sitting in the section beside the girl from Brush. He was making talk
in an assured, familiar way, and the girl was listening to him shyly
and yet eagerly. The man was a variation of a type known to Lindsay.
That type was the Arizona bad-man. If this expensively dressed fellow
was not the Eastern equivalent of the Western gunman, Clay's experience
was badly at fault. The fishy, expressionless eyes, the colorless
face, the tight-lipped jaw, expressed a sinister personality and a
dangerous one. Just now a suave good-humor veiled the evil of him, but
the cowpuncher knew him for a wolf none the less.

Clay had already made friends with the Pullman conductor. He drifted
to him now on the search for information.

"The hard-faced guy with the little girl?" he asked casually after the
proffer of a cigar. "The one with the muscles bulging out all over
him--who is he?"

"He comes by that tough mug honestly. That's Jerry Durand."

"The prize-fighter?"

"Yep. Used to be. He's a gang leader in New York now. On his way
back from the big fight in 'Frisco."

"He was some scrapper," admitted the range-rider. "Almost won the
championship once, didn't he?"

"Lost on a foul. He always was a dirty fighter. I saw him the time he
knocked out Reddy Moran."

"What do you mean gang leader?"

"He's boss of his district, they say. Runs a gambling-house of his
own, I've heard. You can't prove it by me."

When Lindsay returned to his place he settled himself with a magazine
in a seat where he could see Kitty and her new friend. The very
vitality of the girl's young life was no doubt a temptation to this
man. The soft, rounded throat line, the oval cheek's rich coloring so
easily moved to ebb and flow, the carmine of the full red lips: every
detail helped to confirm the impression of a sensuous young creature,
innocent as a wild thing of the forests and as yet almost as
unspiritual. She was a child of the senses, and the man sitting beside
her was weighing and appraising her with a keen and hungry avidity.

Durand took the girl in to dinner with him and they sat not far from
Lindsay. Kitty was lost to any memory of those about her. She was
flirting joyously with a sense of newly awakened powers. The man from
Graham County, Arizona, felt uneasy in his mind. The girl was flushed
with fife. In a way she was celebrating her escape from the narrow
horizon in which she had lived. It was in the horoscope of her
tempe