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STEVE YEAGER
BY
WILLIAM MACLEOD RAINE
NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS
Made in the United States of America
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COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY WILLIAM MACLEOD RAINE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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[Illustration: RUTH]
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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
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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 careful
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.