Steve Yeager | Page 9

the walk there drifted back to
the prizefighter the words of a cowboy song:--
"Oh, bury me out on the lone prairee, In a narrow grave just six by
three, Where the wild coyotes will howl o'er me-- Oh, bury me out on
the lone prairee."
Harrison ripped out an oath. There was a note of gentle irony about the
minor strain of the song that he resented. He had given this youth the
thrashing of his life, but he had apparently left his spirit quite
uncrushed. What he liked was to have men walk in fear of him.
The song presently died on the lips of Steve. Harrison was on his way
to call on Ruth. The man had somehow won her promise to marry him.
It was impossible for Yeager to believe that the child knew what she
was doing. To think of her as the future wife of Chad Harrison moved
him to resentment at life's satiric paradoxes. To give this sweet young
innocent to such a man was to mate a lamb with a tiger or a wolf. The
outrage of it cried to Heaven. What could her mother be thinking of to
allow such a wanton sacrifice?
CHAPTER IV
THE EXTRA
From the first Yeager enjoyed his work with the Lunar Company.
Young and full-blooded, he liked novelty and adventure, life in the
open, new scenes and faces. As a film actor he did not have to seek
sensations. They came to him unsought. He had the faculty of
projecting himself with all his mind into the business of the moment, so
that he soon knew what it was to be a noble and self-conscious hero as
well as an unmitigated villain.
One day he was a miner making his last stand against a band of
Mexican banditti, the next he was crawling through the mesquite to

strike down an intrepid ranger who laughed at death. He fought
desperate single combats, leaped from cliffs into space or across
bridgeless chasms, took part in dozens of sets illustrating scenes of
frontier life as Billy Threewit conceived these. Sometimes Steve smiled.
The director's ideas had largely been absorbed in New York from
reading Western fiction. But so long as he drew down his two-fifty a
day and had plenty of fun doing it, Steve was no stickler for naked
realism. The "bad men" of Yeager's acquaintance had usually been
quiet, soft-spoken citizens, notable chiefly for a certain chilliness of the
eye and an efficient economy of expression that eliminated waste.
Those that Threewit featured were of a different type. They strutted and
bragged and made gun plays on every possible occasion.
Perhaps this was why Harrison's stuff got across. By nature a
swaggering bully, he had only to turn loose his real impulses to register
what the director wanted of a bad man. In the rough-and-tumble life he
had led, it had been Yeager's business to know men. He made no
mistake about Harrison. The fellow might be a loud-mouthed braggart;
none the less he would go the limit. The man was game.
Lennox met Steve one day as the latter was returning from the property
room with a saddle Threewit had asked him to adjust. The star stopped
him good-naturedly.
"Care to put the gloves on with me some time, Yeager?"
The cowpuncher's face brightened. "I sure would. The boys say you're
the best ever with the mitts."
"I'm a pretty good boxer, but I don't trail in your class as a fighter.
What you need is to take some lessons. If you'd care to have me show
you what I know--"
"Say, you've rung the bell first shot."
"Come up to the hotel to-night, then. No need advertising it. Harrison
might pick another quarrel with you to show you what you don't
know."

Steve laughed. "He's ce'tainly one tough citizen. He can look at a pine
board so darned sultry it begins to smoke. All right. Be up there
to-night, Mr. Lennox."
From that day the boxing lessons became a regular thing. The claim
Lennox had made for himself had scarcely done him justice. He was
one of the best amateur boxers in the West. In Yeager he had a pupil
quick to learn. The extra was a perfect specimen physically, narrow of
flank, broad of shoulder, with the well-packed muscles of one always
trained to the minute. Fifteen years in the saddle had given him a
toughness of fiber no city dweller could possibly equal. Nights under
the multiple stars in the hills, cool, invigorating mornings with the
pine-filled air strong as wine in his clean blood, long days of sunshine
full of action, had all contributed to make him the young Hermes that
he was. Cool and wary, supple as a wildcat, light as a