Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Aug 1920)

62 A Broadway Cowboy "Hands up!" It was a girl's voice that shouted it. then it came was not her was expelled ! Colonel Jordan, bank, and quite the stormed, but it was Betty; all she did her dimples coming and his blustering out that Randolph cousin, and poor Betty her father, president of the big man of his own town, hopeless to try to scold was to smile at him, with and going in her cheeks, ended up by his taking her or a him. in his arms and kissing her, being, as he told Sheriff McGann, "dog-goned glad to get her back !" From then on, instead of driving with Betty, Randolph wrote letters to her, and finally, the day that the show went on the road, he sent her a picture of himself dressed in all his Western regalia,, big hat, six-gun hanging from his hip, and leather chaps. "I'll be in Winslow some time about two months from now," he said in his letter. "And until then I'm not going to eat or sleep or breathe until I see you again." No one was in the dressing room, so he kissed the letter, almost believing that it was the first letter that had ever been kissed, and fondly hoping that Betty would know about it. The photograph appeared, as if by magic, on the piano in the colonel's "parlor," where Betty could look at it while she played jazz for the admiring sheriff. There was no doubt, in Pat McGann's mind, that he had the inside track to Betty's affections, and when his manifold duties would allow it, he spent his time in dreaming of a home where she would x:ook his flapjacks and coffee, thus freeing him from the "eatin' place," of Winslow. He was a good man, and a perfectly honest sheriff, but like many a good man before him, the little green-eyed god of jealousy blurred the. path of duty, and he fell. The photograph was responsible. In his long, lanky way, Pat wasn't very quick, and it took him six weeks to discover the photograph standing on the piano. "Huh !" he exclaimed, as he picked it up. "Who is this guy ? A hoss thief ?" "A horse thief !" Betty gasped indignantly. "Well, I like that ! He's — well, it's none of your business who it is ! Give me that photograph !" "Huh !" Pat grunted again. "Y'u seem powerful anxious." He put the picture behind his back, and Betty, with crimson cheeks, made a grab for it. "I know y'u're powerful anxious !" the sheriff decided, and forthwith proceeded to shove the photograph inside his shirt. Betty wailed and cried and threatened, but she didn't get back the photograph. Instead Pat took it with him to his office, which connected with the jail, and held a conference with McGuire, his one prisoner. "Look here, Mac?" he wanted to know, holding the photograph off at arm's length and scowling into the smiling face of Randolph. "Is that bird any better lookin' than me ?" Mac scratched his chin and gave judicious thought. "Well," he finally drawled, "I guess he is. 'Cept he' looks like a hoss thief, in them clothes." "You guess he is, do you?" Pat roared. "Well, you can just get back in the cell, and stay there !" After Mac's departure, Pat continued his study of the picture, reaching the comforting conclusion that the man in the photograph was about as homely as a Mexican donkey skew-bald pinto. But this thought didn't help No, this here son of a gun was roaming loose somewhere through the country. Probably working on some of the near-by ranges, and it would not be long before he rode into Winslow and called at Colonel Jordan's. Then Betty would have another audience for the jazz. They were not pleasant thoughts, and Pat searched vainly through his mind for some way to forestall such a contingency. If he could only stop him — and then a brilliant scheme entered the sheriff's head. He would stop him all right, stop him for keeps. With this end in view he had some copies made of the photograph and on the backs of these he wrote: "Burke Randolph Wanted for Murder. Arrest on sight and notify Sheriff Pat McGann, Winslow." Sticking each one into an envelope and addressing them to the different sheriffs about the county, he walked over to the post office and dropped them in the box. "That cow-puncher'll have a fat chance of reachin' Winslow," he observed sourly. "And if I see him, me an' him are goin' to have an argument that'll be the last one he'll ever take part in!" In the meantime "A Western Knight" had made the same popular appeal to the country at large that it had on Broadway. Things had been going well until one day when a hasty stage hand grabbed Randolph's trunk out of his dressing room, slipped it on a truck, and it was trundled away to the station and so aboard a train, before Randolph had changed from his stage costume. "No one will pay any attention to you," the manager said, when Randolph, the following morning on the train, demanded that something be done. "You mean to say," Randolph howled, "that I've got to wear this confounded rig into Winslow? And be seen by " "By who ?" the manager wanted to know. "Shut up!" Randolph exclaimed, and walked to the other end of the car as the train slowed down at a station that seemed to be more than usually woe-begone. "Moose Run!" he read on the sign over the