William MacLeod Raine - The Big Town Round Up

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THE BIG-TOWN ROUND-UP

by

WILLIAM MACLEOD RAINE

Author of
A Man Four-Square, The Sheriff's Son, Oh, You Tex!, Etc.

Frontispiece by George Giguere

[Frontispiece: Hard knuckles pressed cruelly into the
soft throat of the Villager. (Transcriber's note: most
of illustration missing; enough of its caption remaining
to locate its entirety in the book's text).]

Grosset & Dunlap
Publishers New York
Made in the United States of America
Copyright, 1920, by William Macleod Raine
All Rights Reserved

CONTENTS

FOREWORD
I. CONCERNING A STREET TWELVE MILES LONG
II. CLAY APPOINTS HIMSELF CHAPERON
III. THE BIG TOWN
IV. A NEW USE FOR A WATER HOSE
V. A CONTRIBUTION TO THE SALVATION ARMY
VI. CLAY TAKES A TRANSFER
VII. ARIZONA FOLLOWS ITS LAWLESS IMPULSE
VIII. "THE BEST SINGLE-BARRELED SPORT IVER I MET"
IX. BEATRICE UP STAGE
X. JOHNNIE SEES THE POSTMASTER
XI. JOHNNIE GREEN--MATCH-MAKER
XII. CLAY READS AN AD AND ANSWERS IT
XIII. A LATE EVENING CALL
XIV. STARRING AS A SECOND-STORY MAN
XV. THE GANGMAN SEES RED
XVI. A FACE IN THE NIGHT
XVII. JOHNNIE MAKES A JOKE
XVIII. BEATRICE GIVES AN OPTION
XIX. A LADY WEARS A RING
XX. THE CAUTIOUS GUY SLIPS UP
XXI. AT THE HEAD OF THE STAIRS
XXII. TWO MEN IN A LOCKED ROOM
XXIII. JOHNNIE COMES INTO HIS OWN
XXIV. CLAY LAYS DOWN THE LAW
XXV. JOHNNIE SAYS HE IS MUCH OBLIGED
XXVI. A LOCKED GATE
XXVII. "NO VIOLENCE"
XXVIII. IN BAD
XXIX. BAD NEWS
XXX. BEE MAKES A MORNING CALL
XXXI. INTO THE HANDS OF HIS ENEMY
XXXII. MR. LINDSAY RECEIVES
XXXIII. BROMFIELD MAKES AN OFFER
XXXIV. BEATRICE QUALIFIES AS A SHERLOCK HOLMES
XXXV. TWO AND TWO MAKE FOUR
XXXVI. A BOOMERANG
XXXVII. ON THE CARPET
XXXVIII. A CONVERSATION ABOUT STOCK
XXXIX. IN CENTRAL PARK
XL. CLAY PLAYS SECOND FIDDLE
XLI. THE NEW DAY

THE BIG-TOWN ROUND-UP

FOREWORD

The driver of the big car throttled down. Since he had swung away from
the dusty road to follow a wagon track across the desert, the
speedometer had registered many miles. His eyes searched the ground in
front to see whether the track led up the brow of the hill or dipped
into the sandy wash.

On the breeze there floated to him the faint, insistent bawl of thirsty
cattle. The car leaped forward again, climbed the hill, and closed in
upon a _remuda_ of horses watched by two wranglers.

The chauffeur stopped the machine and shouted a question at the nearest
rider, who swung his mount and cantered up. He was a lean, tanned
youth in overalls, jumper, wide sombrero, high-heeled boots, and shiny
leather chaps. A girl in the tonneau appraised with quick, eager eyes
this horseman of the plains. Perhaps she found him less picturesque
than she had hoped. He was not there for moving-picture purposes.
Nothing on horse or man held its place for any reason except utility.
The leathers protected the legs of the boy from the spines of the
cactus and the thorns of the mesquite, the wide flap of the hat his
face from the slash of catclaws when he drove headlong through the
brush after flying cattle. The steel horn of the saddle was built to
check a half-ton of bolting hill steer and fling it instantly. The
rope, the Spanish bit, the _tapaderas_, all could justify their place
in his equipment.

"Where's the round-up?" asked the driver.

The coffee-brown youth gave a little lift of his head to the right. He
was apparently a man of few words. But his answer sufficed. The
bawling of anxious cattle was now loud and persistent.

The car moved forward to the edge of the mesa and dropped into the
valley. The girl in the back seat gave a little scream of delight.
Here at last was the West she had read about in books and seen on the
screen.

This was Cattleland's hour of hours. The _parada_ grounds were
occupied by two circles of cattle, each fenced by eight or ten
horsemen. The nearer one was the beef herd, beyond this--and closer to
the mouth of the canon from which they had all recently been
driven--was a mass of closely packed cows and calves.

The automobile swept around the beef herd and drew to a halt between it
and the noisier one beyond. In a fire of mesquite wood branding-irons
were heating. Several men were busy branding and marking the calves
dragged to them from the herd by the horsemen who were roping the
frightened little blatters.

It was a day beautiful even for Arizona. The winey air called potently
to the youth in the girl. Such a sky, such atmosphere, so much life
and color! She could not sit still any longer. With a movement of her
wrist she opened the door and stepped down from the car.

A man sitting beside the chauffeur turned in his seat. "You'd better
stay where you are, honey." He had an idea that this was not exactly
the scene a girl of seventeen ought to see at close range.

"I want to get the kinks out of my muscles, Dad," the girl called back.
"I'll not go far."

She walked along a ridge that ran from the mesa into the valley like an
outstretched tongue. Her hands were in the pockets of her fawn-colored
coat. There was a touch of unstudied jauntiness in the way the tips of
her golden curls escaped from beneath the little brown toque she wore.
A young man guarding the beef herd watched her curiously. She moved
with the untamed, joyous freedom of a sun-worshiper just emerging from
the morning of the world. Something in the poise of the light, boyish
figure struck a spark from his imagination.

A _vaquero_ was cantering toward the fire with a calf in his wake.
Another cowpuncher dropped the loop of his lariat on the ground, gave
it a little upward twist as the calf passed over it, jerked taut the
_riata_, and caught the animal by the hind leg. In a moment the victim
lay stretched on the ground. In the gathering gloom the girl could not
quite make out what the men were doing. To her sensitive nostrils
drifted an acrid odor of burnt hair and flesh, the wail of an animal in
pain. One of the men was using his knife on the ears of the helpless
creature. She heard another say something about a crop and an
underbit. Then she turned away, faint and indignant. Three big men
torturing a month-old calf--was this the brave outdoor West she had
read about and remembered from her childhood days? Tears of pity and
resentment blurred her sight.

As she stood on the spit of the ridge, a slim, light figure silhouetted
against the skyline, the young man guarding the beef herd called
something to her that was lost in the bawling of the cattle. From the
motion of his hand she knew that he was telling her to get back to the
car. But the girl saw no reason for obeying the orders of a
range-rider she had never seen before and never expected to see again.
Nobody had ever told her that a rider is fairly safe among the wildest
hill cattle, but a man on foot is liable to attack at any time when a
herd is excited.

She turned her shoulder a little more definitely to the man who had
warned her and looked across the _parada_ grounds to the hills swimming
in a haze of violet velvet. Her heart throbbed to a keen delight in
them, as it might have done at the touch of a dear friend's hand long
absent. For she had been born in the Rockies. They belonged to her
and she to them. Long years in New York had left her still an alien.

A shout of warning startled her. Above the bellowing of the herd she
heard another yell.

"Hi-yi-ya-a!"

A red-eyed steer, tail up, was crashing through the small brush toward
the branders. There was a wild scurry for safety. The men dropped
iron and ropes and fled to their saddles. Deflected by pursuers, the
animal turned. By chance it thundered straight for the girl on the
sand spit.

She stood paralyzed for a moment.

Out of the gathering darkness a voice came to her sharp and clear.
"Don't move!" It rang so vibrant with crisp command that the girl,
poised for flight, stood still and waited in white terror while the
huge steer lumbered toward her.

A cowpony, wheeled as on a dollar, jumped to an instant gallop. The
man riding it was the one who had warned her back to the car. Horse
and _ladino_ pounded over the ground toward her. Each stride brought
them closer to each other as they converged toward the sand spit. It
came to her with a gust of panicky despair that they would collide on
the very spot where she stood. Yet she did not run.

The rider, lifting his bronco forward at full speed, won by a fraction
of a second. He guided in such a way as to bring his horse between her
and the steer. The girl noticed that he dropped his bridle rein and
crouched in the saddle, his eyes steadily upon her. Without slackening
his pace in the least as he swept past, the man stooped low, caught the
girl beneath the armpits, and swung her in front of him to the back of
the horse. The steer pounded past so close behind that one of its
horns grazed the tail of the cowpony.

It was a superb piece of horsemanship, perfectly timed, as perfectly
executed.

The girl lay breathless in the arms of the man, her heart beating
against his, her face buried in his shoulder. She was dazed, half
fainting from the reaction of her fear. The next she remembered
clearly was being lowered into the arms of her father.

He held her tight, his face tortured with emotion. She was the very
light of his soul, and she had shaved death by a hair's breadth. A
miracle had saved her, but he would never forget the terror that had
gripped him. Naturally, shaken, as he was, his relief found vent in
scolding.

"I told you to stay by the car, honey. But you're so willful. You've
got to have your own way. Thank God you're safe. If . . . if . . ."
His voice broke as he thought of what had so nearly been.

The girl snuggled closer to him, her arms round his neck. His anxiety
touched her nearly, and tears flooded her eyes.

"I know, Dad. I . . . I'll be good."

A young man descended from the car, handsome, trim, and well got up.
He had been tailored by the best man's outfitter in New York. Nobody
on Broadway could order a dinner better than he. The latest dances he
could do perfectly. He had the reputation of knowing exactly the best
thing to say on every occasion. Now he proceeded to say it.

"Corking bit of riding--never saw better. I'll give you my hand on
that, my man."

The cowpuncher found a bunch of manicured fingers in his rough brown
paw. He found something else, for after the pink hand had gone there
remained a fifty-dollar bill. He looked at it helplessly for a moment;
then, beneath the brown outdoor tan, a flush of anger beat into his
face. Without a word he leaned forward and pressed the note into the
mouth of the bronco.

The buckskin knew its master for a very good friend. If he gave it
something to eat--well, there was no harm in trying it once. The
buckskin chewed placidly for a few seconds, decided that this was a
practical joke, and ejected from its mouth a slimy green pulp that had
recently been a treasury note.

The father stammered his thanks to the rescuer of the girl. "I don't
know what I can ever do to let you know . . . I don't know how I can
ever pay you for saving . . ."

"Forget it!" snapped the brown man curtly. He was an even-tempered
youth, as genial and friendly as a half-grown pup, but just now the
word "pay" irritated him as a red rag does a sulky bull.

"If there's anything at all I can do for you--"

"Not a thing."

The New Yorker felt that he was not expressing himself at all happily.
What he wanted was to show this young fellow that he had put him under
a lifelong obligation he could never hope to wipe out.

"If you ever come to New York--"

"I'm not liable to go there. I don't belong there any more than you do
here. Better drift back to Tucson, stranger. The _parada_ is no place
for a tenderfoot. You're in luck you're not shy one li'l' girl tromped
to death. Take a fool's advice and hit the trail for town _pronto_
before you bump into more trouble."

The rider swung round his pony and cantered back to the beef herd.

He left behind him a much-annoyed clubman, a perplexed and distressed
father, and a girl both hurt and indignant at his brusque rejection of
her father's friendly advances. The episode of the fifty-dollar bill
had taken place entirely under cover. The man who had given the note
and the one who had refused to accept it were the only ones who knew of
it. The girl saw only that this splendid horseman who had snatched her
from under the very feet of the _ladino_ had shown a boorish
discourtesy. The savor had gone out of her adventure. Her heart was
sick with disappointment and indignation.

CHAPTER I

CONCERNING A STREET TWELVE MILES LONG

"I like yore outfit," Red Hollister grumbled. "You're nice boys, and
good to yore mothers--what few of you ain't wore their gray hairs to
the grave with yore frolicsome ways. You know yore business and you
got a good cook. But I'm darned if I like this thing of two meals a
day, one at a quarter to twelve at night and the other a quarter past
twelve, also and likewise at night."

A tenderfoot might have thought that Hollister had some grounds for
complaint. For weeks he had been crawling out of his blankets in the
pre-dawn darkness of 3 A.M. He had sat shivering down beside a
camp-fire to swallow a hurried breakfast and had swung into the saddle
while night was still heavy over the land. He had ridden after cattle
wild as deer and had wrestled with _ladino_ steers till long after the
stars were up. In the chill night he had eaten another meal, rolled up
in his blankets, and fallen into instant heavy sleep. And five minutes
later--or so at least it seemed to him--the cook had pounded on the
triangle for him to get up.

None the less Red's grumbling was a pretense. He would not have been
anywhere else for twice the pay. This was what he lived for.

Johnnie Green, commonly known as "the Runt," helped himself to another
flank steak. He was not much of a cow-hand, but when it came to eating
Johnnie was always conscientiously on the job.

"These here New Yorkers must be awful hardy," he ventured, apropos of
nothing. "Seems like they're night birds for fair. Never do go to
bed, far as I can make out. They tromp the streets all day and dance
at them cabby-rets all night. My feet would be all wore out."

Stace Wallis grinned. "So would my pocketbook. I've heard tell how a
fellow can pay as high as four or five dollars for an eat at them
places."

"Nothin' to it--nothin' a-tall," pronounced Red dogmatically.
Hollister always knew everything. Nothing in the heavens above or the
earth below could stump him. The only trouble with his knowledge was
that he knew so much that wasn't true. "Can't be did. Do you reckon
any o' them New Yorkers could get away with five dollars' worth of ham
and aigs? Why, the Runt here couldn't eat more'n a dollar's worth."

"Sure," assented Johnnie. It was the habit of his life to agree with
the last speaker. "You're damn whistlin', Red. Why, at the Harvey
House they only charge a dollar for a square, and a man couldn't get a
better meal than that."

"Onct in Denver, when I went to the stock show, I blowed myself for a
meal at the Cambridge Hotel that set me back one-fifty," said Slim
Leroy reminiscently. "They et dinner at night."

"They did?" scoffed Johnnie. "Don't they know a fellow eats dinner at
noon and supper at night?"

"I ain't noticed any dinner at noon for se-ve-real weeks," Hollister
contributed.

"Some feed that," ruminated Leroy, with memories of the Cambridge Hotel
still to the fore.

"With or without?" questioned Red.

"I reckon I had one li'l' drink with it. No more."

"Then they stung you," pronounced Hollister.

"Mebbeso, and mebbe not. I ain't kickin' none. I sure was in tony
society. There was fellows sittin' at a table near us that had on them
swallow-tail coats."

Johnnie ventured a suggestion. "Don't you reckon if a fellow et a
couple o' plates of this here cavi-eer stuff and some ice cream and
cake, he might run it up to two bucks or two and a half? Don't you
reckon he might, Clay?"

Clay Lindsay laughed. "You boys know a lot about New York, just about
as much as I do. I've read that a guy can drop a hundred dollars a
night in a cabaret if he has a friend or two along, and never make a
ripple on Broadway."

"Does that look reasonable to you, Clay?" argued Red. "We're not
talkin' about buckin' the tiger or buyin' diamonds for no actresses.
We're figurin' on a guy goin' out with some friends to eat and take a
few drinks and have a good time. How could he spend fifty dollars--let
alone a hundred--if he let the skirts and the wheel alone and didn't
tamper with no straight flushes?"

"I'm tellin' you what I read. Take it or leave it," said Clay amiably.

"Well, I read there's a street there twelve miles long. If a fellow
started at one end of that street with a thirst he'd sure be salivated
before he reached the other end of it," Stace said with a grin.

"Wonder if a fellow could get a job there. They wouldn't have no use
for a puncher, I reckon," Slim drawled.

"Betcha Clay could get a job all right," answered Johnnie Green
promptly. "He'd be top hand anywhere, Clay would."

Johnnie was the lost dog of the B-in-a-Box ranch. It was his nature to
follow somebody and lick his hand whenever it was permitted. The
somebody he followed was Clay Lindsay. Johnnie was his slave, the echo
of his opinions, the booster of his merits. He asked no greater
happiness than to trail in the wake of his friend and get a kind word
occasionally.

The Runt had chosen as his Admirable Crichton a most engaging youth.
It never had been hard for any girl to look at Clay Lindsay. His
sun-tanned, good looks, the warmth of his gay smile, the poise and the
easy stride of him, made Lindsay a marked man even in a country where
men of splendid physique were no exception.

"I'd take a li'l' bet that New York ain't lookin' for no champeen
ropers or bronco-busters," said Stace. "Now if Clay was a cabby-ret
dancer or a Wall Street wolf--"

"There's no street in the world twelve miles long where Clay couldn't
run down and hogtie a job if he wanted to," insisted Johnnie loyally.
"Ain't that right, Clay?"

Clay was not listening. His eyes were watching the leap of the fire
glow. The talk of New York had carried him back to a night on the
round-up three years before. He was thinking about a slim girl
standing on a sand spit with a wild steer rushing toward her, of her
warm, slender body lying in his arms for five immortal seconds, of her
dark, shy eyes shining out of the dusk at him like live coals. He
remembered--and it hurt him to recall it--how his wounded pride had
lashed out in resentment of the patronage of these New Yorkers. The
younger man had insulted him, but he knew in his heart now that the
girl's father had meant nothing of the kind. Of course the girl had
forgotten him long since. If he ever came to her mind as a fugitive
memory it would be in the guise of a churlish boor as impossible as his
own hill cattle.

"Question is, could you land a job in New York if you wanted one,"
explained Stace to the dreamer.

"If it's neck meat or nothin' a fellow can 'most always get somethin'
to do," said Lindsay in the gentle voice he used. The vague impulses
of many days crystallized suddenly into a resolution. "Anyhow I'm
goin' to try. Soon as the _rodeo_ is over I'm goin' to hit the trail
for the big town."

"Tucson?" interpreted Johnnie dubiously.

"New York."

The bow-legged little puncher looked at his friend and gasped. Denver
was the limit of Johnnie's imagination. New York was _terra
incognita_, inhabited by a species who were as foreign to him as if
they had dwelt in Mars.

"You ain't really aimin' to go to New York sure enough?" he asked.

Clay flashed on him the warm smile that endeared him to all his
friends. "I'm goin' to ride down Broadway and shoot up the town,
Johnnie. Want to come along?"

CHAPTER II

CLAY APPOINTS HIMSELF CHAPERON

As he traveled east Clay began to slough the outward marks of his
calling. He gave his spurs to Johnnie before he left the ranch. At
Tucson he shed his chaps and left them in care of a friend at the
Longhorn Corral. The six-gun with which he had shot rattlesnakes he
packed into his suitcase at El Paso. His wide-rimmed felt hat flew off
while the head beneath it was stuck out of a window of the coach
somewhere south of Denver. Before he passed under the Welcome Arch in
that city the silk kerchief had been removed from his brown neck and
retired to the hip pocket which formerly held his forty-five.

The young cattleman began to flatter himself that nobody could now tell
he was a wild man from the hills who had never been curried. He might
have spared himself the illusion. Everybody he met knew that this
clean-cut young athlete, with the heavy coat of tan on his good-looking
face, was a product of the open range. The lightness of his stride,
the breadth of the well-packed shoulders, the frankness of the steady
eyes, all advertised him a son of Arizona.

It was just before noon at one of the small plains towns east of Denver
that a girl got on the train and was taken by the porter to a section
back of Clay Lindsay. The man from Arizona noticed that she was
refreshingly pretty in an unsophisticated way.

A little later he had a chance to confirm this judgment, for the
dining-car manager seated her opposite him at a table for two. When
Clay handed her the menu card she murmured "Thank you!" with a rush of
color to her cheeks and looked helplessly at the list in her hand.
Quite plainly she was taking her first long journey.

"Do I have to order everything that is here?" she presently asked shyly
after a tentative and furtive glance at her table companion.

Clay felt no inclination to smile at her naivete. He was not very much
more experienced than she was in such things, but his ignorance of
forms never embarrassed him. They were details that seemed to him to
have no importance.

The cowpuncher helped her fill the order card. She put herself
entirely in his hands and was willing to eat whatever he suggested
unbiased by preferences of her own. He included chicken salad and ice
cream. From the justice she did her lunch he concluded that his choice
had been a wise one.

She was a round, soft, little person with constant intimations of a
childhood not long outgrown. Dimples ran in and out her pink cheeks at
the slightest excuse. The blue eyes were innocently wide and the
Cupid's-bow mouth invitingly sweet. The girl from Brush, Colorado, was
about as worldly-wise as a plump, cooing infant or a fluffy kitten, and
instinctively the eye caressed her with the same tenderness.

During the course of lunch she confided that her name was Kitty Mason,
that she was an orphan, and that she was on her way to New York to
study at a school for moving-picture actresses.

"I sent my photograph and the manager wrote back that my face was one
hundred per cent perfect for the movies," the girl explained.

It was clear that she was expecting to be manufactured into a film star
in a week or two. Clay doubted whether the process was quite so easy,
even with a young woman who bloomed in the diner like a rose of the
desert.

After they had finished eating, the range-rider turned in at the
smoking compartment and enjoyed a cigar. He fell into casual talk with
an army officer who had served in the Southwest, and it was three hours
later when he returned to his own seat in the car.

A hard-faced man in a suit of checks more than a shade too loud was
sitting in the section beside the girl from Brush. He was making talk
in an assured, familiar way, and the girl was listening to him shyly
and yet eagerly. The man was a variation of a type known to Lindsay.
That type was the Arizona bad-man. If this expensively dressed fellow
was not the Eastern equivalent of the Western gunman, Clay's experience
was badly at fault. The fishy, expressionless eyes, the colorless
face, the tight-lipped jaw, expressed a sinister personality and a
dangerous one. Just now a suave good-humor veiled the evil of him, but
the cowpuncher knew him for a wolf none the less.

Clay had already made friends with the Pullman conductor. He drifted
to him now on the search for information.

"The hard-faced guy with the little girl?" he asked casually after the
proffer of a cigar. "The one with the muscles bulging out all over
him--who is he?"

"He comes by that tough mug honestly. That's Jerry Durand."

"The prize-fighter?"

"Yep. Used to be. He's a gang leader in New York now. On his way
back from the big fight in 'Frisco."

"He was some scrapper," admitted the range-rider. "Almost won the
championship once, didn't he?"

"Lost on a foul. He always was a dirty fighter. I saw him the time he
knocked out Reddy Moran."

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