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."