LITMIR.BIZ

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wish it would hold off till that raw stock gets here,” Luck observed anxiously. “I wired the order in, but at that I’m afraid it won’t get here before the end of the week. I’ll have one of you boys pack me some water into the dark room so I can develop negatives right after dinner. I want to see how she’s coming out before I take any more.”

      “I thought Andy’d fixed a hose fer that dark room,” Happy Jack said forebodingly. If there was water to be carried, Happy was pessimistically certain that he would have to carry it.

      “I turned that hose over to the missus for a colander,” Andy explained soberly. “By gracious, I couldn’t figure out anything else it could be used for.”

      “Did you get the barrels fixed like I said?”

      “I sure did. Applehead must have had a Dutch picnic or two out here, from the number of beer kegs scattered all over the place. And a couple of big whisky—”

      “Them there whisky bar’ls I bought and used fer water bar’ls till I got my well bored. Luck kin mind the time when we hauled water on a sled outa the arroyo down below.” Applehead’s eyes turned anxiously to Rosemary, toward whom he was beginning to show a timidly worshipful attitude.

      “You bet I can. Do you remember the time we hitched that big bronk up with old Wall-eye, to haul water? Got back here a little ways beyond the stable with two barrels sloshing over the top, and the cat—not this one, but a black-and-white cat, that was—the cat jumped out from behind a buck brush. Hot dog! That bronk went straight in the air! Remember that time?” Luck leaned back in his chair to laugh.

      “I shore do,” Applehead chuckled. “Luck, here, he was walkin’ behind the sled and drivin’,—and he wasn’t as big as he is now, even. That was soon after he come out here to fatten up like. Little bit of a peaked—why, I bet he didn’t weigh over a hundred pounds after a full meal! He was ridin’ the lines an’ steadyin’ the bar’ls, busy as a dog at a badger hole, when the cat jumped out, an’ that there bronk r’ared back and swung off short and hit fur the mesa; and Luck here a-hangin’ and hollerin’, an’ me a-leggin’ it to ketch up, and bar’ls teeterin’ and—Mind how you was bound you’d kill that cat uh mine?” he asked Luck, tears of laughter dimming his eyes. “That was ole Leather Lungs. He tuk sick an’ died, year after that. Luck shore was mad enough to eat that thar cat, now I’m tellin’ yuh!”

      The Happy Family laughed together over the picture Applehead had crudely painted for them. But Luck, although he had started the story, already was slipping away from the present and was trying to peer into the future. He did not even hear what Applehead was saying to keep the boys in a roar of mirth. He was mentally reckoning the number of days since he had wired his order for a C.O.D. shipment of negative to be rushed to Albuquerque. Two days in Los Angeles, getting ready for the venture; two days on the way to Applehead’s ranch, one day here,—five days altogether. He had told them to rush the order. If they did, there was a chance that it might have arrived. He decided suddenly to make the trip and see; but first he would develop the exposed negative of the forenoon’s work. He got up with that businesslike air which the Happy Family had already begun to recognize as a signal for quick action, and took off his coat.

      “Happy, I wish you and Bud would carry me some water,” he said. “I’ll show you where to put it; I’m going to need a lot. Will you help me wind the film on my patent rack, Andy? And I’ll want that little team hitched to the buckboard so I can go to town after I’m through. I’ve got some hopes of my negative being there.”

      “Want the rest of us to work on that stage, don’t you, boss?” Weary asked, pausing in the doorway to roll a smoke. “And please may I wipe off my eyebrows?”

      “Why, sure!—to both questions,” answered Luck, going over to his camera. “I can’t do much more till I get more negative, even with the light right, which it isn’t. You go ahead and finish the stage this afternoon. And be sure the uprights are guyed for a high wind; she sure can blow, in this man’s country.”

      “You’re danged right, she can blow!” Applehead testified emphatically. “She can blow, and she’s goin’ to blow. You want to take your overshoes and mittens, boy, when you start out fer town. You know how cold she can get on that mesa. Chances are you’ll come back facin’ a blizzard. And, say! I wisht you’d take that there dog back with yuh, Luck, ‘cause if yuh don’t, him and me’s shore goin’ to tangle, now I’m tellin’ yuh! Mighty funny note when a cat dassent walk acrost his own dooryard in broad daylight, no more! Poor ole Compadre was shakin’ like a leaf when I clumb up and got him down of’n the windmill. Way the wind was whistlin’ up there, the chances are he’s done ketched cold in ‘is tail, and if he has, yuh better see to it that thar dog ain’t within gunshot uh me, now I’m tellin’ yuh!”

      Luck did not hear half the tirade. He had gone into the dark room and was dissolving hypo for the fixing bath, while the boys tramped in with full water buckets and began to fill the barrels he had placed in a row along the wall. He was impatient to see how his work of the forenoon would come out of the developer, and he was quite as impatient to be on his way to town. Whether he admitted it or not, he had a good deal of faith in Applehead’s weather forecasts; he remembered how often the old fellow had predicted storms in the past when Luck spent a long winter with him here in this same adobe dwelling. If it did snow, he must have plenty of negative for his winter scenes; for snow never laid long on the level here, and he had a full reel of winter stuff to make.

      He called Andy to come and help him wind his exposed film on the crude, improvised film racks that had lately been beer kegs, and closed the dark room door upon the last empty bucket that had been carried in full. In the dull light of the ruby lamp he carefully wound his long strip of exposed negative, emulsion side out, around the keg which Andy held for him. His developer bath was ready, and he immersed the film-jacketed keg slowly, with due regard for bubbles of air.

      “You may not know it, but right here in this dark room is where I look for the real test of success or failure,” he confided to Andy, while he rocked the keg gently in the barrel. “I wish I could afford a good camera-man; but then, the most of them wouldn’t work with this kind of an outfit; they’d demand all the laboratory conveniences, and that would run into money. Ever notice that when you can’t get anything but the crudest kind of tools to work with, you generally have to use them yourself? But it will take more than—oh, hell!”

      “What’s wrong?” Andy Green bent his brown head anxiously down beside Luck’s fast graying mop of hair, and peered at the images coming out of the yellowish veil that had hidden them. “Ain’t they good?”

      Luck reached into the water tank and splashed a little water on his film to check it while he looked. “Now, what in the name of—” He scowled perplexedly down at the streaked strips. “What do you suppose streaked it like that?” He lifted worried, gray eyes to Andy’s apprehensive frown, and looked again disgustedly at the negative before he dropped it back with a splash into the developer.

      “No good; she’s ruined,” he said in the flat tone of a great disappointment. “Eighty feet of film gone to granny. Well, that’s luck for you!”

      Andy reached gingerly into the barrel and brought up the keg so that he could take another look. He had owned a kodak for years and had done enough amateur developing to know that something had gone very wrong here.

      “What ails the darned thing?” he asked fretfully, turning to Luck, who was scowling abstractedly into his barrels of “soup.”

      “You can search me,” Luck replied dully. “Looks like I’d been stung with a bunch of bum chemicals. Either that, or something’s wrong with our tanks here.” He reached down and pulled up the keg by its hooped top, glimpsed a stain on his finger and thumb and let the keg slip hastily over into the pure water so that he could examine the stains.

      “Iron! Iron, sure as thunder!” he exclaimed suddenly. “Those iron hoops are what did it.” He rubbed his hand vexedly. “I knew better than that, too. I don’t see why I didn’t think about those hoops. Of all the idiotic, fool—”

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