During the course of lunch she confided that her name was Kitty Mason, that she was an orphan, and that she was on her way to New York to study at a school for moving-picture actresses.

“I sent my photograph and the manager wrote back that my face was one hundred per cent perfect for the movies,” the girl explained.

It was clear that she was expecting to be manufactured into a film star in a week or two.  Clay doubted whether the process was quite so easy, even with a young woman who bloomed in the diner like a rose of the desert.

After they had finished eating, the range-rider turned in at the smoking compartment and enjoyed a cigar.  He fell into casual talk with an army officer who had served in the Southwest, and it was three hours later when he returned to his own seat in the car.

A hard-faced man in a suit of checks more than a shade too loud was sitting in the section beside the girl from Brush.  He was making talk in an assured, familiar way, and the girl was listening to him shyly and yet eagerly.  The man was a variation of a type known to Lindsay.  That type was the Arizona bad-man.  If this expensively dressed fellow was not the Eastern equivalent of the Western gunman, Clay’s experience was badly at fault.  The fishy, expressionless eyes, the colorless face, the tight-lipped jaw, expressed a sinister personality and a dangerous one.  Just now a suave good-humor veiled the evil of him, but the cowpuncher knew him for a wolf none the less.

Clay had already made friends with the Pullman conductor.  He drifted to him now on the search for information.

“The hard-faced guy with the little girl?” he asked casually after the proffer of a cigar.  “The one with the muscles bulging out all over him—­who is he?”

“He comes by that tough mug honestly.  That’s Jerry Durand.”

“The prize-fighter?”

“Yep.  Used to be.  He’s a gang leader in New York now.  On his way back from the big fight in ’Frisco.”

“He was some scrapper,” admitted the range-rider.  “Almost won the championship once, didn’t he?”

“Lost on a foul.  He always was a dirty fighter.  I saw him the time he knocked out Reddy Moran.”

“What do you mean gang leader?”

“He’s boss of his district, they say.  Runs a gambling-house of his own, I’ve heard.  You can’t prove it by me.”

When Lindsay returned to his place he settled himself with a magazine in a seat where he could see Kitty and her new friend.  The very vitality of the girl’s young life was no doubt a temptation to this man.  The soft, rounded throat line, the oval cheek’s rich coloring so easily moved to ebb and flow, the carmine of the full red lips:  every detail helped to confirm the impression of a sensuous young creature, innocent as a wild thing of the forests and as yet almost as unspiritual.  She was a child of the senses, and the man sitting beside her was weighing and appraising her with a keen and hungry avidity.