er 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