LITMIR.BIZ

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hundred, he was ready to wager, when the last few stragglers, so weak that they wobbled when they hesitated before descending a particularly steep place, came down the slope. It surely did eat up film to take the full magnitude of that march, but Luck turned and turned and gloated in the bigness of it all.

      “All right, Annie,” he called out when he had taken the last of the herd as they filed out of sight into the narrow gully that would lead them to the flat half a mile below, where he meant to get other scenes. “Wave flag now for boys to come!”

      Annie-Many-Ponies lifted high the black flag and waved it in slow, sweeping half circles above her head. “Boys, come,” she called, a moment after.

      Luck, still not trusting the camera to Bill Holmes, swung back slowly to the pass and made a panorama of the desolate hillside and the chill, forbidding mountains behind. At the pass he stopped. “How close?” he shouted to Annie. “Come now,” she called down to him, and Luck began to turn the crank again, watching like a hawk for the first bobbing black specks which would show that the boys were nearing the crest of the ridge.

      They came, on the very instant that he would have chosen for their coming. Side by side they rode, drooping of shoulders, and yet with their bodies braced backward for the descent which at the top was rather steep. “Register cold—horses leg-weary—boys all in—” read the script which Luck knew by heart. It was cold enough, and the camera must have registered it in the way the snow was heaped upon their hatbrims, drifted upon their shoulders, packed in the wrinkles of their clothing and in the manes and tails of the horses. And the horses certainly were leg-weary; so weary that Luck knew how the boys must have ridden to gather the cattle and to put their mounts in that condition of realistic exhaustion. In the story they were supposed to have ridden nearly all night,—the night-guard who had been on duty when the storm struck and the cattle began to drift, and who had stuck to their posts even though they could not turn the herd.

      That might be stretching the probabilities just a shade, but Luck felt that the effects he wanted to get justified the slight license he had used in his plot. The effects were there, in generous measure. He turned the crank on the whole of their descent and got them riding up into the foreground pinched with cold, miserable as men may be. They did not look at him—they dared not until he had given the word that the scene was ended.

      “Ride on past, down into that gully where the cattle went,” he directed them sharply. “I’ll holler when you’re outa sight. You can turn around and come back then; the scene ends where your hat-crowns bob outa sight. And listen! You’re liable to lose your cattle if you don’t spur up a little, so try and get a little speed into them cayuses of yours!”

      Obediently Andy’s quirt rose and descended on the flank of his horse. It started, broke into a shuffling trot, and slowed again to a walk. There was no speed to be gotten out of those cayuses,—which was what Luck meant to show on the screen; for this, you must know, was the painting of one grim phase of the range-man’s life. The Native Son spurred his horse and got a lunge or two that settled presently to the same plodding walk. Luck pammed them out of sight, bethought him of the rest of the boys, and commanded Annie-Many-Ponies to call them in.

      They came, half frozen, half starved, and so tired they did not know which discomfort irked them most. They found Luck; his nose purple with cold marking the footage on his working script with numbed fingers. He barely glanced at them, and turned away to tell Bill Holmes to take the camera on down the draw to where that huddle of rocks stood up on the hillside. Andy and Miguel came back and met the others halfway.

      “Say, boss, when do we eat?” Big Medicine inquired anxiously. “By cripes, I’m holler plumb down to my toes,—and them’s froze stiff.”

      “Eat? We eat when we get these storm scenes taken,” Luck told him heartlessly. “I’m afraid it’ll clear up.”

      “Afraid it’ll clear up!” Pink burrowed his chin deeper into his breath-frosted collar and shivered.

      “Oh, quit kicking,” the Native Son advised ironically. “We’re only living some of Luck’s big minutes he used to tell about.”

      Luck looked around at them and grinned a little. “Part of the business, boys,” he said. “Think of the picture stuff there is in this storm!”

      “Why, sure!” Weary responded with exaggerated cheerfulness. “I’ve been freezing artistically ever since daylight. Darn me for leaving my old sourdough coat at home when I hit for the land of orange blossoms and singing birds and sunshine.”

      “Aw, gwan! I never was warm a minute in Los Angeles except when I got hot at the Acme. Montana never seen the day it was as cold as here.”

      “Come on, boys, let’s get these dissolve scenes of cattle perishing in a blizzard. After that—hey, Annie! You come, make plenty fire, plenty coffee. I show you location.”

      Annie called gently to the little dog, and came striding down through the snow to fall in docilely three paces behind her adored “brother,” Wagalexa Conka after the submissive manner of squaws toward the human male in authority over them.

      “Coffee!” Weary murmured ecstatically. “Plenty fire, plenty coffee—oh, mama!”

      Down in the flat where the bushes grew sparsely along the tiny arroyo now gone dry, the herd had stopped from sheer exhaustion, and were already nibbling desultorily upon the tenderest twigs. This was what Luck wanted in his scene, though the cattle must be moved into the location he had chosen where was just the background effect he wanted to get, with the bare mesa showing in the far distance. There was a dreary interval of riding and shouting and urging the cattle up over a low spur of the bluff and down the other side, and the placing of them to Luck’s satisfaction. I fear that more than one of the boys wondered why that first bit of the flat would not do, and why Luck insisted that they should bring the herd to one particular point and no other, and why they must wear out their horses, and themselves just fussing around among the cattle, scattering one bunch, bringing others closer together, and driving certain animals up to foreground, when they very much objected to going there.

      Luck had concealed his camera behind the rocks so that he could get a “close shot” without registering the fact that the cattle were watching him. His commands to “Edge that black steer over about even with that white bank!” and later, “Put that cow and calf out this way and drive the others back a little, so she will have the immediate foreground to herself,” were easier given than obeyed. The cow and calf, for instance, were much inclined to shamble back with the others, and did not show any appreciation for the foreground, wherein they were vastly unlike any other “extras” ever brought before a camera. Still, in spite of all these drawbacks, the moment arrived when Luck began to turn the crank with his eyes keen for every detail of that bunch of forlorn, hungry, range cattle huddled under the scant shelter of a ten-foot bank, while the snows fell steadily in great flakes which Luck knew would give a grand storm-effect on the screen. The Happy Family, free for the moment, crowded close to the fire of dead sagebrush which Annie-Many-Ponies had lighted in the lee of a high rock, and sniffed longingly at the smell which came steaming up from the dented two-gallon coffee-boiler blackened from many a camp fire.

      Luck was turning the crank and watching his “foreground stuff” so that he did not at first see the two riders who came loping down the hill which he was using for background. Whether he would or no, he had got them in several feet of good scene before he saw them and stopped his camera. He shouted, but they came on headlong, slipping and sliding in the loose snow. There could be no doubt that they were headed straight for the group and felt that their business was urgent, so Luck stepped out from behind the rocks and started toward them, motioning for them to keep out, away from the cattle.

      “Better let me git in the lead right now,” Applehead advised hastily, and jumped in front of Luck as the two came lunging up. “I know these here hombres, to my sorrer, too, now I’m tellin’ yuh!”

      But Luck, feeling that his leadership might as well be established then as any time, pushed the old man back.

      “What you want?” he demanded of the foremost who rode up.

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