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242
The Aryan
open the door. Quiet settled on the crowd. Steve strode across the rough floor and flung himself into a chair. A big, swarthy, shifty-eyed fellow, with drooping black mustache, joined him. This was Mexican Pete, his second in command, as notorious a ruffian as ever escaped the noose.
"What's this I hear about homesteaders, Pete ?" asked Steve.
"Trixie's been tellin' you, eh?"
''Never mind who told me. What about them?"
"They're goin' on to a mile beyond
Yellow Ridge to take up a section of gov'ment lands. Water an' chuck give out. Sent a depitation for help."
"And you told them— "
"To drink all they wanted, but wouldn't let 'em take a drop to their women. Kinder thought that's how yuh felt about women, ain't it?"
"Women !" said Steve. "They're vampires, all of them. Let them die on the desert, if they want to."
But an hour afterward, Steve Denton was compelled to reverse himself. He sat in the big chuck house, cynically eying a dozen of the world's degenerates gulping coffee and making jest of the plight of the homesteaders. Sud
denly he found a girl in a dainty print frock standing at his elbow. Scarcely more than a child she was, with blue eyes that sparkled with the wholesomeness of clean girlhood. A sunbonnet had fallen back from her small, wellformed head, and the sunlight made a glory of her lustrous, fair hair.
He stared at her in bewilderment. "Who are you? Aren't you afraid to come here?" he rasped.
"Afraid? No," she answered, smiling. "I belong with the homesteaders. When our men brought back word that you would not help us, I knew there must be some mistake. So I came myself, and made them take me to the chief man of the town."
"You made them take you ?" Steve ejaculated.
"Of course." Again the bewildering smile. "No one molested me." She put her hand on his shoulder. "They told me von were known as a bad man, but
The reflection showed a big, cruel-mouthed man, who sat huddled up in a chair.
when I look into your eyes I cannot believe that. Please, please, vou will help us?"
He brushed a hand across his forehead and rose stiffly. Without a word,