A wintry frost was in the jet bead eyes that looked up at the puncher. The sitting man did not recognize the extended hand.
"You'll be a heap sorrier before I'm through with you," he growled. "I'm goin' to beat your head off and learn you to mind your own business."
"Interesting if true," retorted Steve lightly. "And maybeso you're right. A man can't always most likely tell. Take a watermelon now. You can't tell how good it is till you thump it. Same way with a man, I've heard say."
He turned to the young woman, whose bright brown eyes were lingering upon him curiously. This was no novel experience to him. He wore his splendid youth so jauntily and yet so casually that the gaze of a girl was likely to be drawn in his direction a second and a third time. In spite of his youthfulness there was in his face a certain sun-and-wind-bitten maturity, a steadiness of the quiet eye that promised efficiency. The film actress sensed the same competent strength in the brown, untorn hand that assisted her to rise to her feet. His friendly smile showed the flash of white, regular teeth.
"The rube apologizes, ma'am. He's just in from Cactus Center and never did see one of those moving-picture outfits before. Thirty-eleven things were in sight as I happened round that bend, but the only one I glimmed was you being mistreated. Corking chance for a grandstand play. So I sailed in pronto. 'Course I should've known better, but I didn't."
Maisie Winters was the name of the young woman. She played the leads in one of the Southwest companies of the Lunar Film Manufacturers. Her charming face was known and liked on the screens of several continents. Now it broke into lines of mischievous amusement.
"I don't mind if Mr. Harrison doesn't." She flashed a gay, inquiring look toward that discomfited villain, who was leaning for support on his accomplice Jackson and glaring at Yeager. Impudently she tilted her chin back toward the puncher. "Are you always so—so impetuous? If so, there's a fortune waiting for you in the moving-picture field."
Yeager did not object to having so attractive a young woman as this one poke fun at him. He grinned joyfully.
"Me! I'm open to an engagement, ma'am."
The short fat man whom Maisie Winters had called Billie looked sharply at the cowpuncher out of shrewd gray eyes.
"Where you been working?" he demanded abruptly.
"With the Lone Star outfit."
"Get fired?"
"Company gone out of business—country getting too popular, what with homesteaders, forest rangers, and Mary's little lamb," explained Steve.
"Hm! Can you ride a bucker?"
"I can pull leather and kinder stick on."
"I'll try you out for a week at two-fifty a day if you like."
"You've hired Steve Yeager," promptly announced the owner of that name.
CHAPTER II
"ENOUGH'S A-PLENTY"
While driving his car back to Los Robles, Billie Threewit, producing director at the border studio of the Lunar Film Manufacturers, indulged in caustic comment on his own idiocy.
"Now, what in hell did I take on this Yeager rube for? He had just finished crabbing one scene. Wasn't that enough without me paying him good money to spoil more? Harrison's sore on him too. There's going to be trouble there. He ain't going to stand for that roughhouse stuff a little bit."
Frank Farrar, the camera man, took a more cheerful view of the situation.
"He's a find, if you ask me—the real thing in cowpunchers. And I don't know as this outfit has to be run to please Harrison. The big bully has got us all stepping sideways and tiptoeing so as not to offend him. I'm about fed up with the brute. Wish this rube would mop the earth up with him when Harrison gets gay."
"No chance. Harrison's a bully all right, but he's one grand little fighter too. You saw him clean up that bunch of greasers. He's there with both feet on the Marquis of Q. business, and don't you forget it. I put up with more from him than I ever did from a dozen other actors because he's so mean when he's sulky."
"Here too," agreed Farrar. "It's take your hat off when you speak to Mr. Chad Harrison. I can't yell at him that he's getting out of the picture; I've got to pull the Alphonse line of talk.—'Mr. Harrison, if you'd be so kind as to get that left hind hoof of yours six inches more to the right.' He makes me good and weary."
"He gets his stuff across good. Wasn't for that I wouldn't stand for him a minute. But we're down here, son, to get this three-reel Mexican war dope. As long as Harrison delivers the goods we'll have to put up with him."
"Well, I'm going to give this Yeager lad a tip what he's up against. Then if he wants to he can light out before Harrison gets to him."
Farrar was as good as his word. As soon as he reached the hotel he dropped around to the room where the new extra was staying. His knock brought no answer, but as the door was ajar the camera man stepped across the threshold.
Steve lay on the bed asleep, his lithe, compact figure stretched at negligent ease. The flannel shirt was open at the throat, the strong muscles of which sloped beautifully into the splendid shoulders. There was strength in the clean-cut jaw of the brown face. It was an easy guess that he had wandered by paths crooked as well as straight, that he had taken the loose pleasures of his kind joyously. But when he had followed forbidden trails it had been from the sheer youthful exuberance of life in him and not from weakness. Farrar judged that the heart of the young vagabond was sound, that the desert winds and suns had kept his head washed clean of shameful thoughts.
The cowpuncher opened his eyes. He looked at his visitor without speaking.
"Didn't expect to find you asleep," apologized the camera man.
Yeager got up and stretched his supple body in a yawn. "That's all right. Just making up the sleep I lost last night on the road. No matter a-tall."
He was in blue overalls, the worn shiny chaps tossed across the back of a chair. On the table lay the dusty, pinched-in hat, through the disreputable crown of which Farrar had lately seen a lock of his brindle hair rising like an aigrette.
"Glad to have you join us. We need riders like you. Say, it was worth five dollars to me to see the way you laid out Harrison."
The cowpuncher's boyish face clouded.
"I'm right sorry about that. It ce'tainly was a fool play. I don't blame Harrison for getting sore."
"He's sore all right. That's what I came to see you about. He's a rowdy, Harrison is. And he'll make you trouble."
"Most generally I don't pack a gun," Yeager observed casually.
"It won't be a gun play; not to start with, anyhow. He used to be a prizefighter. He'll beat you up."
"Well, it don't hurt a man's system to absorb a licking once in a blue moon."
The cowpuncher said it smilingly, with a manner of negligent competence that came from an experience of many dangers faced, of many perilous ways safely trodden.
Farrar had not yet quite discharged his mind. "There's nothing to prevent you from slipping round to the stable and pulling your freight quietly."
"Except that I don't want to," added the new extra. "No, sir. I've got a job and I'm staying with it. I'll sit here like a horned toad till the boss gives me my time."
The camera man beamed. To meet so debonair and care-free a