LITMIR.BIZ

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as I’ve doped it out, Mig loses his life. You find him dead—whether then or later I don’t know yet. The punch is this: You have been getting pretty sick of the life, and wishing you had behaved yourself and stayed with your dad. But you’ve been afraid of Mig. You couldn’t see any chance of taking the back trail as long as he was alive to tell on you. Now he’s dead. I guess maybe you better find him right there in the blizzard—hurt maybe—anyway, just about all in. You try to save him, sabe? You can’t, though.”

      “I still don’t see no phantom herd,” observed Andy, wriggling his toes luxuriously in the warmth of the fire.

      “Well, listen. You’ll see it in a minute. You go back home after your pard’s dead. You have a close squeak yourself, see? And the thing works on your mind. Cutting out the frills, you see things. You see a herd drifting before a storm, maybe,—a blizzard like yesterday, with your pal riding point. You try to come up with it—no herd there. You come to yourself and go back home. Then maybe some black night you’re brooding before a fire like this—I can get a great firelight effect on your face, sitting like this”—Luck, actor that he was, made Andy see just how the scenes would look—“have a flare in the fire to throw the light back on you; see what I mean? And outside a thunderstorm is rolling up. A bright flash of lightning startles you. You go to the door and open it; you see the herd drifting past with Mig trailing along on his horse—black shadows, and then standing out clear in the lightning—”

      “How the deuce—”

      “I’ll do that with ‘lap dissolves’ and double exposures. Lots of work that will be, and careful work, but the result will be—why, Lord! It will be immense! That herd and the lone rider haunt you till you’re on the edge of being crazy. Then I’ll bring out somehow that it’s a nervous condition, which of course it is. And I’ll bring old Dave in strong; he follows you some night, and he finds out what you’re after. You tell him—make a clean breast of your rustling, see? Just unburden your mind to your dad. He’s big enough to see that he isn’t altogether clear of guilt himself, for sending you off the way he did. Anyway, that pulls you out of it. The phantom herd and rider pass over the sky line some night—Lord, I can see what a picture I can get out of that!—and out of your life.”

      “Unh-hunh—that’s a heap better than your first story, Luck.”

      “Andy, are you boys going to talk all night?” the voice of Rosemary came plaintively from the next room.

      “Here. You go back to bed,” Luck generously commanded. “I just wanted to get your idea of what it sounds like. I’ll block it out before I turn in. Go on, now.”

      So Luck wrote his new story of The Phantom Herd that night. He had a midnight supper of warmed-over coffee and cold bean sandwiches, but he did not have any sleep. When he had finished with a last big, artistic scene that made his pulse beat faster in the writing of it, the white world outside was growing faintly pink under the rising sun.

Chapter Fifteen. A Letter from Chief Big Turkey

       Table of Contents

      Annie-Many-Ponies, keen of eye when her heart directed her glances, saw the Kyle postmark on a letter while Applehead was sorting Luck’s mail from the weekly batch he had just brought. Luck also spied the Kyle postmark and the familiar handwriting of George-Low-Cedar, who was a cousin of Annie-Many-Ponies and the most favored scribe of Big Turkey’s numerous family. There was no mistaking those self-conscious shadings on the downward strokes of the pen, or the twice-curled tails of all the capitals. The capital M, for instance, very much resembled a dandelion stem split and curled by the tongue of a little girl.

      George-Low-Cedar and none other had written that letter, and Big Turkey himself had probably composed it in great deliberation over his pipe, while the smoke of his tepee fire curled over his head, and his squaw crouched in the shadow listening stolidly while her heart ached with longing for the girl-child who had gone a-wandering. Annie-Many-Ponies slid unobtrusively to the door and flattened her back against the wall beside it, ready to slip out into the dusk if she read in Wagalexa Conka’s face that the letter was unpleasant.

      Luck did not say a word while he held the letter up and looked at it; he did not say a word, but Annie-Many-Ponies knew, as well as though he had spoken, that he too feared what the contents might be. So she stood flat against the wall and watched his face, and saw how his fingers fumbled at the flap of the envelope, and how slowly he drew out the cheap, heavily ruled, glazed paper that is sold alongside plug tobacco and pearl buttons and safety pins in the Indian traders’ stores. Staring from under her straight brows at that folded letter, Annie-Many-Ponies had a swift, clear vision of the little store set down in the midst of barrenness and dust, and of the squaws sitting wrapped in bright shawls upon the platform while their lords gravely purchased small luxuries within. As a slim, barefooted papoose, proud of her shapeless red calico slip buttoned unevenly up the back with huge white buttons, and of her hair braided in two sleek braids and tied with strips of the same red calico, she had stood flattened against the wall of the store while her father, Big Turkey, bought tobacco. She had hoped that the fates might be kind and send her a five-cent bag of red-and-white gum drops. Instead, Big Turkey had brought her a doll,—a pink-cheeked doll of the white people. In her cheap suitcase which she had carried wrapped in her shawl on her back to the ranch, Annie-Many-Ponies still had that doll. So with her eyes fixed upon the letter, her mind stared trance-like at the vision of that long-ago day which had been to her so wonderful.

      Then Wagalexa Conka looked at her and smiled, and the vision of the store and the slim, barefooted papoose with her doll vanished. The smile meant that all was well, that she might stay with Wagalexa Conka and be his Indian girl in the picture of The Phantom Herd. Annie-Many-Ponies smiled back at him,—the slow, sweet, sphinx-like smile which Luck called “heart-twisting,”—and slipped out into the night with her heart beating fast in a strange mixture of joy that she might stay, and of homesickness for the little store set down in the midst of barrenness and dust, and for that long-ago day that had been so wonderful.

      “Read this,” said Luck, still smiling, and gave the letter into the flour-dusted hands of Rosemary. “Ever see a real, dyed-in-the-wool, Indian letter? Sure takes a load off my mind, too; you never can tell how an idea is going to hit an Indian. Pass it on to the boys.”

      So Rosemary read, with the whole Happy Family crowding close to look over her shoulder:

      Kyle, P. Office

       Pine Ridge, So. D

       Monday, Nov.

      Luck Lindsay at Motion Pictures ranch, Albequrqe, New M.

      Friend son,

      I this day gets letter from agent at agency who tell my girl you sisters are now at New mexicos with you pictures. shes go way one days at night times and to-morrow mornings i no find him. i am glad she sees you. you Take care same as with shows them Buffalo bill. all indians have hard times for cold and much hays and fires of prairies loses much. them indians shake you hands with good hearts they have with you. send me blue silks ribbon send Me pictures so i can see you. Again i shake you by hand with good heart same as I see you. Speak one Letters quick again.

      you father, Big Turkey.

      “Pretty good spelling, for an Indian letter,” Rosemary commented suspiciously. “Are you sure an Indian wrote it, Luck Lindsay?”

      “Why, certainly, I’m sure!” Luck was shuffling his other letters with the air of a man whose mind has for the moment lost its load of trouble. “George-Low-Cedar wrote it. I know his writing. He’s Annie’s cousin, and he thinks he’s highly educated. Indians have great memories, and once they learn to spell a word, they never seem to forget it. They learn to spell in school. What they don’t learn is how to put the words together the way we do. Cousin George is also shaky on capitals, you notice. Now to-morrow we can go ahead with that big cattle-stuff. I can take my time about making Annie’s scenes; I was afraid I might have to rush them all through first thing, so as to send

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