"Except that I don't want to," added the new extra. "No, sir. I've got a
job and I'm staying with it. I'll sit here like a horned toad till the
boss gives me my time."

The camera man beamed. To meet so debonair and care-free a specimen of
humanity warmed the cockles of his heart.

"I'll bet you're some scrapper yourself," he suggested.

"Oh, no. He'll lick me, I reckon. Say, what do they hold you up for at
this hacienda?"

The lank camera man supplied information, adding that he knew of a good
cheap boarding-place where one or two of the company put up.

"If you say so, I'll take you right round there."

Yeager reached promptly for his hat. "You talk like a dollar's worth of
nickels rattling out of a slot machine--right straight to the point."

They walked together down the white, dusty street, crossed the outskirts
of the old Mexican adobe town, and came to a suburb of bungalows. In
front of one of these Farrar stopped. He unlatched the gate.

"Here we are."

There was an old-fashioned garden of roses and mignonettes and
hollyhocks, with crimson ramblers rioting over the wire trellis in front
of the broad porch. A girl with soft, thick, blue-black hair was bending
over a rosebush. She was snipping dead shoots with a pair of scissors.
At the sound of their feet crunching the gravel of the walk, her slender
figure straightened and she turned to them. The ripe lips parted above
pearly teeth in a smile of welcome to the camera man.

"I've come begging again, Miss Ruth," explained Farrar. "This is Mr.
Yeager, a new member of our company. He wants to find a good
boarding-place, so of course I thought of your mother. Don't tell me
that you can't take him."

A little frown of doubt furrowed her forehead. "I don't know, Mr.
Farrar. Our tables are about full. I'll ask mother."

The eyes of the girl rested for an instant on the brown-faced youth
whose application the camera man was backing. He had taken off his hat,
and the sun-pour was on his tawny hair, on the lean, bronzed face and
broad, muscular shoulders. In his torn, discolored hat, his stained and
travel-worn clothes, he looked a very prince of tramps. But in his
quiet, steady gaze was the dynamic spark of self-respect that forebade
her to judge him by his garb.

A faint flush burned in the dusky cheeks to which the long lashes
drooped because of a touch of embarrassment. He had seemed to read her
hesitation with an inner amusement that found expressio