grin. "Every time I open my mouth my face cracks. You ce'tainly did
give me a proper trimming. I don't know sic-'em about this scientific
fight game."

Harrison scowled. "There's more at the same address any time you need
it."

"Not if I see you coming in time to make a getaway," retorted Steve with
a laugh.

As the range-rider passed lightly down 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