Since Steve was of the sunburnt State, still a boy, and by temperament incurably optimistic, he sang cheerfully. He wanted to forget that he had eaten neither supper nor breakfast. So he carried Mr. Bass through many adventures till that genial bandit
"... sold out at Custer City and there got on a spree,
And a tougher lot of cowboys you never'd hope to see."
Four Bits had topped a rise and followed the road down in its winding descent. After the nomadic fashion of Arizona the trail circled around a tongue of a foothill which here jutted out. Voices from just beyond the bend startled Yeager. One of them was raised impatiently.
"Won't do, Harrison. Be rougher. Throw her on her knees and tie her hands."
The itinerant road brought Steve in another moment within view. He saw a girl picking poppies. Two men rode up and swung from their saddles. They talked with her threateningly. She shrank back in fear. One of them seized her wrists and threw her down.
"Lively, now. Into the pit with her. Get the stuff across," urged a short fat man with a cigar in his mouth who was standing ten or fifteen yards back from the scene of action.
Steve had put his horse at a gallop the moment the girl had been seized. It struck him there was something queer about the affair,—something not quite natural to which he could not put a name. But he did not stop to reason out the situation. Dragging his pony to a slithering halt, he leaped to the ground.
"Get busy, Jackson. You ain't in a restaurant waiting for a meal," the little fat man reminded one of his tools irritably. Then, as he caught sight of Steve, "What the hell!"
Yeager's left shot forward, all the weight and muscle of one hundred and seventy pounds of live cowpuncher behind it. Villain Number One went to the ground as if a battering-ram had hit him between the eyes.
"Lay hands on a lady, will you?"