"Glad to meet you, Mr. Whitford. Yore daughter has just saved my life from the police," the Westerner said, and his friendly smile was very much in evidence.
"You make yourself at home," answered the owner of a large per cent of the stock of the famous Bird Cage mine.
"My guests do, Dad. It's the proof that I'm a perfect hostess," retorted Beatrice, her dainty, provocative face flashing to mirth.
"Hmp!" grunted her father dryly. "I'd like to know, young man, why the police are shadowing this house?"
"I expect they're lookin' for me."
"I expect they are, and I'm not sure I won't help them find you.
You'll have to show cause if I don't."
"His bark is much worse than his bite," the girl explained to Clay, just as though her father were not present.
"Hmp!" exploded the mining magnate a second time. "Get busy, young fellow."
Clay told the story of the fifty-five-dollar suit that I. Bernstein had wished on him with near-tears of regret at parting from it. The cowpuncher dramatized the situation with some native talent for mimicry. His arms gestured like the lifted wings of a startled cockerel. "A man gets a chance at a garment like that only once in a while occasionally. Which you can take it from me that when I. Bernstein sells a suit of clothes it is shust like he is dealing with his own brother. Qvality, my friendts, qvality! Why, I got anyhow a suit which I might be married in without shame, un'erstan' me."
Colin Whitford was of the West himself. He had lived its rough-and-tumble life for years before he made his lucky strike in the Bird Cage. He had moved from Colorado to New York only ten years before. The sound of Clay's drawling voice was like a message from home. He began to grin in spite of himself. This man was too good to be true. It wasn't possible that anybody could come to the big town and import into it so naïvely such a genuine touch of the outdoor West. It was not possible, but it had happened just the same. Of course Manhattan would soon take the color out of him. It always did out of everybody. The city was so big, so overpowering, so individual itself, that it tolerated no individuality in its citizens. Whitford had long since become a conformist. He was willing to bet a hat that this big brown Arizonan would eat out of the city's hand within a week. In the meantime he wanted to be among those present while the process of taming the wild man took place. Long before the cowpuncher had finished his story of hog-tying the Swede to a hitching-post with his own hose, the mining man was sealed of the large tribe of Clay Lindsay's admirers. He was ready to hide him from all the police in New York.