He and Farrar walked back to the hotel together. Harrison was waiting
for them on the porch. As soon as he caught sight of the cowpuncher he
strode forward. The straight line of his set mouth looked like a gash in
a melon.
"Will you have it here or back of the garage?" he demanded, getting
straight to business.
"Any place that suits you," agreed Steve affably. "Won't the bulls pinch
us if we do a roughhouse here?"
Harrison turned with triumphant malice to Farrar.
"Get your camera. You say you don't like phony stuff. Good enough. I'll
pull off the real goods for you in licking a rube. There's plenty of
room back of the garage."
The camera man protested. "See here, Harrison. Yeager ain't looking for
trouble. He told you he was sorry. It was an accident. What's the use of
bearing a grudge?"
The heavy glared at him. "You in this, Mr. Farrar? You're liable to have
a heluvatime if you butt into my business without an invite. Shack--and
git that camera."
Yeager nodded to his new friend. "Go ahead and get it. We'll be waiting
back of the garage."
Farrar hesitated, the professional instinct in him awake and active.
"If you're dead keen on a mix-up, Harrison, why not come over to the
studio where I can get the best light? We'll make an indoor set of it."
"Go you," promptly agreed Harrison. His vanity craved a picture of him
thrashing the extra, a good one that the public could see and that he
could afterwards gloat over himself.
Yeager laughed in his slow way. "I'm to be massa-creed to make a Roman
holiday, am I? All right. Might as well begin earning that two-fifty per
I've been promised."
The news spread, as if on the wings of the wind. Before Farrar had a
stage arranged to suit him and his camera ready, a dozen members of the
company drifted in with a casual manner of having arrived accidentally.
Fleming Lennox, leading man, appeared with Cliff Manderson, chief
comedian for the Lunar border company. Baldy Cummings, the property man,
strolled leisurely in to look over some costumes. But Steve observed
that he was panting rapidly.
As he sat on a soap box waiting for Farrar to finish his preparations,
Yeager became aware that Lennox was watching him closely. He did not
know that the leading man would cheerfully have sacrificed a week's
salary to see Harrison get the trimming he needed. The handsome young
film actor was an athlete, a trained boxer, but the ex-prizefighter had
given him the thrashing of his life two months before. He simply had
lacked the physical stamina to weather the blows that came from those
long, gorilla-like arms with the weight of the heavy, rounded shoulders
back of them. The fight had not lasted five minutes.
"Shapes well," murmured Manderson, nodding toward the new extra.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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