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  Title: Steve Yeager

  Author: William MacLeod Raine

  Release Date: August 16, 2006 [EBook #19055]

  Language: English

  *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STEVE YEAGER ***

  Produced by Roger Frank and the Distributed Proofreading

  Team at http://www.pgdp.net

  STEVE YEAGER

  BY

  WILLIAM MacLEOD RAINE

  NEW YORK

  GROSSET & DUNLAP

  PUBLISHERS

  Made in the United States of America

  * * *

  COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY WILLIAM MACLEOD RAINE

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  * * *

  Ruth

  * * *

  Contents

  I STEVE MAKES A MISTAKE 1

  II "ENOUGH'S A-PLENTY" 10

  III CHAD HARRISON 25

  IV THE EXTRA 33

  V YEAGER ASKS ADVICE 42

  VI PLUCKING A PIGEON 56

  VII STEVE TELLS TOO MUCH TRUTH 71

  VIII THE HEAVY GETS HIS TIME 79

  IX GABRIEL PASQUALE 86

  X A NIGHT VISIT 96

  XI CHAD DECIDES TO GET BUSY 112

  XII INTO THE DESERT 121

  XIII THE NIGHT TRAIL 131

  XIV THE CAVE MEN 140

  XV STEVE WINS A HAM SANDWICH 153

  XVI THE HEAVY PAYS A DEBT 166

  XVII PEDRO CABENZA 175

  XVIII HARRISON OVERPLAYS HIS HAND 181

  XIX THE TEXAN 194

  XX NEAR THE END OF HIS TRAIL 207

  XXI A STAGE PREPARED FOR TRAGEDY 216

  XXII A CONSPIRACY 223

  XXIII TRAPPED 229

  XXIV THE PRISONER 247

  XXV THE TEXAN TAKES A LONG JOURNEY 257

  XXVI AT SUNSET 266

  XXVII CULVERA RECONSIDERS 274

  XXVIII AS LONG AS LIFE 284

  * * *

  Steve Yeager

  CHAPTER I

  STEVE MAKES A MISTAKE

  Steve Yeager held his bronco to a Spanish trot. Somewhere in front of him, among the brown hill swells that rose and fell like waves of the sea, lay Los Robles and breakfast. One solitary silver dollar, too lonesome even to jingle, lay in his flatulent trouser pocket. After he and Four Bits had eaten, two quarters would take the place of the big cartwheel. Then would come dinner, a second transfer of capital, and his pocket would be empty as a cow's stomach after a long drive.

  Being dead broke, according to the viewpoint of S. Yeager, is right and fitting after a jaunt to town when one has a good job back in the hills. But it happened he had no more job than a rabbit. Wherefore, to keep up his spirits he chanted the endless metrical version of the adventures of Sam Bass, who

  "... started out to Texas a cowboy for to be,

  And a kinder-hearted fellow you scarcely ever'd see."

  Steve had not quit his job. It had quit him. A few years earlier the Lone Star Cattle Company had reigned supreme in Dry Sandy Valley and the territory tributary thereto. Its riders had been kings of the range. That was before the tide of settlement had spilled into the valley, before nesters had driven in their prairie schooners, homesteaded the water-holes, and strung barb-wire fences across the range. Line-riders and dry farmers and irrigators had pushed the cowpuncher to one side. Sheep had come bleating across the desert to wage war upon the cattle. Finally Uncle Sam had sliced off most of the acreage still left and called it a forest reserve.

  Wherefore the Lone Star outfit had thrown up its hands, sold its holdings, and moved to Los Angeles to live. Wherefore also Steve Yeager, who did not know Darwin from a carburetor, had by process of evolution been squeezed out of the occupation he had followed all of his twenty-three years since he could hang on to a saddle-horn. He had mournfully foreseen the end when the schoolhouse was built on Pine Knob and little folks went down the road with their arms twined around the waist of teacher. After grizzled Tim Sawyer made bowlegged tracks straight for that schoolmarm and matrimony, his friends realized that the joyous whoop of the puncher would not much longer be heard in the land. The range-rider must dwindle to a farmer or get off the earth. Steve was getting off the earth.

  Since Steve was of the sunburnt State, still a boy, and by temperament incurably optimistic, he sang cheerfully. He wanted to forget that he had eaten neither supper nor breakfast. So he carried Mr. Bass through many adventures till that genial bandit

  "... sold out at Custer City and there got on a spree,

  And a tougher lot of cowboys you never'd hope to see."

  Four Bits had topped a rise and followed the road down in its winding descent. After the nomadic fashion of Arizona the trail circled around a tongue of a foothill which here jutted out. Voices from just beyond the bend startled Yeager. One of them was raised impatiently.

  "Won't do, Harrison. Be rougher. Throw her on her knees and tie her hands."

  The itinerant road brought Steve in another moment within view. He saw a girl picking poppies. Two men rode up and swung from their saddles. They talked with her threateningly. She shrank back in fear. One of them seized her wrists and threw her down.

  "Lively, now. Into the pit with her. Get the stuff across," urged a short fat man with a cigar in his mouth who was standing ten or fifteen yards back from the scene of action.

  Steve had put his horse at a gallop the moment the girl had been seized. It struck him there was something queer about the affair,—something not quite natural to which he could not put a name. But he did not stop to reason out the situation. Dragging his pony to a slithering halt, he leaped to the ground.

  "Get busy, Jackson. You ain't in a restaurant waiting for a meal," the little fat man reminded one of his tools irritably. Then, as he caught sight of Steve, "What the hell!"

  Yeager's left shot forward, all the weight and muscle of one hundred and seventy pounds of live cowpuncher behind it. Villain Number One went to the ground as if a battering-ram had hit him between the eyes.

  "Lay hands on a lady, will you?"

  Steve turned to Villain Number Two, who backed away rapidly in alarm.

  "What's eatin' you? We ain't hurtin' her any, you mutt."

  The girl, still crouched on the ground, turned with a nervous little laugh to the man who had been directing operations:—

  "What d'you know about that, Billie? The rube swallowed it all. You gotta raise my salary."

  The cowpuncher felt in the pit of his stomach the same sensation he had known when an elevator in Denver had dropped beneath his feet too suddenly. The young woman was rouged and painted to the ears. Never in its palmiest days had the 'Dobe Dollar's mirrors reflected a costume more gaudy than the one she was wearing. The men too were painted and dolled up extravagantly in vaqueros' costumes that were the limit of absurdity. Had they all escaped from a madhouse? Or was he, Steve Yeager, in a pipe-dream?

  From a near grove of cottonwoods half a dozen men in chaps came running. Assured of their proximity, the fat little fellow pawed the air with rage.

  "Ever see such rotten luck? Spoiled the whole scene. Say, you Rip Van Winkle, think we came out here for the ozone?"

  One of the men joined the young woman, who was assisting the villain Yeager had knocked out. The others crowded around him in excitement, all expostulating at once. They were dressed wonderfully and amazingly as cowpunchers, but they were painted frauds in spite of the car
eful ostentation of their costumes. Steve's shiny leathers and dusty hat missed the picturesque, but he looked indigenous and they did not. He was at his restful ease, this slender, brown man, negligent, careless, eyes twinkling but alert. The brand of the West was stamped indelibly on him.

  "I ce'tainly must 'a' spilled the beans. Looks like I done barked up the wrong tree," he drawled amiably.

  A man who had been standing on a box behind some kind of a masked battery jumped down and joined the group.

  "Gee! I've got a bully picture of our anxious friend laying out Harrison. Nothing phony about that, Threewit. Won't go in this reel, but she'll make a humdinger in some other. Say, didn't Harrison hit the dust fine! Funny you lads can't ever pull off a fall like that."

  An annoyed voice, both raucous and sneering, interrupted his enthusiasm. "Just stick around, Mr. Camera Man, and you'll get a chance to do another bit of real life that ain't faked. I'm goin' to hammer the head off Buttinski presently."

  The camera man, an alert, boyish fellow as thin as a lath, turned and grinned. Harrison was sitting up a little unsteadily. Burning black eyes, set in sockets of extraordinary depths, blazed from a face sinister enough to justify Steve's impression of him as a villain. The shoulders of the man were very broad and set with the gorilla hunch; he was deep-chested and lean-loined. His eyes shifted with a quick, furtive menace. His companions might be imitation cowpunchers, but if Yeager was any judge this was no imitation bad man.

  "Going to eat him alive, are you?" the camera man wanted to know pleasantly.

  Steve pushed through to Harrison. A whimsical little smile of apology crinkled the boyish face.

  "It's on me, compadre. I'm a rube, and anything else you like. And I sure am sorry for going off half-cocked."

  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 specimen of humanity warmed the cockles of his heart.

  "I'll bet you're some scrapper yourself," he suggested.

  "Oh, no. He'll lick me, I reckon. Say, what do they hold you up for at this hacienda?"

  The lank camera man supplied information, adding that he knew of a good cheap boarding-place where one or two of the company put up.

  "If you say so, I'll take you right round there."

  Yeager reached promptly for his hat. "You talk like a dollar's worth of nickels rattling out of a slot machine—right straight to the point."

  They walked together down the white, dusty street, crossed the outskirts of the old Mexican adobe town, and came to a suburb of bungalows. In front of one of these Farrar stopped. He unlatched the gate.