“Buck!”
They straightened up on the instant, like puppets at the pull of a finger, and they turned their heads with the same jerky motion. Woody’s arm fell to his side.
Kit Horne stood in the door of the stable regarding them with level eyes. Buck’s girl! Left an orphan, she was not of his dusty blood, but he had brought her up, and his own wife had suckled her at rich breasts. The wife was gone, but Kit remained.
She was tall, almost as tall as Buck, and sun-tanned, and as wiry as a wild mare. Her eyes were grayest blue, and her little nostrils quivered slightly. She was dressed a la mode; her gown was smart New York, and her jaunty turban latest Fifth Avenue. “Buck, you ought to feel ashamed of yourself. Quarreling with Woody!”
Woody scowled, and then smiled, and then scowled again as he flicked the brim of his Stetson. He strode off on his absurdly bowed legs; and though his lips moved no sound came from them. He disappeared behind the smithy.
“He says I’m old,” muttered old Buck Horne.
She took his hard brown hands in hers. “Never mind, Buck.”
“Damn him, Kit, he ain’t goin’ to tell me—”
“Never mind, Buck.”
He smiled suddenly and put his arm about her waist.
Kit Horne was as well-known to the younger generation as her famous foster-father was to those who had been the younger generation ten and fifteen years before. Bred on a ranch, reared on a horse, with cowboys for playmates, a Bowie knife as a teething-ring, limitless rolling acres of range as a playground, and her foster-father a motion-picture star — around her a Hollywood press-agent contrived to drape a tinsel legend. Buck’s producer had had an idea. Buck was growing old. Kit, who was more man than woman and more woman than Circe, should take his place in the films. That had been nine years before, when she was a straight-backed tomboy of sixteen... The children went wild over her. She could ride, shoot, rope, swear; and, since there must always be a hero, she could kiss and cuddle too. So she became Kit Horne, the great cowgirl star, and her pictures sold at a premium while old Buck slid quietly into oblivion.
They walked out of the stable, up a ramp, and through narrow concrete corridors to a vast wing which held dressing rooms. Over one of the doors there was a metal star; Buck kicked the door open.
“Star!” he bellowed. “Come in, Kit, come in, an’ shut the door behin’ you... An’ I’ve got to take that horse-thief’s lip! Sit down, I tell you.”
He flung himself into a chair like a sulky boy, frowning, his brown hands clenching and unclenching. Kit ruffled his white hair fondly and smiled; and in the depths of her gray-blue eyes there was anxiety.
“Whoa!” she said softly. “You’re off your feed, Buck, upset. Get a grip on yourself. Isn’t this — don’t snarl, you old catamount! — all this excitement just a little too much for you?”
“Stop talking like a prime fool, you, Kit.”
“You’re sure—?”
“Shut up, Kit! I’m all right.”
“Did the rodeo doctor look you over, you old heller?”
“T’day. Says I’m fit.”
She took a long match out of his vest pocket, struck it expertly against the back of the chair, and held it to the tip of a slender cigaret he had been rolling. “You’re sixty-five, Buck.”
He squinted humorously up at her through the fragrant smoke. “You mean I’m through. Listen, Kit, though I been out o’ pictures for three years—”
“Nine,” said Kit gently.
“Three,” said Buck. “I made a come-back for National, didn’t I? Well, I’m as frisky now as I was then. Feel that muscle!” He doubled his big right arm and obediently she tapped his biceps. They were hard as rock. “What the hell, Kit — this is soft pickin’s. A little ridin’, a little shootin’, some fancy ropin’ — you know how I been keepin’ in trim at the ranch these nine-ten years. This racket here with Wild Bill is easy as brandin’ a roped steer. Bill’ll build me up, I’ll get a nice fat movie contract...”
She kissed his forehead. “All right, Buck. Just be — be careful, won’t you?”
At the door she looked back. Buck had propped his long legs on his dressing table, and he was frowning thoughtfully at his reflection in the mirror through a screen of pearly smoke.
Kit sighed a woman’s sigh as she closed the door; and then, drawing her tall figure up, she strode with a man’s strides through the corridors and down another ramp.
Little pops! came faintly to her ears. Some excitement livened her pleasant face, and she hurried purposefully in the direction of the sounds. People passed her — the old familiar people: cowboys in chaps and sombreros, girls in buckskins and short flaring halved skirts. There was the smell of leather, the soft sound of drawling talk, the haze of home-made cigarets...
“Curly! Now, isn’t that remarkable!”
She stood in the doorway to the armory — rack upon rack of long Winchester rifles, blue-steel revolvers, targets — and smiled dreamily. Curly, son of Wild Bill Grant — a young man in dusty corduroys with wide shoulders and no hips at all — lowered the muzzle of a smoking revolver, stared at her, and then whooped.
“Kit! You ole son-of-a-gun! Shore glad to see you!”
She smiled again, more dreamily. Curly was as out of place in the Colosseum and Broadway as Kit herself. He was, she assured herself for the thousandth time, good to look at. As he dashed to her, seized her hands, and grinned into her face she wondered if this new atmosphere — with its reek of gin and gimcracks — would spoil him. There was nothing romantically heroic about him; he was not remotely good-looking, and his nose was far too hawk-like for the conventional hero; but there were interesting glints in his curly brown hair which sat his head like a mat, and his eyes were sure and honest.
“Watch this,” he cried, and dashed back.
She watched, faintly smiling still.
He stepped on the pedal of a queer little apparatus with his right foot; it was a catapult. He tested it with the ball of his foot as his hands broke open the long-barreled revolver and swiftly reloaded the chambers with big fat glinting cartridges. Then he snapped the cylinder back, filled the alley of the catapult with small round objects, braced himself, and trod quickly on the pedal. The air became filled with little glass balls. And as fast as they skimmed into the air he made them disappear in a puff of smoke and tiny fragments, shooting at them with supple wrist and careless flips of his weapon.
She applauded gleefully, and he thrust his revolver into a holster and then bowed and doffed his wide-brimmed hat.
“Pretty neat, hey? Every time I pull this little stunt I think o’ Buffalo Bill. Pop’s tole me about him many a time. Used to shoot little glass balls, too, “when he was with the Wild West Show. Only he was a rotten shot, an’ used buckshot, so he never missed... Another legend busted!”
“You’re almost as good as Buck,” smiled Kit.
He seized her hands again and stared earnestly into her eyes. “Kit darlin’—”
“Buck,” she said hastily, coloring a little. “Poor Buck. I’m worried about him.”
He put her hands gently away from him. “That ole bull?” He laughed. “He’ll be mucho all right, Kit. These old-timers are built out o’ rawhide an’ steel. Like pop. You just tell Wild Bill he ain’t the man he used to be—”
“Isn’t the man he used to be, Curly.”
“Isn’t the man he use to be,” said Curly, meekly. “Anyway, don’t fret, Kit. I saw him go through the last dress rehearsal a while back.”
“Any slips?” she asked swiftly.
“Nary a one. You’d never think the ole hellion was in his sixties! Rode like a red Injun. He’ll be swell tonight, Kit, an’ the publicity—”