The Big-Town Round-Up. William MacLeod Raine
got off."
"But the train hasn't stopped."
"It's just crawlin' along, and he was in a hurry."
Her gaze rested upon an angry bruise on his cheek. It had not been there when last she saw him. She started to speak, then changed her mind.
Clay seated himself beside her. "Chicago is a right big town, I reckon. If I can help you any, Miss Kitty, I'd be glad to do what I can."
The girl did not answer. She was trying to work out this puzzle of why a man should get off before the train reached the station.
"I'm a stranger myself, but I expect I can worry along somehow," he went on cheerfully.
"Mr. Durand didn't say anything to me about getting off," she persisted.
"He made up his mind in a hurry. Just took a sudden notion to go."
"Without saying anything about his suitcases?"
"Never mentioned 'em."
"You didn't have—any trouble with him?" she faltered.
"Not a bit," he told her genially. "Sorry our tickets take us by different roads to New York. Maybe we'll meet up with each other there, Miss Kitty."
"I don't understand it," she murmured, half to herself. "Why would he get off before we reach the depot?"
She was full of suspicions, and the bruise on the Westerner's cheek did not tend to allay them. They were still unsatisfied when the porter took her to the end of the car to brush her clothes.
The discretion of that young man had its limits. While he brushed the girl he told her rapidly what he had seen in the vestibule.
"Was he hurt?" she asked breathlessly.
"No 'm. I looked out and seen him standin' beside the track j'es' a-cussin' a blue streak. He's a sho-'nough bad actor, that Jerry Durand."
Kitty marched straight to her section. The eyes of the girl flashed anger.
"Please leave my seat, sir," she told Clay.
The Arizonan rose at once. He knew that she knew. "I was intendin' to help you off with yore grips," he said.
She flamed into passionate resentment of his interference. "I'll attend to them. I can look out for myself, sir."
With that she turned her back on him.
CHAPTER III
THE BIG TOWN
When Clay stepped from the express into the Pennsylvania Station he wondered for a moment if there was a circus or a frontier-day show in town. The shouts of the porters, the rush of men and women toward the gates, the whirl and eddy of a vast life all about him, took him back to the few hours he had spent in Chicago.
As he emerged at the Thirty-Fourth Street entrance New York burst upon him with what seemed almost a threat. He could hear the roar of it like a river rushing down a cañon. Clay had faced a cattle stampede. He had ridden out a blizzard hunched up with the drifting herd. He had lived rough all his young and joyous life. But for a moment he felt a chill drench at his heart that was almost dread. He did not know a soul in this vast populace. He was alone among seven or eight million crazy human beings.
He had checked his suitcase to be free to look about. He had no destination and was in no hurry. All the day was before him, all of many days. He drifted down the street and across to Sixth Avenue. He clung to the safety of one of the L posts as the traffic surged past. The clang of surface cars and the throb of motors filled the air constantly. He wondered at the daring of a pink-cheeked slip of a girl driving an automobile with sure touch through all this tangle of traffic. While he waited to plunge across the street there came a roar overhead that reminded him again of a wall of water he had once heard tearing down a cañon in his home land.
Instinctively one arm clutched at the post. A monster went flying through the air with a horrible, grinding menace. It was only the Elevated on its way uptown. Clay looked around in whimsical admiration of the hurrying people about him. None of them seemed aware either of the noise or the crush of vehicles. They went on their preoccupied way swiftly and surely.
"I never did see such a town, and me just hittin' the fringes of it yet," Clay moaned aloud in comic despair, unaware that even New York has no noisier street than Sixth Avenue.
Chance swept him up Sixth to Herald Square. He was caught in the river of humanity that races up Broadway. His high-heeled boots clicked on the pavement of one of the world's great thoroughfares as far as Forty-Second Street. Under the shadow of the Times Building he stopped to look about him. Motor-cars, street-cars, and trucks rolled past in endless confusion. Every instant the panorama shifted, yet it was always the same. He wondered where all this rush of people was going. What crazy impulses sent them surging to and fro? And the girls—Clay surrendered to them at discretion. He had not supposed there were so many pretty, well-dressed girls in the world.
"I reckon money grows on trees in New York," he told himself aloud with a grin.
Broadway fascinated him. He followed it uptown toward Longacre Circle. The street was as usual in a state of chronic excavation. His foot slipped and he fell into a trench while trying to cross. When he emerged it was with a pound or two of Manhattan mud on his corduroy suit. He looked at himself again with a sense that his garb did not quite measure up to New York standards.
"First off I'm goin' to get me a real city suit of clothes," he promised himself. "This here wrinkled outfit is some too woolly for the big town. It's a good suit yet—'most as good as when I bought it at the Boston Store in Tucson three years ago. But I reckon I'll save it to go home in."
To a policeman directing traffic at a crossing he applied for information.
"Can you tell me where there's a dry-goods store in this man's town?" he asked. "I fell into this here Broadway and got kinda messed up."
"Watchawant?"
"Suit o' clothes."
The traffic cop sized him up in one swift glance. "Siventh Avenue," he said, and pointed in that direction.
Clay took his advice. He stopped in front of a store above which was the legend "I. Bernstein, Men's Garments." A small man with sharp little eyes and well-defined nose was standing in the doorway.
"Might you would want a good suit of qvality clothes, my friendt," he suggested.
"You've pegged me right," agreed the Westerner with his ready smile.
"Lead me to it."
Mr. Bernstein personally conducted his customer to the suit department. "I wait on you myself on account you was a stranger to the city," he explained.
The little man took a suit from a rack and held it at arm's length to admire it. His fingers caressed the woof of it lovingly. He evidently could bring himself to part with it only after a struggle.
"Worsted. Fine goods." He leaned toward the range-rider and whispered a secret. "Imported."
Clay shook his head. "Not what I want." His eyes ranged the racks. "This is more my notion of the sort of thing I like." He pointed to a blue serge with a little stripe in the pattern.
The eyes of Mr. Bernstein marveled at the discrimination of his customer. "If you had taken an advice from me, it would have been to buy that suit. A man gets a chance at a superior garment like that, understan' me, only once in a while occasionally."
"How much?" asked Lindsay.
The dealer was too busy to hear this crass question. That suit, Clay gathered, had been the pride of his heart ever since he had seen it first. He detached the coat lovingly from