LITMIR.BIZ

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stop, before Luck was in the doorway with his hat on his head and the air of one whose business is both urgent and of large issues.

      “Got the receipts? All right! Where are the things? This the lenses? All right! Put the team in the stable and go get yourself some rest.”

      “Where’s your rest coming in at?” Andy flung back over his shoulder, as Luck turned away with the camera on his shoulder and the small case in his hands.

      “Mine will come when I get through. I’ve got the last reel wound and packed, though. You bed down somewhere and sleep. I’ll be back in a little. I’m going to catch that four o’clock train.”

      When you consider that Luck made that statement with about fifteen cents in his pocket and no ticket, you will understand why Andy gave him that queer look as he drove off to the stable. Luck might have climbed up beside Andy and ridden part of the way, but he was too preoccupied with larger matters to think of it until he found himself picking his footing around the mud through which Andy had splashed in comfort.

      At the bank, Luck went in at the side door which gave easy access to the office behind; and without any ceremony whatever he tapped on a certain glass-paneled door with a name printed across. He waited a second, and then turned the knob and walked briskly in, carrying camera, tripod, and the case of small attachments, and smiling his smile of white teeth and perfect assurance and much good will.

      Now, the cashier whom he faced was a tall man worn thin with the worries of his position and the care of a family. He lived in a large white house, and his wife never seemed able to find a cook who could cook; so the cashier was troubled with indigestion that made his manner one of passive irritation with life. His children were for some reason forever “coming down” with colds or whooping-cough or measles or something (you have seen children like that), so his eyes were always tired with wakeful nights. It needed a Luck Lindsay smile to bring any answering light into the harassed face of that cashier, but it got there after the first surprised glance.

      Luck stood his camera—screwed to its tripod—against the wall by the door. “I’m Luck Lindsay, Mr. White,” he announced in his easy, Texas drawl. “I’m in a hurry, so I’ll omit my full autobiography, if you don’t mind, and let you draw your own conclusions about my reputation and character. I’ve a five-reel feature film called The Phantom Herd just completed, and I want to take it down to El Paso and show it before the Texas Cattlemen’s Convention which meets there to-day. I want their endorsement of it as a Western film which really portrays the West, to incorporate in my advertisements in all the trade journals. But the production of the film took my last cent, and I’ve got to raise money on my camera for the trip down there. You see what I mean. I’m broke, and I’ve got to catch that four o’clock train or the whole thing stops right here. This camera cost me close to fifteen hundred dollars. Here are the receipted sales slips to prove it. In Los Angeles I could easily get—“He caught the beginning of a denial in Mr. White’s sidewise movement of the head—“ten times as much money on it as you can give me. You probably don’t know anything at all about motion-picture cameras, but you can read these slips and find out how prices run.”

      Mr. White had in a measure recovered from the effects of Luck’s smile. He picked up the slips and glanced at them indifferently. “There’s a pawn-shop just down the street, I believe,” he said. “Why—”

      “I want to leave this camera here with you, anyway,” Luck interrupted. “It’s valuable—too valuable to take any risk of fire or burglary. I want to leave it in your vault. You’ve handled a good deal of my money, and you know who I am, and what my standing is, or else you aren’t the right man for the position you occupy. It’s your business to know these things. Now, I’m not asking you for any big loan. All I want is expense money for that trip. If you’ll advance me seventy-five or a hundred dollars on my note, with this camera as security, I’ll thank you and romp down to El Paso and get that endorsement before the convention adjourns till next year.”

      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

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      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—

      And then one of them suddenly cleared his throat with a rasping sound like old Dave Wiswell, his dried little cowman of the picture, and embarrassment dropped from Luck like a cloak flung aside. He was here to put his work to the test; to let these men say whether The Phantom Herdwas worthy to be called a great picture, one of which the West could be proud. So he pushed back his mop of hair—grayer than the hair of many here old enough to be his father—with the fiat of his palm, and looked straight into the faces of these men and said what he had to say:

      “Mr. Chairman, and gentlemen of this Convention, I consider it a great privilege to be able to stand here and speak to you—a greater privilege than any of you realize, perhaps. For my heart has always been in the range-land, my people have been the people of the plains. I have to-day been honored by the hand-grip of old-timers who were riding circle, trailing long-horns, and working cattle when I was a boy in short pants.

      “I have trailed herds on the pay roll of one man who remembers me here to-day, and of others who have crossed the Big Divide. I have seen the open range

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