Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1920)

Photoplay Magazine his head as one in sadness, then held out Lane's watch to Echo. Echo slowly reached out for the watch, awe-stricken and wide-eyed. Jack was still suspicious. "We are waitin' to hear the details, Buck McKee."' McKee replied to Jack with a faint smile, then launched into a graphic story of falling in with Dick Lane in the mountains, of standing shoulder to shoulder with the prospector in a fight against the Apaches, and how Dick fell at last, shot through and through. "And that's the way it was. Miss. I done my best by him, but the odds was too heavy."' Buck McKee ended his story with a heavy sigh. The outlaw's dramatic recital won his audience. Bud was the first to speak. He crossed over to McKee and held out his hand. "You put up a game light to save my brother. Buck— sand from now on I'm going to stand by you — even if the whole world is against you." "Now, you come off your .high horse, Mr. Hall-breed, or you'll be leaving for Mexico again, right away," Sheriff Slim warned. And be it said Slim's word was known to be backed by a stout heart and the most .remarkable ability with the instrument known as Colonel Colt's patent ventilator. The sheriff could sign his nr.me in bullet patterns on a shed at fifty paces. The anemone was blooming in the uplands when Echo and Jack Payson rode in at the Bar-i and announced their engagement to her parents. Uncle Jim and Josephine. The weddin;; date was set for June, "the month when the swell folks back East do their hitchin' up." When Jack rode back to the Sweetwater ranch that cveninc he found a pile of newly arrived mail on his desk. He fumbled it over, with his thoughts still awhirl with his coming marriagi . He came across an envelope addressed to him in a familiar handwriting and postmarked "Chihuahua, Mexico.'' Trembling and assailed with a flood of misgivings, he tore the letter open and read it feverishly. It closed: WHILE this scene was being enacted at the Bar-i ranch in Pinal County, far to the south and over the border Buck McKee's victim, Dick Lane, lay staring at the ceiling in the Chihuahua hospital, wondering who he was. But soon the snows of winter passed from the banks of the Sweetwater and in the joys of the spring old sorrows faded. The love of Echo and Jack Payson bloomed with the coming of the spring and the dimming of the memory of the Dick Lane that was. And meanwhile Buck IMcKee and Bud Lane were fast becoming comrades with results that promised ill for Bud. Much too otten they were together at the bar in Florence and more than once William Henry Harrison Hoover, more familiarly known as "Slim"' because of his three hundred genial pounds, acting in the capacity and office of sheriff of Pinal County, had to start ]„ ^ fia^j, siim covered the half them on their road home, incurring as breed with a revolver and swept often the resentment of McKee. the mob with its mate. ' — Buck !McKee and his gang of Apaches. But am better now and as soon as I can arrange to sell one of my claims, will be home. Please break it gently to Echo and give her the letter I enclose. Your old bunkie, "Dick Lane." Jack Payson stood long at his window staring out across the Sweetwater acres with dazed eyes. A terrific inward battle was raging. He was confronted with the necessity of choosing between the happiness of himself and the woman he loved, or that of his best friend. The selfish cause won. Slowly Payson tore the two letters into tiny bits. Out in the ranch yard Jack caught sight of Bud Lane, staggering in from his latest debauch with Buck McKee. Recalling with a mingling of blazing hate and burning remorse what Lane had written him of Buck McKee.