Mr. White looked at the camera strangely, as though he half expected it to explode.  “I should have to take it up with the directors—­”

“Directors!  Hell, man, that train’s due in an hour!  What are you around here—­a man in authority, or just a dummy made up to look like one?  Do you mean to tell me you’re afraid to stake me to enough money to make El Paso and return?  What, for the Lord’s sake, do I look like, anyway,—­a crook?”

Mr. White’s head was more than six feet in the air when he stood up, and Luck Lindsay in his high-heeled boots lacked a good six inches of that altitude; but for all that, Luck Lindsay was a bigger man than Mr. White.  He dominated the cashier; he made the cashier conscious of his dyspepsia and his thin hair and his flabby muscles and his lack of enthusiasm with life.

“The directors have to pass on all bank loans,” he explained apologetically, “but I can lend you the money out of my personal account.  If you will excuse me, I’ll get the money before my assistant closes the vault.  And shall I put these inside for you?” He rose and started for the inner door with a deprecating smile.

“Aren’t you going to take a note?” Luck studied the man with sharpened glance.

“My check will be a sufficient record of the transaction, I think.”  And Mr. White, with two or three words scribbled at the bottom, proceeded to make the check a record.  “I am glad to be able to stake you, Mr. Lindsay, and I hope your trip will be successful.”

He got another Luck Lindsay smile for that, and the apology he had coming to him.  And then in a very few minutes Luck hurried out and back to the little house on the edge of town.

“Where’s my bag?  So long, boys; I’m going to drift.  I’ll change clothes on the train—­haven’t got time now.  Here’s five dollars, Andy, for the stable bill and so on.  Bill, you’re the only one of the bunch that shirked, so you can carry this box of reels to the depot for me. Adios, boys, I’m sure going to romp all over that Convention, believe me, if they don’t swear The Phantom Herd’s a winner from the first scene!”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

WHEREIN LUCK MAKES A SPEECH

Luck stood on the platform of the Texas Cattlemen’s Convention and looked down upon the work-lined, brown faces of the men whose lives had for the most part been spent out of doors.  Their sober attentiveness confused him for a minute so that he forgot what he wanted to say—­he, Luck Lindsay, who had faced the great audiences of Madison Square Garden and had smiled his endearing smile and made his bow with perfect poise and an eye for pretty faces; who had without a quiver faced the camera, many’s the time, in difficult scenes; who had faced death more times than he could count, and what was to him worse than death,—­blank failure.  But these old range-men with the wind-and-sun wrinkles around their eyes, and their ready-to-wear suits, and their judicial air of sober attention,—­these were to him the jury that would weigh his work and say whether it was worthy.  These men—­