matter what you wear, little Miss
Colorado," he told her with his warm, big brother's smile.

"You're good," the girl said simply.  "I knew that on the train even
when I--when I was mean to you."  There came into her voice a small
tremor of apprehension.  "I'm afraid of this town.  It's so--so kinda
cruel.  I've got no friends here."

He offered instant reassurance with a strong grip of his brown hand.
"You've got one, little pardner.  I'll promise that one big husky will
be on the job when you need him.  Don't you worry."

She gave him her shy eyes gratefully.  There was a mist of tears in
them.

"You're good," she said again naively.




CHAPTER VII

ARIZONA FOLLOWS ITS LAWLESS IMPULSE

When Clay two hours later took the Sixth Avenue L for a plunge into
Bohemianism he knew no more about Greenwich Village than a
six-months-old pup does about Virgil.  But it was characteristic of him
that on his way downtown he proceeded to find out from his chance
seat-mate something about this unknown terrain he was about to visit.

The man he sat beside was a patrolman off duty, and to this engaging
Westerner he was quite ready to impart any information he might have.

"Fakirs," he pronounced promptly.  "They're a bunch of long-haired
nuts, most of 'em--queer guys who can't sell their junk and kid
themselves into thinking they're artists and writers.  They pull a lot
of stuff about socialism and anarchy and high art."

"Just harmless cranks--gone loco, mebbe?"

"Some of 'em.  Others are there for the mazuma.  Uptown the Village is
supposed to be one hell of a place.  The people who own the dumps down
there have worked up that rep to draw the night trade.  They make a
living outa the wickedness of Greenwich.  Nothin' to it--all fake
stuff.  They advertise September Morn balls with posters something
fierce, and when you go they are just like any other dances.  Bum
drawings of naked women on the walls done by artist yaps, decorations
of purple cows, pirates' dens--that's the kind of dope they have."

The Sea Siren was already beginning to fill up when Clay descended
three steps to a cellar and was warily admitted.  A near-Hawaiian
orchestra was strumming out a dance tune and a few couples were on the
floor.  Waitresses, got up as Loreleis, were moving about among the
guests delivering orders for refreshments.

The Westerner sat down in a corner and looked about him.  The walls
were decorated with crude purple crayons of underfed sirens.  A statue
of a nude woman distressed Clay.  He did not mind the missing clothes,
but she was so dreadfully emaciated that he thought it wise for her to
cling to the yellow-and-red draped barber pole that rose from the
pedestal.  On the base was the legend, "The Weeping Lady."  After he
had tasted the Sea Siren fare the man from Arizona suspected that both
her grief and her anaemia arose from the fact that she had been fed on
it.

A man in artist's velveteens, minus a haircut, with a large, fat, pasty
face, sat at an adjoining table and discoursed to his friends.
Presently, during an intermission of the music, he rose and took the
rest of those present into his confidence.  With rapt eyes on the
faraway space of distant planets he chanted his apologia.

"I believe in the Cosmic Urge, in the Sublimity of my Ego.  I follow my
Lawless Impulse where the Gods of Desire shall drive.  I am what I Am,
Son of the Stars, Lord of my Life.  With Unleashed Love I answer the
psychic beat of Pulse to Pulse, Laughter, Tears and Woe, the keen edge
of Passion, the Languor of Satiety: all these are life.  Open-armed, I
embrace them.  I drink and assuage my thirst.  For Youth is here
to-day.  To-morrow, alas, it has gone.  Now I am.  In the Then I shall
not be.  Kismet!"

The poet's fine frenzy faded.  He sank back into his chair, apparently
worn out by his vast mental effort.

Clay gave a deep chuckle of delight.  This was good.

"Heap much oration," he murmured.  "Go to it, old-timer.  Steam off
again.  Git down in yore collar to it."

To miss none of the fun he hitched a little closer on the bench.  But
the man without the haircut was through effervescing.  He began to talk
in a lower voice on world politics to admiring friends who were basking
in his reflected glory.

"Bourgeois to the core," he announced with finality, speaking of the
United States, in answer to a question.  "What are the idols we
worship?  Law, the chain which binds an enslaved people; thrift, born
of childish fear; love of country, which is another name for crass
provincialism.  I--I am a Cosmopolite, not an American.  Bohemia is my
land, and all free souls are my brothers.  Why should I get wrinkles
because Germany sunk the Lusitania a month or two ago?  That's her
business, not mine."

Clay leaned forward on a search for information.  "Excuse me for
buttin' in, and me a stranger.  But isn't it yore business when she
murders American women and children?"

The pasty-faced man looked at him with thinly disguised contempt.  "You
wouldn't understand if I explained."

"Mebbeso I wouldn't, but you take a whirl at it and I'll listen high,
wide, and handsome."

The man in velveteens unexpectedly found himself doing as he was told.
There was a suggestion of compulsion about the gray-blue eyes fastened
on his, something in the clamp of the strong jaw that brought him up
for a moment against stark reality.

"The intelligentsia of a country knows that there can be no freedom
until there is no law.  Every man's duty is to disregard duty.  So, by
faring far on the wings of desire, he helps break down the slavery that
binds us.  Obey the Cosmic Urge of your soul regardless of where it
leads you, young man."

It was unfortunate for the poet of Bohemia that at this precise moment
Kitty Mason, dressed in sandals and a lilac-patterned smock, stood
before him with a tray of cigarettes asking for his trade.  The naive
appeal in her soft eyes had its weight with the poet.  What is the use
of living in Bohemia if one cannot be free to follow impulse?  He
slipped an arm about the girl and kissed the crimson lips upturned to
him.

Kitty started back with a little cry of distress.

The freedom taken by the near-poet was instantly avenged.

A Cosmic Urge beat in the veins of the savage from Arizona.  He took
the poet's advice and followed his Lawless Impulse where it led.
Across the table a long arm reached.  Sinewy fingers closed upon the
flowing neckwear of the fat-faced orator and dragged him forward,
leaving overturned glasses in the wake of his course.

The man in velveteens met the eyes of the energetic manhandler and
quailed.  This brown-faced barbarian looked very much like business.

"Don't you touch me!  Don't you dare touch me!" the apostle of anarchy
shrilled as the table crashed down.  "I'll turn you over to the police!"

Clay jerked him to his feet.  Hard knuckles pressed cruelly into the
soft throat of the Villager.  "Git down on yore ham bones and beg the
lady's pardon, Son of the Stars, or I'll sure make you see a whole
colony of yore ancestors.  Tell her you're a yellow pup, but you don't
reckon you'll ever pull a bone like that again.  Speak right out in
meetin' _pronto_ before you bump into the tears and woe you was makin'
heap much oration about."

The proprietor of the cafe seized the cowpuncher by the arm hurriedly.
"Here, stop that!  You get out of the place!  I'll not stand for any
rough-house."  And he murmured something about getting in bad with the
police.  Clay tried to explain.  "Me, I'm not rough-housing.  I'm
tellin' this here Lord of Life to apologize to the little lady and let
her know that he's sorry he was fresh.  If he don't I'll most ce'tainly
muss up the Sublimity of his Ego."

The companions of the poet rushed forward to protest at the manhandling
of their leader.  Those in the rear jammed the front ones close to Clay
and his captive.  The cowpuncher gently but strongly pushed them back.

"Don't get on the prod," he advised in his genial drawl.  "The poet
he's got an important engagement right now."

A kind of scuffle developed.  The proprietor increased it by his
hysterical efforts to prevent any trouble.  Men joined themselves to
the noisy group of which Clay was the smiling center.  The excitement
increased.  Distant corners of the room became the refuge of the women.
Some one struck at the cowpuncher over the heads of those about him.
The mass of closely packed human beings showed a convulsive activity.
It became suddenly the most popular indoor sport at the Sea Siren to
slay this barbarian from the desert who had interfered with the
amusements of Bohemia.

But Clay took a lot of slaying.  In the rough-and-tumble life of the
outdoor West he had learned how to look out for his own hand.  The
copper hair of his strong lean head rose above the tangle of the melee
like the bromidic Helmet of Navarre.  A reckless light of mirth bubbled
in his dare-devil eyes.  The very number of the opponents who
interfered with each other trying to get at him was a guarantee of
safety.  The blows showered at him lacked steam and were badly timed as
to distance.

The pack rolled across the room, tipped over a table, and deluged an
artist and his affinity with hot chocolate before they could escape
from the avalanche.  Chairs went over like ninepins.  Stands collapsed.
Men grunted and shouted advice.  Girls screamed.  The Sea Siren was
being wrecked by a cyclone from the bad lands.

Against the wall the struggling mob brought up with a crash.  The
velveteen poet caught at "The Weeping Lady" to save himself from going
down.  She descended from her pedestal into his arms and henceforth
waltzed with him as a part of the subsequent proceedings.

The writhing mass caromed from the wall and revolved toward the
musicians.  A colored gentleman jumped up in alarm and brandished his
instrument as a weapon.

"Keep away from this heah niggah!" he warned, and simultaneously he
aimed the drum of the mandolin at the red head which was the core of
the tangle.  His aim was deflected and the wood crashed down upon the
crown of "The Weeping Lady."  For the rest of the two-step it hung like
a large ruff around her neck.

Arms threshed wildly to and fro.  The focal point of their destination
was the figure at the center of the disturbance.  Most of the blows
found other marks.  Four or five men could have demolished Clay.
Fifteen or twenty found it a tough job because they interfered with
each other at every turn.  They were packed too close for hard hitting.
Clay was not fighting but wrestling.  He used his arms to push with
rather than to strike blows that counted.

The Arizonan could not afterward remember at exactly what stage of the
proceedings the face of Jerry Durand impinged itself on his
consciousness.  Once, when the swirl of the crowd flung him close to
the door, he caught a glimpse of it, tight-lipped and wolf-eyed, turned
to him with relentless malice.  The gang leader was taking no part in
the fight.

The crowd parted.  Out of the pack a pair of strong arms and lean broad
shoulders ploughed a way for a somewhat damaged face that still carried
a debonair smile.  With pantherish litheness the Arizonan ducked a
swinging blow.  The rippling muscles of the plunging shoulders tossed
aside a little man in evening dress clawing at him.  Yet a moment, and
he was outside taking the three steps that led to the street.

Into his laboring lungs he drew deliciously the soft breath of the
night.  It cooled the fever of his hammered face, was like an icy bath
to his hot body.  A little dizzy from the blows that had been rained on
him, he stood for a moment uncertain which way to go.  From his throat
there rippled a low peal of joyous mirth.  The youth in him delighted
in the free-for-all from which he had just emerged.

Then again he became aware of Durand.  The man was not alone.  He had
with him a hulking ruffian whose heavy, hunched shoulders told of
strength.  There was a hint of the gorilla in the way the long arms
hung straight from the shoulders as he leaned forward.  Both of the men
were watching the cowpuncher as steadily as alley cats do a housefinch.

"Hell's going to pop in about three seconds," announced Clay to himself.

Silently, without lifting their eyes from their victim for an instant,
the two men moved apart to take him on both sides.  He clung to the
wall, forcing a frontal attack.  The laughter had gone out of his eyes
now.  They had hardened to pinpoints.  This time it was no amateur
horseplay.  He was fighting for his life.  No need to tell Clay Lindsay
that the New York gangster meant to leave him as good as dead.

The men rushed him.  He fought them back with clean hard blows.  Jerry
bored in like a wild bull.  Clay caught him off his balance, using a
short arm jolt which had back of it all that twenty-three years of
clean outdoors Arizona could give.  The gangster hit the pavement hard.

He got up furious and charged again.  The Arizonan, busy with the other
man, tried to sidestep.  An uppercut jarred him to the heel.  In that
instant of time before his knees began to sag beneath him his brain
flashed the news that Durand had struck him on the chin with brass
knucks.  He crumpled up and went down, still alive to what was going
on, but unable to move in his own defense.  Weakly he tried to protect
his face and sides from the kicks of a heavy boot.  Then he floated
balloon-like in space and vanished into unconsciousness.




CHAPTER VIII

"THE BEST SINGLE-BARRELED SPORT IVER I MET"

Clay drifted back to a world in which the machinery of his body
creaked.  He turned his head, and a racking pain shot down his neck.
He moved a leg, and every muscle in it ached.  From head to foot he was
sore.

Voices somewhere in space, detached from any personal ownership,
floated vaguely to him.  Presently these resolved themselves into words
and sentences.

"We're not to make a pinch, Tim.  That's the word he gave me before he
left.  This is wan av Jerry's private little wars and he don't want a
judge askin' a lot of unnicessary questions, y' understand."

"Mother av Moses, if this he-man from Hell's Hinges hadn't the luck av
the Irish, there'd be questions a-plenty asked.  He'd be ready for the
morgue this blissed minute.  Jerry's a murderin' divvle.  When I breeze
in I find him croakin' this lad proper and he acts like a crazy man
when I stand him and Gorilla Dave off till yuh come a-runnin'.  At that
they may have given the bye more than he can carry.  Maybe it'll be
roses and a nice black carriage for him yet."

The other policeman, a sergeant--by this time the voices had localized
themselves in persons--laughed with reluctant admiration.

"Him!  He's got siven lives like a cat.  Take a look at the Sea Siren,
Tim.  'T is kindling the lad has made of the place.  The man that runs
the dump put up a poor mouth, but I told him and the nuts that crowded
round squawkin' for an arrest that if they hollered the police would
close the place and pull the whole bunch for disorderly conduct.  They
melted away, believe me."  He added, with an access of interest,
"Yuh've heard the byes tell the story of the rube that tied up the
Swede janitor on the Drive into a knot with his own hose.  This'll be
the same lad, I'm thinkin'."

The other nodded.  He was bending over Clay and sprinkling water on his
face.  "He'll be black and blue ivery inch of him, but his eyelids are
flickering.  Jerry's an ill man to cross, I've heard tell.  Yuh'd think
this lad had had enough.  But Jerry's still red-eyed about him and
swears they can't both live in the same town.  You'll remember likely
how Durand did for Paddy Kelly?  It was before my time."

"Yuh're a chump copper, Tim Muldoon, else yuh'd know we don't talk
about that in the open street.  Jerry has long ears," the older man
warned, lowering his voice.

Clay opened his eyes, flexed his arm muscles, and groaned.  He caressed
tenderly his aching ribs.

"Some wreck," he gasped weakly.  "They didn't do a thing to me--outside
of beatin' me up--and stompin' on me--and runnin' a steam roller--over
the dear departed."

"Whose fault will that be?  Don't yuh know better than to start a fight
with a rigiment?" demanded the sergeant of police severely.

"That wasn't a fight.  It was a waltz."  The faint, unconquered smile
of brown Arizona, broke through the blood and bruises of the face.
"The fight began when Jerry Durand and his friend rushed me--and it
ended when Jerry landed on me with brass knucks.  After that I was a
football."  The words came in gasps.  Every breath was drawn in pain.

"We'd ought to pinch yuh," the sergeant said by way of reprimand.
"Think yuh can come to New York and pull your small-town stuff on us?
We'll show youse.  If yuh wasn't alfalfa green I'd give yuh a ride."

"You mean if Durand hadn't whispered in yore ear.  I'll call that
bluff, sheriff.  Take me to yore calaboose.  I've got one or two things
to tell the judge about this guy Durand."

The officer dropped his grumbling complaint to a whisper.  "Whisht,
bye.  Take a straight tip from a man that knows.  Beat it out of town.
Get where the long arm of--of a friend of ours--can't reach yuh.  Yuh
may be a straight guy, but that won't help yuh.  Yuh'll be framed the
same as if yuh was a greengoods man or a gopher or a porch-climber.
He's a revingeful inemy if ever there was wan."

"You mean that Durand--"

"I'm not namin' names," the officer interrupted doggedly.  "I'm tellin'
yuh somethin' for your good.  Take it or leave it."

"Thanks, I'll leave it.  This is a free country, and no man livin' can
drive me away," answered Clay promptly.  "Ouch, I'm sore.  Give me a
lift, sergeant."

They helped the cowpuncher to his feet.  He took a limping step or two.
Every move was torture to his outraged flesh.

"Can you get me a taxi?  That is, if you're sure you don't want me in
yore calaboose," the range-rider said, leaning against the wall.

"We'll let yuh go this time."

"Much obliged--to Mr. Jerry Durand.  Tell him for me that maybe I'll
meet up with him again sometime--and hand him my thanks personal for
this first-class wallopin'."  From the bruised, bleeding face there
beamed again the smile indomitable, the grin still gay and winning.
Physically he had been badly beaten, but in spirit he was still the man
on horseback.

Presently he eased himself into a taxi as comfortably as he could.
"Home, James," he said jauntily.

"Where?" asked the driver.

"The nearest hospital," explained Clay.  "I'm goin' to let the doctors
worry over me for a while.  Much obliged to both of you gentlemen.  I
always did like the Irish.  Friend Jerry is an exception."

The officers watched the cab disappear.  The sergeant spoke the comment
that was in the mind of them both.

"He's the best single-barreled sport that iver I met in this man's
town.  Not a whimper out of the guy and him mauled to a pulp.  Game as
they come.  Did youse see that spark o' the divvle in his eye, and him
not fit to crawl into the cab?"

"Did I see it?  I did that.  If iver they meet man to man, him and
Jerry, it'll be wan grand little fight."

"Jerry's the best rough-and-tumble fighter on the island."

"Wan av the best.  I wouldn't put him first till after him and this guy
had met alone in a locked room.  S'long, Mike."

"S'long, Tim.  No report on this rough-house, mind yuh."

"Sure, Mike."




CHAPTER IX

BEATRICE UP STAGE

If you vision Clay as a man of battles and violent deaths you don't see
him as he saw himself.  He was a peaceful citizen from the law-abiding
West.  It was not until he had been flung into the whirlpool of New
York that violent and melodramatic mishaps befell this innocent.  The
Wild East had trapped him into weird adventure foreign to his nature.

This was the version of himself that he conceived to be true and the
one he tried to interpret to Bee Whitford when he emerged from the
hospital after two days of seclusion and presented himself before her.

It was characteristic of Beatrice that when she looked at his battered
face she asked no questions and made no exclamations.  After the first
startled glance one might have thought from her expression that he
habitually wore one black eye, one swollen lip, one cauliflower ear,
and a strip of gauze across his check.

The dark-lashed eyes lifted from him to take on a business-like
directness.  She rang for the man.

"Have the runabout brought round at once, Stevens.  I'll drive myself,"
she gave orders.

With the light ease that looked silken strong she swept the car into
the Park.  Neither she nor Clay talked.  Both of them knew that an
explanation of his appearance was due her and in the meantime neither
cared to fence with small talk.  He watched without appearing to do so
the slender girl in white at the wheel.  Her motions delighted him.
There was a very winning charm in the softly curving contours of her
face, in that flowerlike and precious quality in her personality which
lay back of her boyish comradeship.

She drew up to look at some pond lilies, and they talked about them for
a moment, after which her direct eyes questioned him frankly.

He painted with a light brush the picture of his adventure into
Bohemia.  The details he filled in whimsically, in the picturesque
phraseology of the West.  Up stage on his canvas was the figure of the
poet in velveteens.  That Son of the Stars he did full justice.  Jerry
Durand and Kitty Mason were accessories sketched casually.

Even while her face bubbled with mirth at his story of the improvised
tango that had wrecked the Sea Siren, the quick young eyes of the girl
were taking in the compelling devil-may-care charm of Lindsay.
Battered though he was, the splendid vigor of the man still showed in a
certain tigerish litheness that sore, stiff muscles could not conceal.
No young Greek god's head could have risen more superbly from the
brick-tanned column of his neck than did this bronzed one.

"I gather that Mr. Lindsay of Arizona was among those present,"
Beatrice said, smiling.

"I was givin' the dance," he agreed, and his gay eyes met hers.

Since she was a woman, one phase of his story needed expansion for Miss
Whitford.  She made her comment carelessly while she adjusted the
mileage on the speedometer.

"Queer you happened to meet some one you knew down there.  You did say
you knew the girl, didn't you?"

"We were on the same train out of Denver.  I got acquainted with her."

Miss Whitford asked no more questions.  But Clay could not quite let
the matter stand so.  He wanted her to justify him in her mind for what
he had done.  Before he knew it he had told her the story of Kitty
Mason and Durand.

Nor did this draw any criticism of approval or the reverse.

"I couldn't let him hypnotize that little girl from the country, could
I?" he asked.

"I suppose not."  Her whole face began to bubble with laughter in the
way he liked so well.  "But you'll be a busy knight errant if you
undertake to right the wrongs of every girl you meet in New York."  A
dimple flashed near the corner of her mouth.  "Of course she's pretty."

"Well, yes.  She is right pretty."

"Describe her to me."

He made a lame attempt.  Out of his tangled sentences she picked on
some fragments.  ". . . blooms like a cherokee rose . . . soft like a
kitten."

"I'm glad she's so charming.  That excuses any indiscretion," the girl
said with a gleam of friendly malice.  "There's no fun in rescuing the
plain ones, is there?"

"They don't most usually need so much rescuin'," Clay admitted.

"Don't you think it possible that you rescued her out of a job?"

The young man nodded his head ruefully.  "That's exactly what I did.
After all her trouble gettin' one I've thrown her out again.  I'm a
sure-enough fathead."

"You've been down to find out?" she asked with a sidelong tilt of her
quick eyes.

"Yes.  I went down this mawnin' with Tim Muldoon.  He's a policeman I
met down there.  Miss Kitty hasn't been seen since that night.  We went
out to the Pirate's Den, the Purple Pup, Grace Godwin's Garret, and all
the places where she used to sell cigarettes.  None of them have seen
anything of her."

"So that really your championship hasn't been so great a help to her
after all, has it?"

"No."

"And I suppose it ruined the business of the man that owns the Sea
Siren."

"I don't reckon so.  I've settled for the furniture.  And Muldoon says
when it gets goin' again the Sea Siren will do a big business on
account of the fracas.  It's Kitty I'm worried about."

"She's a kind of cuddly little girl who needs the protection of some
nice man, you say?"

"That's right."

The eyes of Miss Whitford were unfathomable.  "Fluffy and--kind of
helpless."

"Yes."

"I wouldn't worry about her if I were you.  She'll land on her feet,"
the girl said lightly.

Her voice had not lost its sweet cadences, but Clay sensed in it
something that was almost a touch of cool contempt.  He felt vaguely
that he must have blundered in describing Kitty.  Evidently Miss
Whitford did not see her quite as she was.

The young woman pressed the starter button.  "We must be going home.  I
have an engagement to go riding with Mr. Bromfield."

The man beside the girl kept his smile working and concealed the little
stab of jealousy that dirked him.  Colin Whitford had confided to
Lindsay that his daughter was practically engaged to Clarendon
Bromfield and that he did not like the man.  The range-rider did not
like him either, but he tried loyally to kill his distrust of the
clubman.  If Beatrice loved him there must be good in the fellow.  Clay
meant to be a good loser anyhow.

There had been moments when the range-rider's heart had quickened with
a wild, insurgent hope.  One of these had been on a morning when they
were riding in the Park, knee to knee, in the dawn of a new clean
world.  It had come to him with a sudden clamor of the blood that in
the eternal rightness of things such mornings ought to be theirs till
the youth in them was quenched in sober age.  He had looked into the
eyes of this slim young Diana, and he had throbbed to the certainty
that she too in that moment of tangled glances knew a sweet confusion
of the blood.  In her cheeks there had been a quick flame of flying
color.  Their talk had fallen from them, and they had ridden in a shy,
exquisite silence from which she had escaped by putting her horse to a
canter.

But in the sober sense of sanity Clay knew that this wonderful thing
was not going to happen to him.  He was not going to be given her
happiness to hold in the hollow of his hand.  Bee Whitford was a modern
young woman, practical-minded, with a proper sense of the values that
the world esteems.  Clarendon Bromfield was a catch even in New York.
He was rich, of a good family, assured social position, good-looking,
and manifestly in love with her.  Like gravitates to like the land
over.  Miracles no longer happen in this workaday world.  She would
marry the man a hundred other girls would have given all they had to
win, and perhaps in the long years ahead she might look back with a
little sigh for the wild colt of the desert who had shared some perfect
moments with her once upon a time.

Bromfield, too, had no doubt that Bee meant to marry him.  He was in
love with her as far as he could be with anybody except himself.  His
heart was crusted with selfishness.  He had lived for himself only and
he meant to continue so to live.  But he had burned out his first
youth.  He was coming to the years when dissipation was beginning to
take its toll of him.  And as he looked into the future it seemed to
him an eminently desirable thing that the fresh, eager beauty of this
girl should belong to him, that her devotion should stand as a shield
between him and that middle age with which he was already skirmishing.
He wanted her--the youth, the buoyant life, the gay, glad comradeship
of her--and he had always been lucky in getting what he desired.  That
was the use of having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth.

But though Clarendon Bromfield had no doubt of the issue of his suit,
the friendship of Beatrice for this fellow from Arizona stabbed his
vanity.  It hurt his class pride and his personal self-esteem that she
should take pleasure in the man's society.  Bee never had been well
broken to harness.  He set his thin lips tight and resolved that he
would stand no nonsense of this sort after they were married.  If she
wanted to flirt it would have to be with some one in their own set.

The clubman was too wise to voice his objections now except by an
occasional slur.  But he found it necessary sometimes to put a curb on
his temper.  The thing was outrageous--damnably bad form.  Sometimes it
seemed to him that the girl was gratuitously irritating him by
flaunting this bounder in his face.  He could not understand it in her.
She ought to know that this man did not belong to her world--could not
by any chance be a part of it.

Beatrice could not understand herself.  She knew that she was behaving
rather indiscreetly, though she did not fathom the cause of the
restlessness that drove her to Clay Lindsay.  The truth is that she was
longing for an escape from the empty life she was leading, had been
seeking one for years without knowing it.  Her existence was losing its
savor, and she was still so young and eager and keen to live.  Surely
this round of social frivolities, the chatter of these silly women and
smug tailor-made men, could not be all there was to life.  She must
have been made for something better than that.

And when she was with Clay she knew she had been.  He gave her a vision
of life through eyes that had known open, wide spaces, clean,
wholesome, and sun-kissed.  He stood on his own feet and did his own
thinking.  Simply, with both hands, he took hold of problems and
examined them stripped of all trimmings.  The man was elemental, but he
was keen and broad-gauged.  He knew the value of the things he had
missed.  She was increasingly surprised to discover how wide his
information was.  It amazed her one day to learn that he had read
William James and understood his philosophy much better than she did.

There was in her mind no intention whatever of letting herself do
anything so foolish as to marry him.  But there were moments when the
thought of it had a dreadful fascination for her.  She did not invite
such thoughts to remain with her.

For she meant to accept Clarendon Bromfield in her own good time and
make her social position in New York absolutely secure.  She had been
in the fringes too long not to appreciate a chance to get into the
social Holy of Holies.




CHAPTER X

JOHNNIE SEES THE POSTMASTER

A bow-legged little man in a cheap, wrinkled suit with a silk kerchief
knotted loosely round his neck stopped in front of a window where a
girl was selling stamps.

"I wantta see the postmaster."

"Corrid'y'right.  Takel'vatorthir'doorleft," she said, just as though
it were two words.

The freckle-faced little fellow opened wider his skim-milk eyes and his
weak mouth.  "Come again, ma'am, please."

"Corrid'y'right.  Takel'vatorthir'doorleft," she repeated.  "Next."

The inquirer knew as much as he did before, but he lacked the courage
to ask for an English translation.  A woman behind was prodding him
between the shoulder-blades with the sharp edge of a package wrapped
for mailing.  He shuffled away from the window and wandered helplessly,
swept up by the tide of hurrying people that flowed continuously into
the building and ebbed out of it.  From this he was tossed into a
backwater that brought him to another window.

"I wantta see the postmaster of this burg," he announced again with a
plaintive whine.

"What about?" asked the man back of the grating.

"Important business, _amigo_.  Where's he at?"

The man directed him to a door upon which was printed the legend,
"Superintendent of Complaints."  Inside, a man was dictating a letter
to a stenographer.  The bow-legged man in the wrinkled suit waited
awkwardly until the letter was finished, twirling in his hands a white,
broad-rimmed hat with pinched-in crown.  He was chewing tobacco.  He
wondered whether it would be "etiquette" to squirt the juice into a
waste-paper basket standing conveniently near.

"Well, sir!  What can I do for you?" the man behind the big desk
snapped.

"I wantta see the postmaster."

"What about?"

"I got important business with him."

"Who are you?"

"Me, I'm Johnnie Green of the B-in-a-Box Ranch.  I just drapped in from
Arizona and I wantta see the postmaster."

"Suppose you tell your troubles to me."

Johnnie changed his weight to the other foot.  "No, suh, I allow to see
the postmaster himself personal."

"He's busy," explained the official.  "He can't possibly see anybody
without knowing his business."

"Tha's all right.  I've lost my pal.  I wantta see--"

The Superintendent of Complaints cut into his parrot-like repetition.
"Yes, you mentioned that.  But the postmaster doesn't know where he is,
does he?"

"He might tell me where his mail goes, as the old sayin' is."

"When did you lose your friend?"

"I ain't heard from him since he come to New York.  So bein' as I got a
chanct to go from Tucson with a jackpot trainload of cows to Denver, I
kinda made up my mind to come on here the rest of the way and look him
up.  I'm afraid some one's done him dirt."

"Do you know where he's staying?"

"No, suh, I don't."

The Superintendent of Complaints tapped with his fingers on the desk.
Then he smiled.  The postmaster was fond of a joke.  Why not let this
odd little freak from the West have an interview with him?

Twenty minutes later Johnnie was telling his story to the postmaster of
the City of New York.  He had written three times to Clay Lindsay and
had received no answer.  So he had come to look for him.

"And seein' as I was here, thinks I to myself thinks I it costs nothin'
Mex to go to the postmaster and ask where Clay's at," explained Johnnie
with his wistful, ingratiating, give-me-a-bone smile.  "Thinks I, it
cayn't be but a little ways down to the office."

"Is your friend like you?" asked the postmaster, interested in spite of
himself.

"No, suh."  Johnnie, _alias_ the Runt, began to beam.  "He's a
sure-enough go-getter, Clay is, every jump of the road.  I'd follow his
dust any day of the week.  You don't never need to think he's any
shorthorn cattleman, for he ain't.  He's the livest proposition that
ever come out of Graham County.  You can ce'tainly gamble on that."

The postmaster touched a button.  A clerk appeared, received orders,
and disappeared.

Johnnie, now on the subject of his hero, continued to harp on his
points.  "You're damn whistlin' Clay ain't like me.  He's the best
hawss-buster in Arizona.  The bronco never was built that can pile him,
nor the man that can lick him.  Clay's no bad _hombre_, you understand,
but there can't nobody run it over him.  That's whatever.  All I'm
afraid of is some one's gave him a raw deal.  He's the best blamed old
son-of-a-gun I ever did meet up with."

The clerk presently returned with three letters addressed to Clay
Lindsay, General Delivery, New York.  The postmaster handed them to the
little cowpuncher.

"Evidently he never called for them," he said.

Johnnie's chin fell.  He looked a picture of helpless woe.  "They're
the letters I set down an' wrote him my own se'f.  Something has sure
happened to that boy, looks like," he bemoaned.

"We'll try Police Headquarters.  Maybe we can get a line on your
friend," the postmaster said, reaching for the telephone.  "But you
must remember New York is a big place.  It's not like your Arizona
ranch.  The city has nearly eight million inhabitants."

"I sure found that out already, Mr. Postmaster.  Met every last one of
'em this mo'nin', I'll bet.  Never did see so many humans millin'
around.  I'll say they're thick as cattle at a round-up."

"Then you'll understand that when one man gets lost it isn't always
possible to find him."

"Why not?  We got some steers down in my country--about as many as you
got men in this here town of yourn.  Tha's what we ride the range for,
so's not to lose 'em.  We've traced a B-in-a-Box steer clear from
Tucson to Denver, done it more'n onct or twice too.  I notice you got a
big bunch of man-punchers in uniform here.  Ain't it their business to
rustle up strays?"

"The police," said the postmaster, amused.  "That is part of their
business.  We'll pass the buck to them anyhow."

After some delay and repeated explanations of who he was, the
postmaster got at the other end of the wire his friend the
commissioner.  Their conversation was brief.  When the postmaster hung
up he rang for a stenographer and dictated a letter of introduction.
This he handed to Johnnie, with explicit instructions.

"Go to Police Headquarters, Center Street, and take this note to
Captain Luke Byrne.  He'll see that the matter is investigated for you."

Johnnie was profuse, but somewhat incoherent in his thanks.  "Much
obliged to meet you, Mr. Postmaster.  An'--an' if you ever hit the
trail for God's Country I'll sure--I'll sure--Us boys at the B-in-a-Box
we'd be right glad to--to meet up with you.  Tha's right, as the old
sayin' is.  We sure would.  Any ol' time."

The cowpuncher's hat was traveling in a circle propelled by red,
freckled hands.  The official cut short Johnnie's embarrassment.

"Do you know the way to Police Headquarters?"

"I reckon I can find it.  Is it fur?"  The man from Arizona looked down
at the high-heeled boots in which his tortured feet had clumped over
the pavements of the metropolis all morning.

"I'll send you in a taxi."  The postmaster was thinking that this babe
in the woods of civilization never would be able to find his way alone.

As the driver swept the car in and out among the traffic of the narrow
streets Johnnie clung to the top of the door fearfully.  Every moment
he expected a smash.  His heart was in his throat.  The tumult, the
rush of business, the intersecting cross-town traffic, the hub-bub of
the great city, dazed his slow brain.  The hurricane deck of a bronco
had no terrors for him, but this wild charge through the humming
trenches shook his nerve.

"I come mighty nigh askin' you would you just as lief drive slower," he
said with a grin to the chauffeur as he descended to the safety of the
sidewalk.  "I ain't awful hardy, an' I sure was plumb scared."

A sergeant took Johnnie in tow and delivered him at length to the
office waiting-room of Captain Anderson, head of the Bureau of Missing
Persons.  The Runt, surveying the numbers in the waiting-room and those
passing in and out, was ready to revise his opinion about the possible
difficulty of the job.  He judged that half the population of New York
must be missing.

After a time the captain's secretary notified Johnnie that it was his
turn.  As soon as he was admitted the puncher began his little piece
without waiting for any preliminaries.

"Say, Captain, I want you to find my friend Clay Lindsay.  He--"

"Just a moment," interrupted the captain.  "Who are you?  Don't think I
got your name."

Johnnie remembered the note of introduction and his name at the same
time.  He gave both to the big man who spent his busy days and often
part of the nights looking for the lost, strayed, and stolen among New
York's millions.

The captain's eyes swept over the note.  "Sit down, Mr. Green, and
let's get at your trouble."

As soon as it permeated Johnnie's consciousness that he was Mr. Green
he occupied precariously the front three inches of a chair.  His
ever-ready friend the cow-boy hat began to revolve.

"This note says that you're looking for a man named Clay Lindsay who
came to New York several months ago.  Have you or has anybody else
heard from him in that time?"

"We got a letter right after he got here.  He ain't writ since."

"Perhaps he's dead.  We'd better look up the morgue records."

"Morgue!"  The Runt grew excited instantly.  "That place where you keep
folks that get drowned or bumped off?  Say, Captain, I'm here to tell
you Clay was the livest man in Arizona, which is the same as sayin'
anywheres.  Cowpunchers don't take naturally to morgues.  No, sir.
Clay ain't in no morgue.  Like as not he's helped fill this yere morgue
if any crooks tried their rough stuff on him.  Don't get me wrong, Cap.
Clay is the squarest he-man ever God made.  All I'm sayin' is--"

The captain interrupted.  He asked sharp, incisive questions and got
busy.  Presently he reached for a 'phone, got in touch with a sergeant
at the police desk in the upper corridor, and sent an attendant with
Johnnie to the Police Department.

The Irish sympathies of the sergeant were aroused by the naive honesty
of the little man.  He sent for another sergeant, had card records
brought, consulted a couple of patrolmen, and then turned to Johnnie.

"We've met your friend all right," he said with a grin.  "He's wan
heluva lad.  Fits the description to a T.  There can't be but one like
him here."  And he went on to tell the story of the adventure of the
janitor and the hose and that of its sequel, the resale of the
fifty-five-dollar suit to I. Bernstein, who had reported his troubles
to the police.

The washed-out eyes of the puncher lit up.  "That's him.  That's sure
him.  If the' was two of him they'd ce'tainly be a hell-poppin' team.
Clay he's the best-natured fellow you ever did see, but there can't
nobody run a whizzer on him, y' betcha.  Tell me where he's at?"

"We don't know.  We can show you the place where he tied the janitor,
but that's the best we can do."  The captain hesitated.  "If you find
him, give him a straight tip from me.  Tell him to buy a ticket for
Arizona and take the train for home.  This town is no healthy place for
him."

"Because he hogtied a Swede," snorted Johnnie indignantly.

"No.  He's got into more serious trouble than that.  Your friend has
made an enemy--a powerful one.  He'll understand if you tell him."

"Who is this here enemy?"

"Never mind.  He hit up too fast a pace."

"You can't tell me a thing against Clay--not a thing," protested
Johnnie hotly.  "He'll sure do to take along, Clay will.  There can't
any guy knock him to me if he does wear a uniform."

"I'm not saying a thing against him," replied the officer impatiently.
"I'm giving him a friendly tip to beat it, if you see him.  Now I'm
going to send you up-town with a plain-clothes man.  He'll show you
where your friend made his New York debut.  That's all we can do for
you."

An hour later the little cowpuncher was gazing wistfully at the
hitching-post.  His face was twisted pathetically to a question mark.
It was as though he thought he could conjure from the post the secret
of Clay's disappearance.  Where had he gone from here?  And where was
he now?

In the course of the next two days the Runt came back to that post many
times as a starting-point for weary, high-heeled tramps through streets
within a circuit of a mile.  He could not have explained why he did so.
Perhaps it was because this was the only spot in the city that held for
him any tangible relationship to Clay.  Some one claimed to have seen
him vanish into one of these houses.  Perhaps he might come back again.
It was a very tenuous hope, but it was the only one Johnnie had.  He
clumped over the pavements till his feet ached in protest.

His patience was rewarded.  On the second day, while he was gazing
blankly at the post a groom brought two horses to the curb in front of
the house opposite.  One of the horses had a real cowboy's saddle.
Johnnie's eyes gleamed.  This was like a breath of honest-to-God
Arizona.  The door opened, and out of it came a man and a slim young
woman.  Both of them were dressed for riding, she in the latest togs of
the town, he in a well-cut sack suit and high tan boots.

Johnnie threw up his hat and gave a yell.  "You blamed old horn-toad!
Might 'a' knowed you was all right!  Might 'a' knowed you wouldn't bite
off more'n you could chew!  Oh, you Arizona!"

Clay gave one surprised look--and met him in the middle of the street.
The little cowpuncher did a war dance of joy while he clung to his
friend's hand.  Tears brimmed into his faded eyes.

"Hi yi yi, doggone yore old hide, if it ain't you big as coffee, Clay.
Thinks I to myse'f, who is that pilgrim?  And, by gum, it's old
hell-a-mile jes' a-hittin' his heels.  Where you been at, you old
skeezicks?"

"How are you, Johnnie?  And what are you doin' here?"

The Runt was the kind of person who tells how he is when any one asks
him.  He had no imagination, so he stuck to the middle of the road for
fear he might get lost.

"I'm jes' tol'able, Clay.  I got a kinda misery in my laigs from
trompin' these hyer streets.  My feet are plumb burnin' up.  You didn't
answer my letters, so I come to see if you was all right."

"You old scalawag.  You came to paint the town red."

Johnnie, highly delighted at this charge, protested.  "Honest I didn't,
Clay.  I wasn't feelin' so tur'ble peart.  Seemed like the boys picked
on me after you left.  So I jes' up and come."

If Clay was not delighted to have his little Fidus Achates on his hands
he gave no sign of it.  He led him across the road and introduced him
to Miss Whitford.

Clay blessed her for her kindness to this squat, snub-nosed adherent of
his whose lonely heart had driven him two thousand miles to find his
friend.  It would have been very easy to slight him, but Beatrice had
no thought of this.  The loyalty of the little man touched her greatly.
Her hand went out instantly.  A smile softened her eyes and dimpled her
cheeks.

"I'm very glad to meet any friend of Mr. Lindsay.  Father and I will
want to hear all about Arizona after you two have had your visit out.
We'll postpone the ride till this afternoon.  That will be better, I
think."

Clay agreed.  He grudged the loss of his hour with her, but under the
circumstances it had to be.  For a moment he and Beatrice stood
arranging the time for their proposed ride.  Then, with a cool little
nod that included them both, she turned and ran lightly up the steps
into the house.

"Some sure-enough queen," murmured Johnnie in naive admiration, staring
after her with open mouth.

Clay smiled.  He had an opinion of his own on that point.




CHAPTER XI

JOHNNIE GREEN--MATCH-MAKER

Johnnie Green gave an upward jerk to the frying-pan and caught the
flapjack deftly as it descended.

"Fust and last call for breakfast in the dining-cyar.  Come and get it,
old-timer," he sang out to Clay.

That young man emerged from his bedroom glowing.  He was one or two
shades of tan lighter than when he had reached the city, but the paint
of Arizona's untempered sun still distinguished him from the
native-born, if there are any such among the inhabitants of upper New
York.

"You're one sure-enough cook," he drawled to his satellite.  "Some girl
will ce'tainly have a good wife when she gets you.  I expect I'd better
set one of these suffragette ladies on yore trail."

"Don't you, Clay," blushed Johnnie.  "I ain't no ladies' man.  They
make me take to the tall timber when I see 'em comin'."

"That ain't hardly fair to them, and you the best flapjack artist in
Graham County."

"Sho!  I don't make no claims, old sock.  Mebbe I'm handy with a
fry-pan, mebbe I ain't.  Likely you're jest partial to my flapjacks,"
the little man said in order to have his modest suggestion refuted.

"They suit me, Johnnie."  And Clay reached for the maple syrup.  "Best
flapjacks ever made in this town."

The Runt beamed all over.  If he had really been a puppy he would have
wagged his tail.  Since he couldn't do that he took it out in grinning.
Any word of praise from Clay made the world a sunshiny one for him.

"This here place ain't Arizona, but o' course we got to make the best
of it.  You know I can cook when I got the fixin's," he agreed.

The two men were batching it.  They had a little apartment in the Bronx
and Johnnie looked after it for his friend.  One of Johnnie's
vices--according to the standard of the B-in-a-Box boys--was that he
was as neat as an old maid.  He liked to hang around a mess-wagon and
cook doughnuts and pies.  His talent came in handy now, for Clay was no
housekeeper.

After the breakfast things were cleared away Johnnie fared forth to a
certain house adjoining Riverside Drive, where he earned ten dollars a
week as outdoors man.  His business was to do odd jobs about the place.
He cut and watered the lawn.  He made small repairs.  Beatrice had a
rose garden, and under her direction he dug, watered, and fertilized.

Incidentally, the snub-nosed little puncher with the unfinished
features adored his young mistress in the dumb, uncritical fashion a
schoolboy does a Ty Cobb or an Eddie Collins.  For him the queen could
do no wrong.  He spent hours mornings and evenings at their rooms
telling Clay about her.  She was certainly the finest little lady he
ever had seen.  In his heart he had hopes that Clay would fall in love
with and marry her.  She was the only girl in the world that deserved
his paragon.  But her actions worried him.  Sometimes he wondered if
she really understood what a catch Clay was.

He tried to tell her his notions on the subject the morning Clay
praised his flapjacks.

She was among the rose-bushes, gloved and hatted, clipping American
Beauties for the dining-room, a dainty but very self-reliant little
personality.

"Miss Beatrice, I been thinkin' about you and Clay," he told her,
leaning on his spade.

"What have you been thinking about us?" the girl asked, snipping off a
big rose.

She liked Johnnie and listened often with amusement to his point of
view.  It was so different from that of anybody else she had ever met.
Perhaps this was why she encouraged him to talk.  There may have been
another reason.  The favorite theme of his conversation interested her.

"How you're the best-lookin' couple that a man would see anywheres."

Into her clear cheeks the color flowed.  "If I thought nonsense like
that I wouldn't say it," she said quietly.  "We're not a couple.  He's
a man.  I'm a woman.  I like him and want to stay friends with him if
you'll let me."

"Sure.  I know that, but--" Johnnie groped helplessly to try to explain
what he had meant.  "Clay he likes you a heap," he finished
inadequately.

The eyes of the girl began to dance.  There was no use taking offense
at this simple soul.  After all he was not a servant, but a loyal
follower whose brain was not quite up to the job of coping with the
knotty problem of bringing two of his friends together in matrimony.
"Does he?  I'm sure I'm gratified," she murmured, busy with her
scissors among the roses.

"Yep.  I never knowed Clay to look at a girl before.  He sure thinks a
heap of you."

She gave a queer little bubbling laugh.  "You're flattering me."

"Honest, I ain't."  Johnnie whispered a secret across the rose-bushes.
"Say, if you work it right I believe you can get him."

The girl sparkled.  Here was a new slant on matrimonial desirability.
Clearly the view of the little cow-puncher was that Clay had only to
crook his fingers to summon any girl in the world that he desired.

"Do you think so--with so many attractive girls in New York?" she
pleaded.

"He don't pay no 'tention to them.  Honest, I believe you can if you
don't spill the beans."

"What would you advise me to do?" she dimpled.

"Sho!  I dunno."  He shyly unburdened himself of the warning he had
been leading up to.  "But I'd tie a can to that dude fellow that hangs
around--the Bromfield guy.  O' course I know he ain't one two three
with you while Clay's on earth, but I don't reckon I'd take any
chances, as the old sayin' is.  No, ma'am, I'd ce'tainly lose him
_pronto_.  Clay might get sore.  Better get shet of the dude."

Miss Whitford bit her lip to keep from exploding in a sudden gale of
mirth.  But the sight of her self-appointed chaperon set her off into
peals of laughter in spite of herself.  Every time she looked at
Johnnie she went off into renewed chirrups.  He was so homely and so
deadly earnest.  The little waif was staring at her in perplexed
surprise, mouth open and chin fallen.  He could see no occasion for
gayety at his suggestion.  There was nothing subtle about the Runt.  In
his social code wealth did not figure.  A forty-dollar-a-month bronco
buster was free to offer advice to the daughter of a millionaire about
her matrimonial prospects if it seemed best.

And just now it seemed to Johnnie decidedly best.  He scratched his tow
head, for he had mulled the whole thing over and decided reluctantly to
do his duty by the girl.  So far as he could make out, Beatrice
Whitford played no favorites in her little court of admirers.  Clay
Lindsay and Clarendon Bromfield were with her more than any of the
others.  If she inclined to either of the two, Johnnie could see no
evidence of it.  She was gay and frank with both, a jolly comrade for a
ride, a dinner dance, or a theater party.

This was what troubled Johnnie.  Of course she must be in love with
Clay and want to marry him, since she was a normal human being.  But if
she continued to play with Bromfield the Westerner might punish her by
sheering off.  That was the reason why the Runt was doing his
conscientious duty this fine morning.

"Clay ain't one o' the common run of cowpunchers, ma'am.  You bet you,
by jollies, he ain't.  Clay he owns a half-interest in the B-in-a-Box.
O' course it ain't what he's got, but what he is that counts.  He's the
best darned pilgrim ever I did see."

"He's all right, Johnnie," the girl admitted with an odd little smile.
"Do you want me to tell him that I'll be glad to drop our family
friends to meet his approval?  I don't suppose he asked you to speak to
me about it, did he?"

The little range-rider missed the irony of this.  "No, ma'am, I jest
butted in.  Mebbe I hadn't ought to of spoke."

The frank eyes of the girl met his fairly.  A patch of heightened color
glowed in her soft cheeks.  "That would have been better, Johnnie.  But
since you have introduced the subject, I'll tell you that Mr. Lindsay
and I are friends.  Neither of us has the slightest intention of being
anything more.  You may not understand such things."

"No'm," he admitted humbly.  "I reckon I'm a plumb idjit."

His attitude was so dejected that she relented.

"You needn't feel badly, Johnnie.  There's no harm done--if you don't
say anything about it to Mr. Lindsay.  But I don't think you were
intended for a match-maker.  That takes quite a little finesse, doesn't
it?"

The word "finesse" was not in Johnnie's dictionary, but he acquiesced
in her verdict.

"I reckon, ma'am, you're right."




CHAPTER XII

CLAY READS AN AD AND ANSWERS IT

Clay was waiting for lunch at a _rotisserie_ on Sixth Avenue, and in
order to lose no time--of which he had more just now than he knew what
to do with--was meanwhile reading a newspaper propped against a
water-bottle.  From the personal column there popped out at him three
lines that caught his attention:

    If this meets the eye of C. L. of Arizona
    please write me.  Box M-21, The Herald.
    Am in trouble.               KITTY M.

He read it again.  There could be no doubt in the world.  It was
addressed to him, and from Kitty.  While he ate his one half spring
chicken Clay milled the situation over in his mind.  She had been on
the lookout for him, just as he had been searching for her.  By good
luck her shot at a venture had reached him.  He remembered now that on
the bus he had casually mentioned to her that he usually read the
"Herald."

After he had eaten, Clay walked down Broadway and left a note at the
office of the "Herald" for Kitty.

The thought of her was in his mind all day.  He had worried a good deal
over her disappearance.  It was not alone that he felt responsible for
the loss of her place as cigarette girl.  One disturbing phase of the
situation was that Jerry Durand must have seen her.  What more likely
than that he had arranged to have her spirited away?  Lindsay had read
that hundreds of girls disappeared every year in the city.  If they
ever came to the surface again it was as dwellers in that underworld in
the current of which they had been caught.

Jerry was a known man in New York.  It had been easy for Clay to find
out the location of his saloon and the hotel where he lived.  The
cattleman had done some quiet sleuthing, but he had found no trace of
Kitty.  Now he knew that she had turned to him in her need and cried
for help.

That she was in trouble did not surprise him.  The girl was born for it
as naturally as the sparks fly upward.  She was a provocation to those
who prey.  In her face there was a disturbing quality quite apart from
her prettiness.  Back of the innocence lay some hint of slumberous
passion.  Kitty was one of those girls who have the misfortune to stir
the imaginations of men without the ability to keep them at arm's
length.  Just what her present difficulty was Clay did not know, but he
was quite sure it had to do with a man.  Already he had decided to
rescue her.  He had promised to be her friend.  It never occurred to
him to stand back when she called.

He had an engagement that afternoon to walk with Beatrice Whitford.
She was almost the only girl in her set who knew how to walk and had
the energy for it.  In her movement there was the fluent, untamed grace
that expressed a soul not yet stunted by the claims of convention.  The
golden little head was carried buoyantly.  In her step was the rhythm
of perfect ease.  The supple resilience of her was another expression
of the spiritual quality that spoke in the vivid face.

Clay, watching her as she moved, thought of a paragraph from Mark
Twain's "Eve's Diary":


She is all interest, eagerness, vivacity, the world is to her a charm,
a wonder, a mystery, a joy; she can't speak for delight when she finds
a new flower, she must pet it and caress it and smell it and talk to
it, and pour out endearing names upon it.  And she is color mad: brown
rocks, yellow sand, gray moss, green foliage, blue sky; the pearl of
the dawn, the purple shadow on the mountains, the golden islands
floating in crimson seas at sunset, the pallid moon sailing through the
shredded cloud-rack, the star-jewels glittering in the waste of space.
. . .


But the thing that tantalized him about her and filled him with despair
was that, though one moment she might be the first woman in the
birthday of the world filled with the primitive emotions of the
explorer, the next she was a cool, Paris-gowned-and-shod young modern,
about as competent to meet emergencies as anything yet devised by
heaven and a battling race.

They crossed to Morningside Park and moved through it to the northern
end where the remains of Fort Laight, built to protect the approach to
the city during the War of 1812, can still be seen and traced.

Beatrice had read the story of the earthworks.  In the midst of the
telling of it she stopped to turn upon him with swift accusation,
"You're not listening."

"That's right, I wasn't," he admitted.

"Have you heard something about your cigarette girl?"

Clay was amazed at the accuracy of her center shot.

"Yes."  He showed her the newspaper.

She read.  The golden head nodded triumphantly.  "I told you she could
look out for herself.  You see when she had lost you she knew enough to
advertise."

Was there or was there not a faint note of malice in the girl's voice?
Clay did not know.  But it would have neither surprised nor displeased
him.  He had long since discovered that his imperious little friend was
far from an angel.

At his rooms he found a note awaiting him.


Come to-night after eleven.  I am locked in the west rear room of the
second story.  Climb up over the back porch.  Don't make any noise.
The window will be unbolted.  A friend is mailing this.  For God's
sake, don't fail me.


The note was signed "Kitty."  Below were given the house and street
number.  Clay studied the letter a long time--the wording of it, the
formation of the letters, the spirit that had actuated the writer.  It
was written upon a sheet of cheap lined paper torn from a pad.  The
envelope was one of those sold at the post-office already stamped.

Was the note genuine?  Or did it lead to a trap?  He could not tell.
It might be a plant or it might be a wail of real distress.  There was
only one way to find out unless he went to the police.  That way was to
go through with the adventure.  The police!  Clay went back to the
thought of them several times.  The truth was that he had put himself
out of court there.  He was in bad with the bluecoats and would
probably be arrested if he showed up at headquarters.

He decided to play a lone hand except for such help as Johnnie could
give him.

Clay took a downtown car and rode to the cross-street mentioned in the
letter for a preliminary tour of investigation.  The street designated
was one of plain brownstone fronts with iron-grilled doors.  The blank
faces of the houses invited no confidence.  It struck him that there
was something sinister about the neighborhood, but perhaps the thought
was born of the fear.  Number 121 had windows barred with ornamental
grilles.  This might be to keep burglars out.  It would serve equally
well to keep prisoners in.

At the nearest grocery store Clay made inquiries.  He was looking, he
said, for James K. Sanger.  He did not know the exact address.  Could
the grocery man help him run down his party?  How about the folks
living at Number 121?

"Don't know 'em.  They've been in only for a few days.  They don't
trade here."

Clay tried the telephone, but Information could tell him only that
there was no 'phone at 121.

On the whole Clay inclined to think that the letter was not a forgery.
In his frank, outdoor code there was no reason why Durand should hate
him enough to go to such trouble to trap him.  The fellow had more than
squared accounts when he had beaten him up outside the Sea Siren.  Why
should he want to do anything more to him?  But he had had two warnings
that the ex-prize-fighter was not through with him--both of them from
members of the police force, one direct from the sergeant who had
helped rescue him, the other by way of the Runt from headquarters.
When he recalled the savage hatred of that flat, pallid face he did not
feel so sure of immunity.  Clay had known men in the West, wolf-hearted
killers steeped in a horrible lust for revenge, who never forgot or
forgave an injury--until their enemy had paid the price in full.  Jerry
Durand might be one of this stamp.  He was a man of a bad reputation,
one about whom evil murmurs passed in secret.  Not many years ago he
had been tried for the murder of one Paddy Kelly, a rival gangsman in
his neighborhood, and had been acquitted on the ground of self-defense.
But there had been a good deal of talk about evidence framed in his
behalf.  Later he had been arrested for graft, but the case somehow had
never been acted upon by the district attorney's office.  The whisper
was that his pull had saved him from trial.

The cattleman did not linger in that street lined with houses of
sinister faces.  He did not care to call attention to his presence by
staying too long.  Besides, he had some arrangements to make for the
night at his rooms.

These were simple and few.  He oiled and loaded his revolver carefully,
leaving the hammer on the one chamber left empty to prevent accidents
after the custom of all careful gunmen.  He changed into the wrinkled
suit he had worn when he reached the city, and substituted for his
shoes a pair of felt-soled gymnasium ones.

The bow-legged little puncher watched his friend, just as a faithful
dog does his master.  He asked no questions.  In good time he knew he
would be told all it was necessary for him to know.

As they rode from the Bronx, Clay outlined the situation and told his
plans so far as he had any.

"So I'm goin' to take a whirl at it, Johnnie.  Mebbe they're lyin' low
up in that house to get me.  Mebbe the note's the real thing.  You can
search me which it is.  The only way to find out is to go through with
the thing.  Yore job is to stick around in front of the hacienda and
wait for me.  If I don't show up inside of thirty minutes, get the
police busy right away breakin' into the place.  Do you get me,
Johnnie?"

"Lemme go with you into the house, Clay," the little man pleaded.

"No, this is a one-man job.  If the note is straight goods I've got to
work on the Q.T.  Do exactly as I say.  That's how you can help me
best."

"What's the matter with me goin' into the house instead o' you?  It
don't make no difference much if they do gun me.  I'm jest the common
run of the pen.  But you--you're graded stock," argued the Runt.

"Nothin' doin', old-timer.  This is my job, and I don't reckon I'll let
anybody else tackle it.  Much obliged, just the same.  You're one
sure-enough white man, Johnnie."

The little fellow knew that the matter was settled.  Clay had decided
and what he said was final.  But Johnnie worried about it all the way.
At the last moment, when they separated at the street corner, he added
one last word.

"Don't you be too venturesome, son.  If them guys got you it sure would
break me all up."

Clay smiled cheerfully.  "They're not goin' to get me, Johnnie.  Don't
forget to remember not to forget yore part.  Keep under cover for
thirty minutes; then if I haven't shown up, holler yore head off for
the cops."

They were passing an alley as Clay finished speaking.  He slipped into
its friendly darkness and was presently lost to sight.  It ran into an
inner court which was the center of tortuous passages.  The cattleman
stopped to get his bearings, selected the likeliest exit, and brought
up in the shelter of a small porch.  This, he felt sure, must be the
rear of the house he wanted.

A strip of lattice-work ran up the side of the entrance.  Very
carefully, testing every slat with his weight before trusting himself
to it, he climbed up and edged forward noiselessly upon the roof.  On
hands and knees he crawled to the window and tried to peer in.

The blind was down, but he could see that the room was dark.  What
danger lurked behind the drawn blind he could not guess, but after a
moment, to make sure that the revolver beneath his belt was ready for
instant use, he put his hand gently on the sash.

His motions were soundless as the fall of snowflakes.  The window moved
slowly, almost imperceptibly, under the pressure of his hands.  It gave
not the faintest creak of warning.  His fingers found the old-fashioned
roller blind and traveled down it to the bottom.  With the faintest of
clicks he released the spring and guided the blind upward.

Warily he lifted one leg into the room.  His head followed, then the
rest of his body.  He waited, every nerve tensed.

There came to him a sound that sent cold finger-tips laying a tattoo up
and down his spine.  It was the intake of some one's cautious breathing.

His hand crept to the butt of the revolver.  He crouched, poised for
either attack or retreat.

A bath of light flooded the room and swallowed the darkness.  Instantly
Clay's revolver leaped to the air.




CHAPTER XIII

A LATE EVENING CALL

A young woman in an open-neck nightgown sat up in bed, a cascade of
black hair fallen over her white shoulders.  Eyes like jet beads were
fastened on him.  In them he read indignation struggling with fear.

"Say, what are you anyhow--a moll buzzer?  If you're a porch-climber
out for the props you've sure come to the wrong dump.  I got nothin'
but bum rocks."

This was Greek to Clay.  He did not know that she had asked him if he
were a man who robs women, and that she had told him he could get no
diamonds there since hers were false.

The Arizonan guessed at once that he was not in the room mentioned in
the letter.  He slipped his revolver back into its place between shirt
and trousers.

"Is this house number 121?" he asked.

"No, it's 123.  What of it?"

"It's the wrong house.  I'm ce'tainly one chump."

The black eyes lit with sardonic mockery.  The young woman knew already
that she had nothing to fear from this brown-faced man.  His face was
not that of a thug.  It carried its own letter of recommendation
written on it.  Instinctively she felt that he had not come to rob.  A
lively curiosity began to move in her.

"Say, do I look like one of them born-every-minute kind?" she asked
easily.  "Go ahead and spring that old one on me about how you got
tanked at the club and come in at the window on account o' your wife
havin' a temper somethin' fierce."

"No, I--I was lookin' for some one else.  I'm awful sorry I scared you.
I'd eat dirt if it would do any good, but it won't.  I'm just a plumb
idiot.  I reckon I'll be pushin' on my reins."  He turned toward the
window.

"Stop right there where you're at," she ordered sharply.  "Take a step
to that window and I'll holler for a harness bull like a Bowery bride
gettin' a wallopin' from friend husband.  I gotta have an explanation.
And who told you I was scared?  Forget that stuff.  Take it from Annie
that she ain't the kind that scares."

The girl sat up in bed, fingers laced around the knees beneath the
blanket.  There was an insouciance about her he did not understand.
She did not impress him in the least as a wanton, but if he read that
pert little face aright she was a good deal less embarrassed than he.

"I came to see some one else, but I got in the wrong house," he
explained again lamely.

"That's twice I heard both them interestin' facts.  Who is this goil
you was comin' through a window to see in the middle o' the night.  And
what's that gat for if it ain't to croak some other guy?  You oughtta
be ashamed of yourself for not pullin' a better wheeze than that on me."

Clay blushed.  In spite of the slangy impudence that dropped from the
pretty red lips the girl was slim and looked virginal.

"You're 'way off.  I wasn't callin' on her to--"  He stuck hopelessly.

"Whadya know about that?" she came back with obvious sarcasm.  "You
soitainly give me a pain.  I'll say you weren't callin' to arrange no
Sunday School picnic.  Listen.  Look at that wall a minute, will you?"

When he turned again at her order she was sitting on the side of the
bed wrapped in a kimono, her feet in bedroom slippers.  He saw now that
she was a slender-limbed slip of a girl.  The lean forearm, which
showed bare to the elbow when she raised it to draw the kimono closer
round her, told Clay that she was none too well nourished.

"I'll listen now to your fairy tale, Mr. Gumshoe Guy, but I wantta wise
you that I'm hep to men.  Doncha try to string me," she advised.

Clay did not.  It had occurred to him that she might give him
information of value.  There was something friendly and kindly about
the humorous little mouth which parroted worldly wisdom so sagely and
the jargon of criminals so readily.  He told her the story of Kitty
Mason.  He could see by the girl's eyes that she had jumped to the
conclusion that he was in love with Kitty.  He did not attempt to
disturb that conviction.  It might enlist her sympathy.

"Honest, Annie, I believe this guy's on the level," the young woman
said aloud as though to herself.  "If he ain't, he's sure a swell
mouthpiece.  He don't look to me like no flat-worker--not with that mug
of his.  But you never can tell."

"I'm not, Miss.  My story's true."  Eyes clear as the Arizona sky in a
face brown as the Arizona desert looked straight at her.

Annie Millikan had never seen a man like this before, so clean and
straight and good to look at.  From childhood she had been brought up
on the fringe of that underworld the atmosphere of which is miasmic.
She was impressed in spite of herself.

"Say, why don't you go into the movies and be one of these here screen
ideals?  You'd knock 'em dead," she advised flippantly, crossing her
bare ankles.

Clay laughed.  He liked the insolent little twist to her mouth.  She
made one strong appeal to him.  This bit of a girl, so slim that he
could break her in his hands, was game to the core.  He recognized it
as a quality of kinship.

"This is my busy night.  When I've got more time I'll think of it.
Right now--"

She took the subject out of his mouth.  "Listen, how do you know the
girl ain't a badger-worker?"

"You'll have to set 'em up on the other alley, Miss," the Westerner
said.  "I don't get yore meanin'."

"Couldn't she 'a' made this date to shake you down?  Blackmail stuff."

"No chance.  She's not that kind."

"Mebbe you're right.  I meet so many hop-nuts and dips and con guys and
gun-molls that I get to thinkin' there's no decent folks left," she
said with a touch of weariness.

"Why don't you pull yore picket-pin and travel to a new range?" he
asked.  "They're no kind of people for you to be knowin'.  Get out to
God's country where men are white and poor folks get half a chance."

The girl shrugged her shoulders.  "Little old New York is my beat.
It's the biggest puddle in the world and I'll do my kickin' here."
Abruptly she switched the talk back to his affairs.  "You wantta go
slow when you tackle Jerry Durand.  I can tell you one thing.  He's in
this business up to the neck.  I seen his shadow Gorilla Dave comin'
outa the house next door twice to-day."

"Seen anything of the girl?"

"Nope.  But she may be there.  Honest, you're up against a tough game.
There's no use rappin' to the bulls.  They'd tip Jerry off and the girl
wouldn't be there when they pulled the house."

"Then I must work this alone."

"Why don't you lay down on it?" she asked, her frank eyes searching
his.  "You soitainly will if you've got good sense."

"I'm goin' through."

Her black eyes warmed.  "Say, I'll bet you're some guy when you get
started.  Hop to it and I hope you get Jerry good."

"I don't want Jerry.  He's too tough for me.  Once I had so much of him
I took sick and went to the hospital.  It's the girl I want."

"Say, listen!  I got a hunch mebbe it's a bum steer, but you can't be
sure till you try it.  Why don't you get in through the roof instead o'
the window?"

"Can I get in that way?"

"Surest thing you know--if the trapdoor ain't latched.  Say, stick
around outside my room half a sec, will you?"

The cattleman waited in the darkness of the passage.  If his enemies
were trying to ambush him in the house next door the girl's plan might
save him.  He would have a chance at least to get them unexpectedly in
the rear.

It could have been scarcely more than two minutes later that the young
woman joined him.

Her small hand slipped into his to guide him.  They padded softly along
the corridor till they came to a flight of stairs running up.  The girl
led the way, taking the treads without noise in her stockinged feet.
Clay followed with the utmost caution.

Again her hand found his in the darkness of the landing.  She took him
toward the rear to a ladder which ended at a dormer half-door leading
to the roof.  Clay fumbled with his fingers, found a hook, unfastened
it, and pushed open the trap.  He looked up into a starlit night and a
moment later stepped out upon the roof.  Presently the slim figure of
the girl stood beside him.

They moved across to a low wall, climbed it and came to the dormer door
of the next house.  Clay knelt and lifted it an inch or two very
slowly.  He lowered it again and rose.

"I'm a heap obliged to you, Miss," he said in a low voice.  "You're a
game little gentleman."

She nodded.  "My name is Annie Millikan."

"Mine is Clay Lindsay.  I want to come and thank you proper some day."

"I take tickets at Heath's Palace of Wonders two blocks down," she
whispered.

"You'll sure sell me a ticket one of these days," Clay promised.

"Look out for yourself.  Don't let 'em get you.  Give 'em a chance, and
that gang would croak you sure."

"I'll be around to buy that ticket.  Good-night, Miss Annie.  Don't you
worry about me."

"You will be careful, won't you?"

"I never threw down on myself yet."

The girl's flippancy broke out again.  "Say, lemme know when the
weddin' is and I'll send you a salad bowl," she flashed at him saucily
as he turned to go.

Clay was already busy with the door.




CHAPTER XIV

STARRING AS A SECOND-STORY MAN

Darkness engulfed Clay as he closed the trapdoor overhead.  His
exploring feet found each tread of the ladder with the utmost caution.
Near the foot of it he stopped to listen for any sound that might serve
to guide him.  None came.  The passage was as noiseless as it was dark.

Again he had that sense of cold finger-tips making a keyboard of his
spine.  An impulse rose in him to clamber up the ladder to the safety
of the open-skyed roof.  He was a son of the wide outdoors.  It went
against his gorge to be blotted out of life in this trap like some foul
rodent.

But he trod down the panic and set his will to carry on.  He crept
forward along the passage.  Every step or two he stopped to listen,
nerves keyed to an acute tension.

A flight of stairs brought him to what he knew must be the second
floor.  To him there floated a murmur of sounds.  They came vague and
indistinct through a closed door.  The room of the voices was on the
left-hand side of the corridor.

He soft-footed it closer, reached the door, and dropped noiselessly to
a knee.  A key was in the lock on the outside.  With infinite
precaution against rattling he turned it, slid it out, and dropped it
in his coat pocket.  His eye fastened to the opening.

Three men were sitting round a table.  They were making a bluff at
playing cards, but their attention was focused on a door that evidently
led into another room.  Two automatic revolvers were on the table close
to the hands of their owners.  A blackjack lay in front of the third
man.  Clay recognized him as Gorilla Dave.  The other two were
strangers to him.

They were waiting.  Sometimes they talked in low voices.  For the most
part they were silent, their eyes on the door of the trap that had been
baited for a man Clay knew and was much interested in.  Something evil
in the watchfulness of the three chilled momentarily his veins.  These
fellows were the gunmen of New York he had read about--paid assassins
whose business it was to frame innocent men for the penitentiary or
kill them in cold blood.  They were of the underworld, without
conscience and without honor.  As he looked at them through the
keyhole, the watcher was reminded by their restless patience of
mountain wolves lying in wait for their kill.  Gorilla Dave sat
stolidly in his chair, but the other two got up from time to time and
paced the room silently, always with an eye to the door of the other
room.

Then things began to happen.  A soft step sounded in the corridor
behind the man at the keyhole.  He had not time to crawl away nor even
to rise before a man stumbled against him.

Clay had one big advantage over his opponent.  He had been given an
instant of warning.  His right arm went up around the neck of his foe
and tightened there.  His left hand turned the doorknob.  Next moment
the two men crashed into the room together, the Westerner rising to his
feet as they came, with the body of the other lying across his back
from hip to shoulder.

Gorilla Dave leaped to his feet.  The other two gunmen, caught at
disadvantage a few feet from the table, dived for their automatics.
They were too late.  Clay swung his body downward from the waist with a
quick, strong jerk.  The man on his back shot heels over head as though
he had been hurled from a catapult, crashed face up on the table, and
dragged it over with him in his forward plunge to the wall.

Before any one else could move or speak, Lindsay's gun was out.

"Easy now."  His voice was a gentle drawl that carried a menace.
"Lemme be boss of the _rodeo_ a while.  No, Gorilla, I wouldn't play
with that club if I was you.  I'm sure hell-a-mile on this gun stuff.
Drop it!"  The last two words came sharp and crisp, for the big thug
had telegraphed an unintentional warning of his purpose to dive at the
man behind the thirty-eight.

Gorilla Dave was thick-headed, but he was open to persuasion.  Eyes
hard as diamonds bored into his, searched him, dominated him.  The
barrel of the revolver did not waver a hair-breadth.  His fingers
opened and the blackjack dropped from his hand to the floor.

"For the love o' Mike, who is this guy?" demanded one of the other men.

"I'm the fifth member of our little party," explained Clay.

"Wot t'ell do youse mean?  And what's the big idea in most killin' the
chief?"

The man who had been flung across the table turned over and groaned.
Clay would have known that face among a thousand.  It belonged to Jerry
Durand.

"I came in at the wrong door and without announcin' myself," said the
cattleman, almost lazily, the unhurried indolence of his manner not
shaken.  "You see I wanted to be on time so as not to keep you waitin'.
I'm Clay Lindsay."

The more talkative of the gunmen from the East Side flashed one look at
the two automatics lying on the floor beside the overturned table.
They might as well have been in Brazil for all the good they were to
him.

"For the love o' Mike," he repeated again helplessly.  "You're
the--the--"

"--the hick that was to have been framed for house-breaking.  Yes, I'm
him," admitted Clay idiomatically.  "How long had you figured I was to
get on the Island?  Or was it yore intention to stop my clock for good?"

"Say, how did youse get into de house?" demanded big Dave.

"Move over to the other side of the room, Gorilla, and join yore two
friends," suggested the master of ceremonies.  "And don't make any
mistake.  If you do you won't have time to be sorry for it.  I'll
ce'tainly shoot to kill."

The big-shouldered thug shuffled over.  Clay stepped sideways, watching
the three gunmen every foot of the way, kicked the automatics into the
open, and took possession of them.  He felt safer with the revolvers in
his coat pocket, for they had been within reach of Durand, and that
member of the party was showing signs of a return to active interest in
the proceedings.

"When I get you right I'll croak you.  By God, I will," swore the gang
leader savagely, nursing his battered head.  "No big stiff from the
bushes can run anything over on me."

"I believe you," retorted Clay easily.  "That is, I believe you're
tellin' me yore intentions straight.  There's no news in that to write
home about.  But you'd better make that _if_ instead of _when_.  This
is three cracks you've had at me and I'm still a right healthy rube."

"Don't bank on fool luck any more.  I'll get you sure," cried Durand
sourly.

The gorge of the Arizonan rose.  "Mebbeso.  You're a dirty dog, Jerry
Durand.  From the beginning you were a rotten fighter--in the ring and
out of it.  You and yore strong-arm men!  Do you think I'm afraid of
you because you surround yoreself with dips and yeggmen and hop-nuts,
all scum of the gutter and filth of the earth?  Where I come from men
fight clean and out in the open.  They'd stomp you out like a
rattlesnake."

Clay moved back to the door and looked around from one to another, a
scorching contempt in his eyes.  "Rats--that's what you are, vermin
that feed on offal.  You haven't got an honest fight in you.  All you
can do is skulk behind cover to take a man when he ain't lookin'."

He whipped open the door, stepped out, closed it, and took the key from
his pocket.  A moment, and he had turned the lock.

From within there came a rush that shook the panels.  Clay was already
busy searching for Kitty.  He tore open door after door, calling her
loudly by name.  Even in the darkness he could see that the rooms were
empty of furniture.

There was a crash of splintering panels, the sound of a bursting lock.
Almost as though it were an echo of it came a heavy pounding upon the
street door.  Clay guessed that the thirty minutes were up and that the
Runt was bringing the police.  He dived back into one of the empty
rooms just in time to miss a rush of men pouring along the passage to
the stairs.

Cut off from the street, Clay took to the roof again.  It would not do
for him to be caught in the house by the police.  He climbed the
ladder, pushed his way through the trapdoor opening, and breathed
deeply of the night air.

But he had no time to lose.  Already he could hear the trampling of
feet up the stairs to the second story.

Lightly he vaulted the wall and came to the roof door leading down to
number 123.  He found it latched.

The eaves of the roof projected so far that he could not from there get
a hold on the window casings below.  He made a vain circuit of the
roof, then passed to the next house.

Again he was out of luck.  The tenants had made safe the entrance
against prowlers of the night.  He knew that at any moment now the
police might appear in pursuit of him.  There was no time to lose.

He crossed to the last house in the block--and found himself barred
out.  As he rose from his knees he heard the voices of men clambering
through the scuttle to the roof.  At the same time he saw that which
brought him to instant action.  It was a rope clothes-line which ran
from post to post, angling from one corner of the building to another
and back to the opposite one.

No man in Manhattan's millions knew the value of a rope or could handle
one more expertly than this cattleman.  His knife was open before he
had reached the nearest post.  One strong slash of the blade severed
it.  In six long strides he was at the second post unwinding the line.
He used his knife a second time at the third post.

Through the darkness he could see the dim forms of men stopping to
examine the scuttle.  Then voices came dear to him in the still night.

"If he reached the roof we've got him."

"Unless he found an open trap," a second answered.

With deft motions Clay worked swiftly.  He was fastening the rope to
the chimney of the house.  Every instant he expected to hear a voice
raised in excited discovery of him crouched in the shadows.  But his
fingers were as sure and as steady as though he had minutes before him
instead of seconds.

"There's the guy--over by the chimney."

Clay threw the slack of the line from the roof.  He had no time to test
the strength of the rope nor its length.  As the police rushed him he
slid over the edge and began to lower himself hand under hand.

Would they cut the rope?  Or would they take pot shots at him.  He
would know soon enough.

The wide eaves protected him.  A man would have to hang out from the
wall above the ledge to see him.

Clay's eyes were on the gutter above while he jerked his way down a
foot at a time.  A face and part of a body swung out into sight.

"We've got yuh.  Come back or I'll shoot," a voice called down.

A revolver showed against the black sky.

The man from Arizona did not answer and did not stop.  He knew that
shooting from above is an art that few men have acquired.

A bullet sang past his ear just as he swung in and crouched on the
window-sill.  Another one hit the bricks close to his head.

The firing stopped.  A pair of uniformed legs appeared dangling from
the eaves.  A body and a head followed these.  They began to descend
jerkily.

Clay took a turn at the gun-play.  He fired his revolver into the air.
The spasmodic jerking of the blue legs abruptly ceased.

"He's got a gun!" the man in the air called up to those above.

The fact was obvious.  It could not be denied.

"Yuh'd better give up quietly.  We're bound to get yuh," an officer
shouted from the roof by way of parley.

The cattleman did not answer except by the smashing of glass.  He had
forced his way into two houses within the past hour.  He was now busy
breaking into a third.  The window had not yielded to pressure.
Therefore he was knocking out the glass with the butt of his revolver.

He crawled through the opening just as some one sat up in bed with a
frightened exclamation.

"Who--is--s--s--s it?" a masculine voice asked, teeth chattering.

Clay had no time to gratify idle curiosity.  He ran through the room,
reached the head of the stairs, and went down on the banister to the
first floor.  He fled back to the rear of the house and stole out by
the kitchen door.

The darkness of the alley swallowed him, but he could still hear the
shouts of the men on thereof and answering ones from new arrivals below.

Five minutes later he was on board a street car.  He was not at all
particular as to its destination.  He wanted to be anywhere but here.
This neighborhood was getting entirely too active for him.




CHAPTER XV

THE GANGMAN SEES RED

Exactly thirty minutes after Clay had left him to break into the house,
Johnnie lifted his voice in a loud wail for the police.  He had read
somewhere that one can never find an officer when he is wanted, but the
Bull-of-Bashan roar of the cowpuncher brought them running from all
directions.

Out of the confused explanations of the range-rider the first policeman
to reach him got two lucid statements.

"They're white-slavin' a straight girl.  This busher says his pal went
in to rescue her half an hour ago and hasn't showed up since," he told
his mates.

With Johnnie bringing up the rear they made a noisy attack on the front
door of Number 121.  Almost immediately it was opened from the inside.
Four men had come down the stairs in a headlong rush to cut off the
escape of one who had outwitted and taunted them.

Those who wanted to get in and those who wanted to get out all tried to
talk at once, but as soon as the police recognized Jerry Durand they
gave him the floor.

"We're after a flat-worker," explained the ex-pugilist.  "He must be
tryin' for a roof getaway."  He turned and led the joint forces back up
the stairs.

Thugs and officers surged up after him, carrying with them in their
rush the Runt.  He presently found himself on the roof with those
engaged in a man-hunt for his friend.  When Clay shattered the window
and disappeared inside after his escape from the roof, Johnnie gave a
deep sigh of relief.  This gun-play got on his nerves, since Lindsay
was the target of it.

The bandy-legged range-rider was still trailing along with the party
ten minutes later when its scattered members drew together in tacit
admission that the hunted man had escaped.

"Did youse get a look at his mug, Mr. Durand?" asked one of the
officers.  "It's likely we've got it down at headquarters in the
gall'ry."

Durand had already made up his mind on that point.

"We didn't see his face in the light, Pete.  No, I wouldn't know him
again."

His plug-uglies took their cue from him.  So did the officers.  If
Durand did not want a pinch there would, of course, not be one.

The gang leader was in a vile temper.  If this story reached the
newspapers all New York would be laughing at him.  He could appeal to
the police, have Clay Lindsay arrested, and get him sent up for a term
on the charge of burglary.  But he could not do it without the whole
tale coming out.  One thing Jerry Durand could not stand was ridicule.
His vanity was one of his outstanding qualities, and he did not want it
widely known that the boob he had intended to trap had turned the
tables on him, manhandled him, jeered at him, and locked him in a room
with his three henchmen.

Johnnie Green chose this malapropos moment for reminding the officers
of the reason for the coming to the house.

"What about the young lady?" he asked solicitously.

Durand wheeled on him, looked him over with an insolent, malevolent
eye, and jerked a thumb in his direction.  "Who is this guy?"

"He's the fellow tipped us off his pal was inside," answered one of the
patrolmen.  He spoke in a whisper close to the ear of Jerry.  "Likely
he knows more than he lets on.  Shall I make a pinch?"

The eyes of the gang leader narrowed.  "So he's a friend of this
second-story bird, is he?"

"Y'betcha!" chirped up Johnnie, "and I'm plumb tickled to take his dust
too.  Now about this yere young lady--"

Jerry caught him hard on the side of the jaw with a short arm jolt.
The range-rider hit the pavement hard.  Slowly he got to his feet
nursing his cheek.

"What yuh do that for, doggone it?" he demanded resentfully.  "Me, I
wasn't lookin' for no trouble.  Me, I--"

Durand leaped at him across the sidewalk.  His strong fingers closed on
the throat of the bow-legged puncher.  He shook him as a lion does his
kill.  The rage of the pugilist found a vent in punishing the friend of
the man he hated.  Johnnie grew black in the face.  His knees sagged
and his lips foamed.

The officers pried Jerry loose from his victim with the greatest
difficulty.  He tried furiously to get at him, lunging from the men who
were holding his arms.

The puncher sank helplessly against the wall.

"He's got all he can carry, Mr. Durand," one of the bluecoats said
soothingly.  "You don't wantta croak the little guy."

The ex-prize-fighter returned to sanity.  "Says I'm white-slavin' a
girl, does he?  I'll learn him to lie about me," he growled.

Johnnie strangled and sputtered, fighting for breath to relieve his
tortured lungs.

"Gimme the word, an' I'll run him in for a drunk," the policeman
suggested out of the corner of a whispering mouth.

Jerry shook his head.  "Nope.  Let him go, Pete."

The policeman walked up to the Runt and caught him roughly by the arm.
"Move along outa here.  I'd ought to pinch you, but I'm not gonna do it
this time.  See?  You beat it!"

Durand turned to one of his followers.  "Tail that fellow.  Find out
where he's stayin' and report."

Helplessly Johnnie went staggering down the street.  He did not
understand why he had been treated so.  His outraged soul protested at
such injustice, but the instinct of self-preservation carried him out
of the danger zone without argument about it.  Even as he wobbled away
he was looking with unwavering faith to his friend to right his wrongs.
Clay would fix this fellow Durand for what he had done to him.  Before
Clay got through with him the bully would wish he had never lifted a
hand to him.




CHAPTER XVI

A FACE IN THE NIGHT

Clay did his best under the handicap of a lack of _entente_ between him
and the authorities to search New York for Kitty.  He used the personal
columns of the newspapers.  He got in touch with taxicab drivers,
ticket-sellers, postmen, and station guards.  So far as possible he
even employed the police through the medium of Johnnie.  The East Side
water-front and the cheap lodging-houses of that part of the city he
combed with especial care.  All the time he knew that in such a maze as
Manhattan it would be a miracle if he found her.

But miracles are made possible by miracle-workers.  The Westerner was a
sixty-horse-power dynamo of energy.  He felt responsible for Kitty and
he gave himself with single-minded devotion to the job of discovering
her.

His rides and walks with Beatrice were rare events now because he was
so keen on the business of looking for his Colorado protegee.  He gave
them up reluctantly.  Every time they went out together into the open
Miss Whitford became more discontented with the hothouse existence she
was living.  He felt there was just a chance that if he were constant
enough, he might sweep her off her feet into that deeper current of
life that lay beyond the social shallows.  But he had to sacrifice this
chance.  He was not going to let Kitty's young soul be ship-wrecked if
he could help it, and he had an intuition that she was not wise enough
nor strong enough to keep off the rocks alone.

A part of his distress lay in the coolness of his imperious young
friend who lived on the Drive.  Beatrice resented his divided
allegiance, though her own was very much in that condition.  Clay and
she had from the first been good comrades.  No man had ever so deeply
responded to her need of friendship.  All sorts of things he understood
without explanations.  A day with him was one that brought the deep
content of happiness.  That, no doubt, she explained to herself, was
because he was such a contrast to the men of cramped lives she knew.
He was a splendid tonic, but of course one did not take tonics except
occasionally.

Yet though Beatrice intended to remain heart-whole, she wanted to be
the one woman in Clay's life until she released him.  It hurt her
vanity, and perhaps something deeper than her vanity, that such a girl
as she conceived Kitty Mason to be should have first claim on the time
she had come to consider her own.  She made it plain to him, in the
wordless way expert young women have at command, that she did not mean
to share with him such odd hours as he chose to ask for.  He had to
come when she wanted him or not at all.  Without the name of Kitty
having been mentioned, he was given to understand that if he wished to
remain in the good graces of Beatrice Whitford he must put the
cigarette girl out of his mind.

For all his good nature Clay was the last man in the world to accept
dictation of this sort.  He would go through with anything he started,
and especially where it was a plain call of duty.  Beatrice might like
it or not as she pleased.  He would make his own decisions as to his
conduct.

He did.

Bee was furious at him.  She told herself that there was either a weak
streak in him or a low one, else he would not be so obsessed by the
disappearance of this flirtatious little fool who had tried to entrap
him.  But she did not believe it.  A glance at this brown-faced man was
sufficient evidence that he trod with dynamic force the way of the
strong.  A look into his clear eyes was certificate enough of his
decency.

When Clay met Kitty at last it was quite by chance.  As it happened
Beatrice was present at the time.

He had been giving a box party at the Empire.  The gay little group was
gathered under the awning outside the foyer while the limousine that
was to take them to Shanley's for supper was being called.  Colin
Whitford, looking out into the rain that pelted down, uttered an
exclamatory "By Jove!"

Clay turned to him inquiringly.

"A woman was looking out of that doorway at us," he said.  "If she's
not in deep water I'm a bad guesser.  I thought for a moment she knew
me or some one of us.  She started to reach out her hands and then
shrank back."

"Young or old?" asked the cattleman.

"Young--a girl."

"Which door?"

"The third."

"Excuse me."  The host was off in an instant, almost on the run.

But the woman had gone, swallowed in the semi-darkness of a side
street.  Clay followed.

Beatrice turned to her father, eyebrows lifted.  There was a moment's
awkward silence.

"Mr. Lindsay will be back presently," Whitford said.  "We'll get in and
wait for him out of the way a little farther up the street."

When Clay rejoined them he was without his overcoat.  He stood in the
heavy rain beside the car, a figure of supple grace even in his evening
clothes, and talked in a low voice with Beatrice's father.  The mining
man nodded agreement and Lindsay turned to the others.

"I'm called away," he explained aloud.  "Mr. Whitford has kindly
promised to play host in my place.  I'm right sorry to leave, but it's
urgent."

His grave smile asked Beatrice to be charitable in her findings.  The
eyes she gave him were coldly hostile.  She, too, had caught a glimpse
of the haggard face in the shadows and she hardened her will against
him.  The bottom of his heart went out as he turned away.  He knew
Beatrice did not and would not understand.

The girl was waiting where Clay had left her, crouched against a
basement milliner's door under the shelter of the steps.  She was
wearing the overcoat he had flung around her.  In its pallid despair
her face was pitiable.

A waterproofed policeman glanced suspiciously at them as he sloshed
along the sidewalk in the splashing rain.

"I--I've looked for you everywhere," moaned the girl.  "It's
been--awful."

"I know, but it's goin' to be all right now, Kitty," he comforted.
"You're goin' home with me to-night.  To-morrow we'll talk it all over."

He tucked an arm under hers and led her along the wet, shining street
to a taxicab.  She crouched in a corner of the cab, her body shaken
with sobs.

The young man moved closer and put a strong arm around her shoulders.
"Don't you worry, Kitty.  Yore big brother is on the job now."

"I--I wanted to--to kill myself," she faltered.  "I tried to--in the
river--and--it was so black--I couldn't."  The girl shivered with cold.
She had been exposed to the night rain for hours without a coat.

He knew her story now in its essentials as well as he did later when
she wept it out to him in confession.  And because she was who she was,
born to lean on a stronger will, he acquitted her of blame.

They swung into Broadway and passed taxis and limousines filled with
gay parties just out of the theaters.  Young women in rich furs,
wrapped from the cruelty of life by the caste system in which wealth
had encased them, exchanged badinage with sleek, well-dressed men.  A
ripple of care-free laughter floated to him across the gulf that
separated this girl from them.  By the cluster lights of Broadway he
could see how cruelly life had mauled her soft youth.  The bloom of her
was gone, all the brave pride and joy of girlhood.  It would probably
never wholly return.

He saw as in a vision the infinite procession of her hopeless sisters
who had traveled the road from which he was rescuing her, saw them
first as sweet and merry children bubbling with joy, and again, after
the world had misused them for its pleasure, haggard and tawdry, with
dragging steps trailing toward the oblivion that awaited them.  He
wondered if life must always be so terribly wasted, made a bruised and
broken thing instead of the fine, brave adventure for which it was
meant.




CHAPTER XVII

JOHNNIE MAKES A JOKE

As Kitty stepped from the cab she was trembling violently.

"Don't you be frightened, li'l' pardner.  You've come home.  There
won't anybody hurt you here."

The soft drawl of Clay's voice carried inexpressible comfort.  So too
did the pressure of his strong hand on her arm.  She knew not only that
he was a man to trust, but that so far as could be he would take her
troubles on his broad shoulders.  Tears brimmed over her soft eyes.

The Arizonan ran her up to his floor in the automatic elevator.

"I've got a friend from home stayin' with me.  He's the best-hearted
fellow you ever saw.  You'll sure like him," he told her without stress
as he fitted his key to the lock.

He felt her shrink beneath his coat, but it was too late to draw back
now.  In another moment Lindsay was introducing her casually to the
embarrassed and astonished joint proprietor of the apartment.

The Runt was coatless and in his stockinged-feet.  He had been playing
a doleful ditty on a mouth-organ.  Caught so unexpectedly, he blushed a
beautiful brick red to his neck.

Johnnie ducked his head and scraped the carpet with his foot in an
attempt at a bow.  "Glad to meet up with you-all, Miss.  Hope you're
feelin' tol'able."

Clay slipped the coat from her shoulders and saw that the girl was wet
to the skin.

"Heat some water, Johnnie, and make a good stiff toddy.  Miss Kitty has
been out in the rain."

He lit the gas-log and from his bedroom brought towels, a bathrobe,
pajamas, a sweater, and woolen slippers.  On a lounge before the fire
he dumped the clothes he had gathered.  He drew up the easiest armchair
in the room.

"I'm goin' to the kitchen to jack up Johnnie so he won't lay down on
his job," he told her cheerily.  "You take yore time and get into these
dry clothes.  We'll not disturb you till you knock.  After that we'll
feed you some chuck.  You want to brag on Johnnie's cookin'.  He thinks
he's it when it comes to monkeyin' 'round a stove."

When her timid knock came her host brought in a steaming cup.  "You
drink this.  It'll warm you good."

"What is it?" she asked shyly.

"Medicine," he smiled.  "Doctor's orders."

While she sipped the toddy Johnnie brought from the kitchen a tray upon
which were tea, fried potatoes, ham, eggs, and buttered toast.

The girl ate ravenously.  It was an easy guess that she had not before
tasted food that day.

Clay kept up a flow of talk, mostly about Johnnie's culinary triumphs.
Meanwhile he made up a bed on the couch.

Once she looked up at him, her throat swollen with emotion.  "You're
good."

"Sho!  We been needin' a li'l' sister to brace up our manners for us.
It's lucky for us I found you.  Now I expect you're tired and sleepy.
We fixed up yore bed in here because it's warmer.  You'll be able to
make out with it all right.  The springs are good."  Clay left her with
a cheerful smile.  "Turn out the light before you go to bed, Miss
Colorado.  Sleep tight.  And don't you worry.  You're back with old
home folks again now, you know."

They heard her moving about for a time.  Presently came silence.  Tired
out from tramping the streets with out food and drowsy from the toddy
she had taken, Kitty fell into deep sleep undisturbed by troubled
dreams.

The cattleman knew he had found her in the nick of time.  She had told
him that she had no money, no room in which to sleep, no prospect of
work.  Everything she had except the clothes on her back had been
pawned to buy food and lodgings.  But she was young and resilient.
When she got back home to the country where she belonged, time would
obliterate from her mind the experiences of which she had been the
victim.

It was past midday when Kitty woke.  She heard a tuneless voice in the
kitchen lifted up in a doleful song:


  "There's hard times on old Bitter Creek
    That never can be beat.
  It was root hog or die
  Under every wagon sheet.
  We cleared up all the Indians,
  Drank all the alkali,
    And it's whack the cattle on, boys--
  Root hog or die."


Kitty found her clothes dry.  After she dressed she opened the door
that led to the kitchen.  Johnnie was near the end of another stanza of
his sad song:


  "Oh, I'm goin' home
    Bull-whackin' for to spurn;
  I ain't got a nickel,
  And I don't give a dern.
  'T is when I meet a pretty girl,
  You bet I will or try,
    I'll make her my little wife--
  Root hog--"


He broke off embarrassed.  "Did I wake you-all, ma'am, with my fool
singin'?  I'm right sorry if I did."

"You didn't."  Kitty, clinging shyly to the side of the doorway, tried
to gain confidence from his unease.  "I was already awake.  Is it a
range song you were singing?"

"Yes'm.  Cattle range, not kitchen range."

A wan little smile greeted his joke.  The effect on Johnnie himself was
more pronounced.  It gave him confidence in his ability to meet the
situation.  He had not known before that he was a wit and the discovery
of it tickled his self-esteem.

"'Course we didn't really clean up no Indians nor drink all the alkali.
Tha's jes' in the song, as you might say."  He began to bustle about in
preparation for her breakfast.

"Please don't trouble.  I'll eat what you've got cooked," she begged.

"It's no trouble, ma'am.  If the's a thing on earth I enjoy doin' it's
sure cookin'.  Do you like yore aigs sunny side up or turned?"

"Either way.  Whichever you like, Mr. Green."

"You're eatin' them," Johnnie reminded her with a grin.

"On one side, then, please.  Mr. Lindsay says you're a fine cook."

"Sho!  I'm no great shakes.  Clay he jes' brags on me."

"Lemme eat here in the kitchen.  Then you won't have to set the table
in the other room," she said.

The puncher's instinct was to make a spread on the dining-table for
her, but it came to him with a flash of insight that it would be wise
to let her eat in the kitchen.  She would feel more as though she
belonged and was not a guest of an hour.

While she ate he waited on her solicitously.  Inside, he was a river of
tears for her, but with it went a good deal of awe.  Even now, wan-eyed
and hollow-cheeked, she was attractive.  In Johnnie's lonesome life he
had never before felt so close to a girl as he did to this one.
Moreover, for the first time he felt master of the situation.  It was
his business to put their guest at her ease.  That was what Clay had
told him to do before he left.

"You're the doctor, ma'am.  You'll eat where you say."

"I--I don't like to be so much bother to you," she said again.  "Maybe
I can go away this afternoon."

"No, ma'am, we won't have that a-tall," broke in the range-rider in
alarm.  "We're plumb tickled to have you here.  Clay he feels thataway
too."

"I could keep house for you while I stay," she suggested timidly.  "I
know how to cook--and the place does need cleaning."

"Sure it does.  Say, wha's the matter with you bein' Clay's sister,
jes' got in last night on the train?  Tha's the story we'll put up to
the landlord if you'll gimme the word."

"I never had a brother, but if I'd had one I'd 'a' wanted him to be
like Mr. Lindsay," she told his friend.

"Say, ain't he a go-getter?" cried Johnnie eagerly.  "Clay's sure one
straight-up son-of-a-gun.  You'd ought to 'a' seen how he busted New
York open to find you."

"Did he?"

Johnnie told the story of the search with special emphasis on the night
Clay broke into three houses in answer to her advertisement.

"I never wrote it.  I never thought of that.  It must have been--"

"It was that scalawag Durand, y'betcha.  I ain't still wearin' my
pinfeathers none.  Tha's who it was.  I'm not liable to forget him.  He
knocked me hell-west and silly whilst I wasn't lookin'.  He was sore
because Clay had fixed his clock proper."

"So you've fought on account of me too.  I'm sorry."  There was a
little break in her voice.  "I s'pose you hate me for--for bein' the
way I am.  I know I hate myself."  She choked on the food she was
eating.

Johnnie, much distressed, put down the coffee-pot and fluttered near.
"Don't you take on, ma'am.  I wisht I could tell you how pleased we-all
are to he'p you.  I hope you'll stay with us right along.  I sure do.
You'd be right welcome," he concluded bashfully.

"I've got no place to go, except back home--and I've got no folks there
but a second cousin.  She doesn't want me.  I don't know what to do.
If I had a woman friend--some one to tell me what was best--"

Johnnie slapped his hand on his knee, struck by a sudden inspiration.
"Say!  Y'betcha, by jollies, I've got 'er--the very one!  You're
damn--you're sure whistlin'.  We got a lady friend, Clay and me, the
finest little pilgrim in New York.  She's sure there when the gong
strikes.  You'd love her.  I'll fix it for you--right away.  I got to
go to her house this afternoon an' do some chores.  I'll bet she comes
right over to see you."

Kitty was doubtful.  She did not want to take any strange young women
into her confidence until she had seen them.  More than one good
Pharisee had burned her face with a look of scornful contempt in the
past weeks.

"Maybe we better wait and speak to Mr. Lindsay about it," she said.

"No, ma'am, you don't know Miss Beatrice.  She's the best friend."  He
passed her the eggs and a confidence at the same time.  "Why, I
shouldn't wonder but what she and Clay might get married one o' these
days.  He thinks a lot of her."

"Oh."  Kitty knew just a little more of human nature than the puncher.
"Then I wouldn't tell her about me if I was you.  She wouldn't like my
bein' here."

"Sho!  You don't know Miss Beatrice.  She grades 'way up.  I'll bet she
likes you fine."

When Johnnie left to go to work that afternoon he took with him a
resolution to lay the whole case before Beatrice Whitford.  She would
fix things all right.  No need for anybody to worry after she took a
hand and began to run things.  If there was one person on earth Johnnie
could bank on without fail it was his little boss.




CHAPTER XVIII

BEATRICE GIVES AN OPTION

It was not until Johnnie had laid the case before Miss Whitford and
restated it under the impression that she could not have understood
that his confidence ebbed.  Even then he felt that he must have bungled
it in the telling and began to marshal his facts a third time.  He had
expected an eager interest, a quick enthusiasm.  Instead, he found in
his young mistress a spirit beyond his understanding.  Her manner had a
touch of cool disdain, almost of contempt, while she listened to his
tale.  This was not at all in the picture he had planned.

She asked no questions and made no comments.  What he had to tell met
with chill silence.  Johnnie's guileless narrative had made clear to
her that Clay had brought Kitty home about midnight, had mixed a drink
for her, and had given her his own clothes to replace her wet ones.
Somehow the cattleman's robe, pajamas, and bedroom slippers obtruded
unduly from his friend's story.  Even the Runt felt this.  He began to
perceive himself a helpless medium of wrong impressions.  When he tried
to explain he made matters worse.

"I suppose you know that when the manager of your apartment house finds
out she's there he'll send her packing."  So Beatrice summed up when
she spoke at last.

"No, ma'am, I reckon not.  You see we done told him she is Clay's
sister jes' got in from the West," the puncher explained.

"Oh, I see."  The girl's lip curled and her clean-cut chin lifted a
trifle.  "You don't seem to have overlooked anything.  No, I don't
think I care to have anything to do with your arrangements."

"She's an awful pretty cute little thing," the puncher added, hoping to
modify her judgment.

"Indeed!"

Beatrice turned and walked swiftly into the house.  A pulse of anger
was beating in her soft throat.  She felt a sense of outrage.  To Clay
Lindsay she had given herself generously in spirit.  She had risked
something in introducing him to her friends.  They might have laughed
at him for his slight social lapses.  They might have rejected him for
his lack of background.  They had done neither.  He was so genuinely a
man that he had won his way instantly.  In this City of Bluff, as O.
Henry dubs New York, his simplicity had rung true as steel.  Still, she
had taken a chance and felt she deserved some recognition of it on his
part.  This he had never given.  He had based their friendship on
equality simply.  She liked it in him, though her vanity had resented
it a little.  But this was different.  She was still young enough,
still so little a woman of the world, that she set a rigid standard
which she expected her friends to meet.  She had believed in Clay, and
now he was failing her.

Pacing up and down her room, little fists clenched, her soul in
passionate turmoil, Beatrice went over it all again as she had done
through a sleepless night.  She had given him so much, and he had
seemed to give her even more.  Hours filled with a keen-edged delight
jumped to her memory, hours that had carried her away from the
falseness of social fribble to clean, wind-swept, open spaces of the
mind.  And after this--after he had tacitly recognized her claim on
him--he had insulted her before her friends by deserting his guests to
go off with this hussy he had been spending weeks to search for.

Now his little henchman had the imbecility to ask her help while this
girl was living at Clay Lindsay's apartment, passing herself off as his
sister, and proposing to stay there ostensibly as the housekeeper.  She
felt degraded, humiliated, she told herself.  Not for a moment did she
admit, perhaps she did not know, that an insane jealousy was flooding
her being, that her indignation was based on personal as well as moral
grounds.

Something primitive stirred in her--a flare of feminine ferocity.  She
felt hot to the touch, an active volcano ready for eruption.  If only
she could get a chance to strike back in a way that would hurt, to
wound him as deeply as he had her!

Pat to her desire came the opportunity.  Clay's card was brought in to
her by Jenkins.

"Tell Mr. Lindsay I'll see him in a few minutes," she told the man.

The few minutes stretched to a long quarter of an hour before she
descended.  To the outward eye at least Miss Whitford looked a woman of
the world, sheathed in a plate armor of conventionality.  As soon as
his eyes fell on her Clay knew that this pale, slim girl in the
close-fitting gown was a stranger to him.  Her eyes, star-bright and
burning like live coals, warned him that the friend whose youth had run
out so eagerly to meet his was hidden deep in her to-day.

"I reckon I owe you and Mr. Whitford an apology," he said.  "No need to
tell you how I happened to leave last night.  I expect you know."

"I know why you left--yes."

"I'd like to explain it to you so you'll understand."

"Why take the trouble?  I think I understand."  She spoke in an even,
schooled voice that set him at a distance.

"Still, I want you to know how I feel."

"Is that important?  I see what you do.  That is enough.  Your friend
Mr. Green has carefully brought me the details I didn't know."

Clay flushed.  Her clear voice carried an edge of scorn.  "You mustn't
judge by appearances.  I know you wouldn't be unfair.  I had to take
her home and look after her."

"I don't quite see why--unless, of course, you wanted to," the girl
answered, tapping the arm of her chair with impatient finger-tips, eyes
on the clock.  "But of course it isn't necessary I should see."

Her cavalier treatment of him did not affect the gentle
imperturbability of the Westerner.

"Because I'm a white man, because she's a little girl who came from my
country and can't hold her own here, because she was sick and chilled
and starving.  Do you see now?"

"No, but it doesn't matter.  I'm not the keeper of your conscience, Mr.
Lindsay," she countered, with hard lightness.

"You're judging me just the same."

Her eyes attacked him.  "Am I?"

"Yes."  The level gaze of the man met hers calmly.  "What have I done
that you don't like?"

She lost some of her debonair insolence that expressed itself in
indifference.

"I'd ask that if I were you," she cried scornfully.  "Can you tell me
that this--friend of yours--is a good girl?"

"I think so.  She's been up against it.  Whatever she may have done
she's been forced to do."

"Excuses," she murmured.

"If you'd ever known what it was to be starving--"

Her smoldering anger broke into a flame.  "Good of you to compare me
with her!  That's the last straw!"

"I'm not comparing you.  I'm merely saying that you can't judge her.
How could you, when your life has been so different?"

"Thank Heaven for that."

"If you'd let me bring her here to see you--"

"No, thanks."

"You're unjust."

"You think so?"

"And unkind.  That's not like the little friend I've come to--like so
much."

"You're kind enough for two, Mr. Lindsay.  She really doesn'

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/17205