CHAPTER TWELVE

"I THINK YOU NEED INDIAN GIRL FOR PICTURE"

Still it did not snow, though the wind blew from the storm quarter, and Applehead sniffed it and made predictions, and Compadre went with his remnant of tail ruffed like a feather boa. Immediately after supper Luck attached his new hose to the tank faucet and developed the corral scenes which he had taken, with the thin youth taking his first lesson in the dark room. The thin youth, who said his name was Bill Holmes, did not have very much to say, but he seemed very quick to grasp all that Luck told him. That kept Luck whistling softly between sentences, while they wound the negative around the roped half barrel that had not so much as a six penny nail in it this time, so thoroughly did Andy do his work.

The whistling ceased abruptly when Luck examined his film by the light of the ruby lamp, however, for every scene was over-exposed and worthless. Luck realized when he looked at it that the light was much stronger than any he had ever before photographed by, and that he would have to "stop down" hereafter; the problem was, how much. His light tests, he remembered, had been made rather late in the afternoon, when the light was getting yellow, and he had blundered in forgetting that the forenoon light was not the same.

He went ahead and put the film through the fixing bath and afterwards washed it carefully, more for the practice and to show Bill Holmes how to handle the negative than for any value the film would have. He discovered that Andy had not unpacked the rewinding outfit, but since he would not need it until his negative was dry, he made no comment on the subject. Bill Holmes kept at his heels, helping when he knew what to do, asking a question now and then, but silent for the most part. Luck felt extremely optimistic about Bill Holmes, but for all that he was depressed by his second failure to produce good film. A camera-man, he felt in his heart, might be the determining factor for success; but he was too stubborn to admit it openly or even to consider sending for one, even if he could have managed to pay the seventy-five dollars a week salary for the time it would take to produce the Big Picture. He could easier afford to waste a few hundred feet of negative now, he argued to himself.

"Come on down, and I'll show you what I can about the camera," he said to Bill Holmes. "The light's too tricky to-day to work by, but I'll give you a few pointers that you'll have to keep in mind when I'm too busy to think about telling you. Once I get to directing a scene, I'm liable to be busy as a one-armed prospector fighting a she-bear with cubs. I'm counting on you to remember what all I'va told you, in case I forget to tell you again. You see, I've ruined a hundred and fifty feet of negative already, just by overlooking a couple of bets. You're here to help keep that from happening again. Sabe?"

"Well, there's one or two things I don't have to learn," Bill Holmes told him by way of encouragement. "You get the camera set and ready, and I can turn it any speed you want. I'll guarantee that much. I learned that all right in projection."

"That's exactly why I brought you out here, brother," Luck assured him. "That's why—"

"Oh, Luck Lindsay!" came Rosemary's voice excitedly. "Mr. Forrman wants you right away quick! Somebody's coming that he doesn't know, and he says it's up to you!"

"What's up to me?" Luck came hurrying down the ladder backwards. "Has Applehead gone as crazy as his cat? I've nothing to do with strangers coming to the ranch."

"Yes," said Rosemary, twinkling her brown eyes at him, "but this is a woman. Mr. Forrman refuses to take any responsibility—"

"So do I. I don't know of any woman that's liable to come trailing me up. Where is she?"

From the doorway Rosemary pointed dramatically, and Luck went up and stood beside her, rolling down his sleeves while he stared at the trail. Down the slope, head bent to the whooping wind, a woman came walking with a free, purposeful stride that spoke eloquently of accustomedness to the open land. Her skirts flapped but could not impede her movements. She seemed to be carrying some bright-hued burden upon her shoulders, and she was, without doubt, coming straight down to the ranch as to a much-desired goal.

"You can search me," he said emphatically in answer to Applehead's question. "Must be some señora away off the trail. I never saw her before in my life."

"We-ell, now, that there lady don't act like she's lost," Applehead declared, watching her intently as she came on. "Aims to git whar she's goin', if I'm any jedge of actions. An' she shore is hittin' fur here. Ain't been ary woman on this ranch in ten year, till Mrs. Green come t'other day."

"She's none of my funeral; I don't know her from Adam," Luck disclaimed, and went back into the dark room as though be had urgent business there, which he had not. In the back of his mind was an uneasy feeling that the newcomer was "some of his funeral," and yet he could not tell how or why she should be. In her walk there was a teasing sense of familiarity; he did not know who she was, but he felt uncomfortably that he ought to know. He fumbled among the litter on the shelf, putting things in order; and all the while his ears were sharpened to the sounds that came muffled through the closed door.

"Oh, Luck Lindsay!" came Rosemary's voice at last, with what Luck fancied was a malicious note in it. "You're wanted out here!"

Luck fumbled for a minute longer while he racked his brain for some clue to this woman's identity. For a man who has lived the varied life Luck had lived, his conscience was remarkably clean; but no one enjoys having mystery stalk unawares up to one's door. However, he opened the door and went out, feeling sensitively the curious expectancy of the Happy Family, and faced the woman who stood just beyond the doorway. One look, and he stopped dead still in the middle of the room. "Well, I'll be darned!" he said in a hushed tone of blank amazement.

The woman's black eyes lighted as though flames had darted up behind them. "How, Cola?" she greeted him in the soft, cooing tones of the younger Indians whose voices have not yet grown shrill and harsh. "Wagalexa Conka!" It was the tribal name given him in great honor by his Indians of Pine Ridge Agency.

Through his astonishment, Luck's face glowed at the words. He went up and put out his hand, impelled by the hospitality which is an unwritten law of the old West, and is not to be broken save for good cause.

"How! How!" he answered her greeting. "You long ways from home, Annie-Many-Ponies!"

Annie-Many-Ponies smiled in a way to make Happy Jack gulp with a sudden emotion he would have denied. She flashed a quick glance around at the curious faces that regarded her so intently, and she eased her shawl-wrapped burden to the ground with the air of one who has reached her journey's end.

"Yes, I plenty long ways," she assented placidly. "I don't stay by reservation no more. Too lonesome. One night I beat it. I work for you now."

"How you know you work for me?" Luck felt nine pairs of eyes trying to read his face. "That's bad, you run away. You better go back, Annie-Many-Ponies. Your father—"

"Nah!" Annie-Many-Ponies cried in swift rebellion. "I work for you all time, I no want monies. I got plenty wardrobe; you give me plenty grub; I work for you. I think you need him Indian girl in picture. I think you plenty sorry all Indians go by reservation. You no like for Indians go home," she stated with soft sympathy. "I sabe you not got monies for pay all thems Indians. I come be Indian girl for you; I not want monies. You let me stay—Wagalexa Conka!"

"You come in and eat, Annie-Many-Ponies," Luck commanded with more gentleness than he was accustomed to show. The girl must have followed him all the way from Los Angeles, and she must have walked all the way out from Albuquerque. All this she seemed to take for granted, a mere detail of no importance beside her certainty that although he had no money to pay the Indians, he must surely need an Indian girl in his pictures. Loyalty always touched Luck deeply. He had brought the little black dog back with him and hidden it in the stable, just because the dog had followed him all around town and had seemed so pleased when Luck was loading the buckboards for the return trip. He could not logically repulse the manifest friendliness of Annie-Many-Ponies.

He introduced her formally to Rosemary, and was pleased when Rosemary smiled and shook hands without the slightest hesitation. The Happy Family he lumped together in one sentence. "All these my company," he told her. "You eat now. By and by I think you better go home."

Annie-Many-Ponies looked at him with smoldering eyes, standing in the middle of the kitchen, refusing to sit down to the table until the main question was settled.

"Why you say that?" she demanded, drawing her brows down sullenly. "You got plenty more Indian girls?"

Luck shook his head.

"You think me not good-looking any more?" With her two slim brown hands she pushed back the shawl from her hair and challenged criticism of her beauty. She was beautiful,—there was no gain saying that; she was so beautiful that the sight of her, standing there like an indignant young Minnehaha, tingled the blood of more than one of the Happy Family. "You think I so homely I spoil your picture?"

"I think you must not run away from the reservation," Luck parried, refusing to be cajoled by her anger or her beauty. "You always were a good girl, Annie-Many-Ponies. Long time ago, when you were little girl with the Buffalo Bill show, you were good. You mind what Wagalexa Conka say?"

Annie-Many-Ponies bent her head. "I mind you now, Wagalexa Conka," she told him quickly. "You tell me ride down that big hill," she threw one hand out toward the bluff that sheltered the house. "I sure ride down like hell. I care not for break my neck, when you want big 'punch' in picture. You tell me be homely old squaw like Mrs. Ghost-Dog, I be homely so dogs yell to look on me. I mind you plenty—but I do not go by reservation no more."

"Yow father be mad—I let you stay, he maybe shoot me," Luck argued, secretly flattered by her persistence.

Annie-Many-Ponies smiled,—a slow, sphinx-like smile, mysteriously sweet and lingering. "Nah! Not shoot you. I write one letters, say I go work for you. Now you write one letter by Agent, say you let me stay, say I work for you, say I good girl, say I be Indian girl for your picture. I mind you plenty, Wagalexa Conka!" She smiled again coaxingly, like a child. "I like you," she stated simply. "You good man. You need Indian girl, I think. I work for you. My father not be mad; my father know you good man for Indians."

Luck turned from her and gave the Happy Family a pathetic, what's-a-fellow-going-to-do look that made Andy Green snort unexpectedly and go outside. One by one the others followed him, grinning shamelessly at Luck's helplessness. In a moment he overtook them, wanting the support of their judgment.

"The worst of it is," he confessed, after he had explained how he had known the girl since she was a barefooted papoose with the "Bill" show, and he was Indian Agent there; "the worst of it is, she's a humdinger in pictures. She gets over big in foreground stuff. Rides like a whirlwind, and as for dramatic work, she can put it over half the leading women in the business—that is, in her line of Pocohontas stuff."

"Well, why don't you let her stay?" Weary demanded. "She will anyway—mama! We're not what you can call over-run with women on this job."

"Why don't you make a squaw-man outa Dave?" Pink suggested boldly, "and let her be his daughter instead of Rosemary?"

"Say, what does that there walka-some-darn-thing mean, that she calls yuh?" Big Medicine wanted to know. "By cripes, I hate talk I don't savey."

"Wagalexa Conka?" Luck smiled shamefacedly. "Oh, that's just a name the Indians gave me. Means Big Turkey, in plain English. Her father, old Chief Big Turkey, adopted me into the tribe, and they call me by his name. Annie-Many-Ponies has heard it used ever since she was a kid. By tribal law I'm her brother. Well, what's the word, boys? Shall we let her stay or not? We could use her, all right, and put a dash of old-plains' color in the picture that I haven't got, as it stands. It's up to you to decide."

"You're wrong," Pink grinned. "She's decided that, herself. Gee, she's pretty!"

"Certainly she is; but get this, boys: She isn't going to stay just because she's pretty, and if I had a different bunch than you fellows, she'd have to go for that reason. I'm responsible for her—sabe? Bill Holmes, you get this; I saw you eyeing her pretty strong. That girl is the daughter of an influential chief, and she comes pretty near being the pride of the reservation. There can't be any romantic stuff, if they let her stay. Her father and the Agent will consent, if they do consent, on the strength of the confidence they have in me. They're going to keep that confidence. Get that, and get it strong, because I sure mean what I'm telling you." He eased the tenseness with a laugh. "I don't mean to offend anybody," he said, "and that's why I'm putting it straight before the play comes up. Annie-Many-Ponies has got a heart-twisting smile, but she's a squaw just the same. She's got the ways of the Injun to the marrow of her bones, and I'll bet right now if you were to shake her hard enough, you'd jingle a knife out of her clothes." He stopped and lighted the cigarette he had been carefully rolling. "Well," he finished after the pause, "does she stay or go?"

The Happy Family answered him with, various phrases, the meaning of which was that he could suit himself about that; as far as they were concerned, she could stay and welcome.

So she stayed, and Rosemary hung up a calico curtain across the one bedroom, so that Annie-Many-Ponies might have a corner to call her own. She stayed; and Luck rewrote two reels of his scenario so that there should be a place in it for a beautiful Indian girl who rode like a whirlwind and did not know the meaning of fear, and who had a mind of her own, and who was just exactly as harmless in that camp as half a quart of nitroglycerine, and added thereby a good bit to the load of responsibility which Luck was shouldering.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

"PAM. BLEAK MESA—CATTLE DRIFTING BEFORE WIND—"

"Pam. bleak mesa—snow—cattle drifting before wind. Dale and Johnny dis. riding to foreground. Reg. cold—horses leg-weary—boys all in—"

Out toward Bear Canyon, where the land to the north rose brokenly to the mountains, Luck found the bleak stretches of which he had dreamed that night on the observation platform of a train speeding through the night in North Dakota,—a great white wilderness unsheltered by friendly forests, uninhabited save by wild things that moved stealthily across its windswept ridges. Beyond, the mountains rose barrenly, more bleak than the land that lay at their feet.

"Pam. bleak mesa—snow—" With the camera set halfway up a gentle slope commanding a steeper hill beyond, down which the boys would send the cattle in a slow, uneasy march before the storm, Luck focused his telephoto lens upon bleakness enough to satisfy even his voracious appetite for realism. Bill Holmes, his tan pumps wrapped in gunny sacks for protection against the snow that was a foot deep on the level and still falling, thrashed his body with his arms, like a windmill whose paddles have suddenly gone limp in a high wind. When he was ready, Luck stopped long enough to blow on his fingers and to turn and watch for the signal from Annie-Many-Ponies, stationed on a higher ridge to the right of him,—the signal that the cattle were coming.

Through the drive of the snowstorm he saw her tall, straight figure as through a thin, shifting, white veil. The little black dog, for whom she had conceived a fierce affection in defiance of Rosemary's tacit opposition, was lying with its tail curled tight around its feet and its nose, hunting warmth in the shelter of her flapping garments. Annie-Many-Ponies was staring away to the north, shielding her keen eyes from the snow with one slim, brown hand, while she watched for the coming of the herd.

Luck looked at her, silhouetted against the sky. He had no scene written in his script to match the picture she made; he had no negative to waste. But he swung his camera around and, using the telephoto lens he had adjusted for his cattle scenes, he called to her to hold that pose, and indulged his artistic sense in a ten-or-twelve foot scene which showed Annie-Many-Ponies wholly absorbed in gazing upon farther bleakness.

Annie-Many-Ponies was so keenly conscious of her duty to the camera that she dared not break her pose, even to give the signal, until he had yelled, "All right, Annie!" and swung the camera back with its recording eye fixed upon that narrow depression between two blunt ears of hilltop, through which the herd was to be sent down to the ridge and on past the camera to the flat, where other scenes were to be taken later on, when the cattle were hungry enough to browse miserably upon the bosquet of young cotton woods.

"Cows come!" she called out, because Luck had his back to her at the moment and did not see the wave of hand she had been told to give him.

Luck, squinting into the view-finder, caught the swaying vanguard of the herd and swore. He had meant to "pan. bleak mesa" for half a minute before those swaying heads and horns appeared over the brow of the ridge. Now, even though he began to turn the crank the instant he glimpsed them, he would not have quite the effect which he had meant to have. He would be compelled to make two scenes of it, and pan. his bleak mesa afterwards and trust to a "cut-in scene" to cover the break. He did not trust Bill Holmes to turn the crank on that slow, plodding march of misery. With his diaphragm of the camera wide open to get all the light possible, because the air was filled with falling snow, he followed the herd, as it wound snakelike down the easiest descents, making for the more sheltered small canyons that opened out upon the flat. "Cattle drifting before the wind," read the script; and now Luck saw them coming, their snow-whitened backs humped to the driving storm, heads lowered and swaying weakly from side to side with the shambling motion of their feet. They were drifting before the wind, just as he had planned that they should do. That they shuffled wearily down that hill with poor cows and unweaned calves straggling miserably behind the main body in "the drag herd," proved how well the boys had done the work which he had sent them out at daylight to do.

The boys had gone out, under the leadership of Applehead, who knew that range as he knew his own dooryard, just when daylight began to break coldly upon the storm that had come with the sunset. Luck had already ridden out with them and had chosen his location for the blizzard scenes.

He had gone with them over every foot of that drive, and had told them just where the main body of riders was to fall back behind the ridge that would hide them from the camera, leaving Andy Green and the Native Son—since these were the two whom he always visualized in the scene—to come on alone in the wake of the herd. Under the leadership of old Applehead, they had combed every draw that sheltered so much as a lone cow and calf.

Luck had told them to bring in every hoof they could spot and get over that ridge by ten o'clock. He had a nervous dread of the storm breaking before noon, and his heart was set on getting that never-to-be-successfully-faked blizzard scene. Realism ruled him absolutely, now that he was actually producing some of the big scenes of this picture. He had told them just where to watch for Annie-Many-Ponies and the flag she would wave,—a black flag, so that the boys could not fail to see it in the vague whiteness of the storm. He had located the jutting ledge behind which Happy Jack was to sneak, that he might watch for the signal as an extra precaution against an unseasonable appearance of the two riders over the ridge.

When the herd straggled down in what seemed an endless stream of storm-driven animals, Luck knew that the boys had done their work well. He knew cattle as he knew pictures; he knew that a full two thousand came over that ridge through a shallow pass he had chosen, "'Every hoof' is right," he remarked to Bill Holmes with a dry approval. "I'd hate to go hunting meat where that bunch was gathered from. Looks like they'd combed the country for fifty miles around." He sent a quick glance to the pinnacle where Annie-Many-Ponies stood waiting to give the signal. He wished that she had realized the importance of these cattle scenes keenly enough to have given him the signal at the cost of breaking her pose. But he had only himself to blame. He should not have taken the risk, even though he had believed that the cattle would not arrive for another half hour. He should have been ready; he had told the boys to send them right over the ridge when they came up to it, because he wanted to preserve unbroken that indescribable atmosphere of a long, weary journey.

Still they came; a good twenty-five 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. "Didn't you hear me tell you to keep out around the cattle?"

"Adonde va V con mi vaca?" snapped the first rider in high-keyed Spanish.

"My brother say where you go with our cattle?" interrupted the other one, evidently proud of his English.

"I know what he said," Luck snubbed this one bluntly. "I don't know that they are your cattle. I don't care. We're using them to make motion pictures. Get outa the way so we can go on with our work." Had he not spoiled several feet of film because of their coming he might have been more inclined to placate them. As it was, he did not welcome their interference, he did not like their looks, and their tones were to his temper as tow would be to a fire. Their half Mexican, half American dress irritated him; the interruption exasperated him. He was hungry and cold and keyed to a high nervous tension in his anxiety to make the most of his present big opportunity; he knew too well that he might not have another chance all winter, with the snow falling as if under his direction.

"Get over there outa range of the camera!" he commanded them sharply, "then you can spout Mex. till you're black in the face, for all I care. I'm busy." To make himself absolutely understood he repeated the gist of his remarks in Spanish before he turned his back on them to finish his interrupted scene.

Whereupon one swore in Spanish and the other in English, and they both declared that they would take their cattle right now, and reined their horses toward the shifting herd.

"Hold on thar, Ramone Chavez!" shouted Applehead, striding forward. "Didn't you hear the boss tell ye to git outa the way, both of yuh? Yuh better do it, now I'm tellin' yuh, 'cause if yuh don't, they's goin' to be right smart of a runction around here! A good big share uh them thar cattle belongs to me. Don't ye go messin' in there amongst 'em; you jest ride back outa the way uh that thar camery. Git!"

At Applehead's command they "got," at least as far as the camp fire, where the bright shawl of Annie-Many-Ponies caught and held their interest. Annie-Many-Ponies, being a woman who had both youth and beauty and sensed instinctively the value of both, sent a slant-eyed glance and a half smile toward Ramone, who possessed more good looks and more English than his brother. The Happy Family eyed them with a tolerant indifference and moved aside with reluctant hospitality when Ramone dismounted shiveringly and came forward to warm his fingers over the blaze.

"She's cold day, you bet," Ramone remarked ingratiatingly.

"She ain't what you could call hot," Big Medicine conceded drily, since no one else showed any disposition to reply.

"We don't get much snow like this. You live in Albuquerque, perhaps?"

There was really no excuse for snubbing these two, who had been well within their rights in making an investigation of this unheralded and unauthorized gathering of all the cattle on this range. Andy told Ramone where they were staying and where they came from, and let it go at that. The less Americanized brother dismounted and joined the group with a nod of greeting.

"My brother Tomas," announced Ramone, with a flash of white teeth, his eyes shifting unobtrusively toward Annie-Many-Ponies, who wore a secret, half-smiling air of provocative interest in him. "Not spik much English, my brother. Always stay too much at home. Me, I travel all over—Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco. I ride in all contests—Pueblo, San Antonio—all over. Tomas, he go not so often. His head, all for business—making money—get rich some day. Me, I spend. My hand wide open always. Money slip fast."

"There's plenty of us marked that way," Weary made good-natured comment, turning so that his back might feel the heat of the fire.

"Shunka Chistala!" murmured Annie-Many-Ponies in her soft contralto to the little black dog, and moved away to the mountain wagon, with the dog following close to her moccasined heels.

Ramone looked after her with frank surprise at the strange words. "Not Spanish, then?" he ventured.

"Indian," the Native Son explained briefly, and added, perhaps for reasons of his own, "Sioux squaw."

Ramone very wisely let his curiosity rest there. He had a good excuse, for Luck, having finished work for the time being, came tramping over to the fire. At him Ramone glanced apologetically.

"We borrow comfort from your fire, señor," he said indifferently. "She's bad day for riding."

Luck nodded, already ashamed of having lost his temper, yet not at the point of yielding openly to any overtures for peace. "Soon as we eat," he said to Weary and those others who stood nearest, "I'll have you cut out that poor cow and calf and drive 'em down the flat here, so I can get that other scene I was telling you about."

"Wagalexa Conka, here is plenty hot coffee," came a soft voice at his elbow, and Luck turned with a smile to take the steaming cup from the hand of Annie-Many-Ponies.

The Native Son poured a cup and offered it to Tomas Chavez. "Quire cafe?" he asked.

"Si, señor; Gracias." Tomas smiled, and took the cup and bowed. Annie-Many-Ponies herself, with a sidelong glance at Luck to see if she might dare, carried the biggest cup of coffee to Ramone, and smiled demurely when he took it and looked into her eyes and thanked her.

In this fashion did the social sky clear, even though the snow continued to drive against those who broke bread together out there in the dreary wastes, with the snow halfway to their knees. The Native Son, being half Spanish and knowing well the language of his father, talked a little with Tomas. Ramone made himself friendly with any one who would give him any attention. But Applehead scowled over his boiled-beef sandwich and his coffee, and kept his back turned upon the Chavez brothers, and would not talk at all. He eyed them sourly when they still loitered after the meal was over and the remains packed away in the box by Annie-Many-Ponies, and Luck had gone to work again with Bill Holmes at his heels and the boys helping to place the cattle to Luck's liking.

When the Chavez brothers finally did show symptoms of intending to leave, Luck beckoned to Tomas, whom he judged to be the leader. "Here," he said in Spanish, when Tomas had come close to him. "I will pay you for using your cattle. When I am through, my boys will drive them back to the mesa again. For my picture I may need them again, señor. I promise you they will not be harmed." And he charged in his expense book the sum, "to use of locations."

"Gracias," said Tomas, and took the five dollars which Luck could ill afford to give, but which he felt would smooth materially the trail to their future work. Cattle he must have for his picture; cattle he would have at any cost,—but it would be well to have them with the consent of their owners. So the Chavez brothers rode away with smiles for their neighbors instead of threats, and with five dollars which had come to them like a gift.

"Yuh might better uh kicked 'em outa here without no softsoapin' about it, now I'm tellin' yuh!" Applehead grumbled when they were out of earshot. "You may know your business better'n what I do, but by thunder I wouldn't uh give 'em no five dollars—ner five cents. 'S like feedin' a stray dog; yuh won't never git rid of 'em now. They'll be hangin' around under yer feet—"

"At that, I might have use for them," Luck retorted unmoved. "They're fine types."

"Types!" old Applehead exploded indignantly. "Types! They're sneak-thieves and cutthroats 't I wouldn't trust fur's I could throw a bull by the tail. That's what they be. Types,—my granny!"

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

"PLUMB SPOILED, D' YUH MEAN?"

Luck came out of the dark room with the still, frozen, look of a trouble that has gone too deep for words. Annie-Many-Ponies eyed him aslant and straightway placed the hottest, juiciest piece of steak on his plate, and poured his coffee even before she poured for old Dave Wiswell, whom she favored as being an old acquaintance of the Pine Ridge country.

Once when her father, old chief Big Turkey, had broken his leg and refused to have a doctor attend him, and had said that he would die if his "son" did not make his leg well, Luck had looked as he looked now. Still, he had set chief Big Turkey's leg so well that it grew straight and strong again. Annie-Many-Ponies might be primitive as to her nature and untutored as to her mind, but she could read the face of her brother Wagalexa Conka swiftly and surely. Something was very bad in his heart. Annie-Many-Ponies searched her soul for guilt, remembered the smile she had given to Ramone Chavez whom Wagalexa Conka did not like, and immediately she became humbled before her chief.

Shunka Chistala—which is Sioux for little dog—she banished into the cold, and hardened her heart, against his whining. It is true that Wagalexa Conka had not forbidden her to have the little dog in the house, but in his displeasure he might make the dog an excuse for scolding her and for taking the part of Rosemary, who hated dogs in the house, and who was trying, by every ingratiating means known to woman, to make a friend of Compadre. Rosemary was a white woman and the wife of Wagalexa Conka's friend; Annie-Many-Ponies was an Indian girl, not even of the same race as her brother Wagalexa Conka. And although her vanity might lead her to believe herself and her smile the cause of Luck's mask-like displeasure, she had no delusions as to which side he would take in an argument between herself and Shunka Chistala on the one side, and Rosemary and Compadre on the other; and in the back of her mind lived always the fear that Wagalexa Conka might refuse to let her stay and work for him in pictures.

Therefore Annie-Many-Ponies crouched humbly before the rock fireplace, until Luck missed her at the table and told her to come and eat; she came as comes a dog who has been beaten, and slid into her place as noiselessly as a shadow,—humility being the heritage of her sex and race.

No one talked at all. Even Rosemary seemed depressed and made no attempt to stir the Happy Family to their wonted cheerfulness. They were worn out from their long day that had been filled with real hardships as well as work. In the general silence, Luck's deeper gloom seemed consistent and only to be expected; for hard as the others had worked, he had worked harder. His had been the directing brain; his hand had turned the camera crank, lest Bill Holmes, not yet familiar with his duties, might fail where failure would be disaster. He had endured the cold and the storm, tramping back and forth in the snow, planning, directing, doing literally the work of two men. Annie-Many-Ponies alone knew that exhaustion never brought just that look into Luck's face. Annie-Many-Ponies knew that something was very bad in Luck's heart. She knew, and she trembled while she ate with a precise attention to her table manners lest he chide her openly before them all.

"How long do you think this storm will last, Applehead?" Luck asked, when he had walked heavily over to the fireplace for his smoke, and had drawn a match sharply along the rough face of a rock.

"We-ell, she's showin' some signs uh clearin' up to-night," Applehead stated with careful judgment, because he felt that Luck's question had much to do with Luck's plans, and was not a mere conversational bait. "Wind, she's shiftin', er was, when I come in to supper. She shore come down like all git-out ever since she started, and I calc'late she's about stormed out. I look fer sun all day to-morrer, boy." This last in a tone of such manifest encouragement that Luck snorted. (Back by the table in the kitchen, Annie-Many-Ponies paused in her piling of plates and listened breathlessly. She knew that particular sound. Wagalexa Conka would presently reveal what was bad in his heart.)

"That would be my luck, all right," her chief stated pessimistically.

"What's the matter with the sun, now?" Big Medicine boomed reprovingly. "Comin' in, you said you had your blizzard stuff, and now if the sun'd jest come out, by cripes, you'd be singin' songs uh thanksgivin'—er words to that effect. Honest to gran'ma, there's folks that'd kick if—"

"But I haven't got my blizzard stuff," Luck stated, harshly because of the effort to speak at all. "All that negative I took to-day is chuck full of 'static.'"

Annie-Many-Ponies, out in the kitchen, dropped a granite-iron plate, but the others merely stared at Luck uncomprehendingly.

"Well, say, by cripes! What's statics?" demanded Big Medicine pugnaciously, as though he meant to ward off from his mind the realization of some new misfortune.

Luck's lips twitched in the faint impulse toward a smile that would not come. "Statics," he explained, "is that branch of mechanics that relates to bodies held at rest by the forces acting on them. In other words, it is electricity in a stationary charge, the condition being produced by friction, or induction. In other words—"

"In other words," Big Medicine supplied glumly, "I can shut up and mind my own business. I get yuh, all right!"

"Nothing like that, Bud," Luck corrected more amiably, warmed a little by the sympathy he knew would follow close upon the heels of understanding. "Static is a technical word used a good deal in motion-picture photography. In this case it was caused, I think, by the difference of temperature in the metal parts of the camera and negative, and the weather outside the camera box. I've been keeping it here in the house where it's warm, and I took it out into the cold and started work—sabe? And the grinding of the bearings, and the action of the film on the race plate, generated static electricity in tiny flashes which lighted up the interior of the camera and light-exposed the negative, as it was passing from one magazine to another. When it's developed, these flashes show up in contrasty lights, like tiny grape vines; I can show you that part; I've got about a mile of it, more or less, there in the dark room."

"Plumb spoiled, d' yuh mean?" Big Medicine asked, his voice hushed before the catastrophe.

"Plumb spoiled." Luck threw his cigarette stub viciously into the blaze. "All that drifting herd, all that panoram of Andy and Miguel—all—everything I took to-day, with the exception of those last scenes with the cow and calf. The one where the cow is down and the snow drifting over her, and the calf huddled there by the carcass,—that's dandy. Camera and negative were cold as the outside air by that time. That one scene will stand out big; it's got an awful big punch, provided I had the stuff leading up to it, which I haven't got."

"Hell!" said Andy softly, voicing the dismay of them all.

Presently old Applehead unlimbered himself from his chair and went out into the cold and darkness. When he came back, ribbing his knuckles for warmth, he stood before the fireplace and ruminated dispiritedly before he spoke.

"Ain't ary hope of it blizzardin' to-morrer, boy," he broke his silence reluctantly, "'less the wind changes, which she don't act to me like she's got ary notion of doin'; she's shore goin' to blind ye with sun to-morrer, now I'm tellin' yuh."

"Well, there won't be any more static in my film," Luck declared with sudden decision, and carried his camera outside. When he returned Applehead eyed him solicitously.

"We-ell, this ain't but the middle uh November, yuh want to recollect," he said. "We're liable to have purtier storms 'n what this here one was, 'fore winter's over. Cattle'll be in worse condition, too,—ribs stickin' out so'st you kin count 'em a mile off 'n' more. Way winter's startin' in, wouldn't s'prise me a mite if we had storms all through till spring opens up."

Luck knew the old man was trying in his crude way to encourage him, but he made no reply, and Applehead relapsed into drowsy meditation over his pipe. The boys, yawning sleepily, trailed off to bed in the Ketch-all cabin. Rosemary and Annie-Many-Ponies, having finished washing the dishes and tidying the kitchen, came through the room on their way to bed, Annie-Many-Ponies cunningly hiding the little black dog behind her skirts. Rosemary frowned at the two and went to the door and called Compadre; but the blue cat, scenting a dog in the house, meowed his regrets and would not come.

"I'll take 'im down with me," said Applehead, rising stiffly. "He cain't take no comfort in the house no more—not till he spunks up and licks that thar dawg a time er two. Comin', Luck?" he added, waiting at the door. But Luck was staring into the fire and did not seem to hear him, so Applehead went off alone to where the Happy Family were already creeping thankfully into their hard bunks.

The house grew still; so still that Luck could hear the wind whispering in the chimney, coming from the quarter which meant clearing weather. He sighed, flung more wood on the coals to drive back the chill of the night, and got out his scenario and some sheets of blank paper and a pencil. He had sold his typewriter when he was raising money for this trip, and he was inclined now to regret it. But he sharpened the pencil, laid a large-surfaced "movie" magazine across his knees, and prepared to revise his scenario to meet his present limitations.

With a good thousand feet of film spoiled through no real fault of his own, and with the expenses he knew he must meet looming inexorably before him, he simply could not afford a leading woman. Therefore, he must change his story, making it a "character" lead instead of the conventional hero and heroine theme. Chance—he called it luck—had sent him Annie-Many-Ponies, who "Wants no monies." He must change his story so that she would fit into it as the necessary feminine element, but he was discouraged enough that night to tell himself that, just as he had her placed and working properly, the Indian Agent or her father, old Big Turkey, would probably demand her immediate return. In his despondent mood he had no faith in his standing with the Indians or in the letter he had written to the Agent. His "one best bet", as he put it, was to make her scenes as soon as possible, before they had time to reach him with a letter; therefore he must reconstruct his scenario immediately, so that he could get to work in the morning, whatever the weather.

He read the script through from beginning to end, and his heart went heavy in his chest. He did not want to change one scene of that Big Picture. Just as it stood it seemed to him perfect in its way. It had the bigness of the West when the West was young. It had the red blood of courage, the strength of achievement, the sweetness of a great love. It was, in short, Luck's biggest, best work. Still, without a woman to play that lead—

Luck sighed and dampened his pencil on his tongue and drew a heavy line through the scene where "Marian" first appeared in the story. It hurt him like drawing a hot wire across his hand. It was his first real compromise, his first step around an obstacle in his path rather than his usual bold jump over it. He looked at the pencil mark and considered whether he could not send for a girl young in the profession, who would be satisfied with her transportation and thirty or forty dollars a week while she stayed. He could make all her scenes and send her back. But a little mental arithmetic, coupled with the cold fact that he did not know of any young woman who was capable of doing the work he required and would yet be satisfied with a small salary, killed that new-born hope. He drew a line through the next scene where the girl appeared.

When he had quite blotted the girl from his story, he was appalled at the gap he must fill in the continuity and in the theme. He had left old Dave Wiswell, his dried little cattleman, a childless old man—or else a "squaw" man whose squaw has, presumably, died before the story began. Somehow he could not "see" his cattleman as one who would set aside the barrier of race and take a squaw for his wife. He could not see Annie-Many-Ponies as anything save what she was—a beautiful young savage with an odd adornment of civilized speech and some of the civilized customs, it is true, but a savage for all that. He did not want to spoil her by portraying her as a half-caste in his picture.

He must make his story a man's story, with the full interest centered about the man's hopes, his temptations, his achievements. The woman—Annie, as he saw the woman now—must be of secondary interest. He laid his head against the chair back in his favorite attitude for uninterrupted thought, and stared into the fire. In this way he had stared out into the night of the Dakota prairie; at first brooding in discontent because things were not as he would have them, then drifting into dreams of what he would like; then weaving his dreams together and creating a something complete in itself. So had he created his Big Picture,—the picture which was already beginning to live in the narrow strips of negative. A few hundred feet of that negative were even dry and filed away ready for cutting; unimportant scenes, to be sure, with all of his "big stuff" yet to be produced. His mind went methodically over the completed scenes, judging each one separately, seeking some change of plot that would yet permit these scenes to be used. From there his thought drifted to the day's work in the blizzard,—the day's work that had been lost because of atmospheric conditions. Blizzard stuff he must have, he told himself stubbornly. Not only was that a phase of the range which he must portray if his picture were to be complete; he must have it to lead the story up to that tragic, pitifully eloquent scene which had come out clear and photographically perfect,—the scene of the old cow's struggle against the storm and of her final surrender, too weak to match her puny strength against the furies of wind and snow and cold. That scene would live long in the minds of those who saw it; that scene alone would lift his picture above the dead level of mediocrity. But he must have another blizzard....

His eyelids drooped low over his tired eyes; through their narrowing opening he stared at the yellow glow of the fire. Only half awake, he dreamed of the herd drifting down that bleak hillside, with Andy and the Native Son riding doggedly after them. Only half awake, his story changed, grew indistinct, clarified in stray scenes, held aloof from him, grew and changed, and was another story. And always in the background of his mind went that drifting herd. Sometimes snow-whitened, their backs humped in the wind, their heads lowered and swaying weakly from side to side, the cattle marched and marched before him, sometimes obscured by the blackness of night, a vague procession of moving shadows; sometimes revealed suddenly when the lightning split the blackness. Like a phantom herd—

"The phantom herd!" Aloud he cried the words. "The Phantom Herd!" He sat up straight in his chair. Here was his title, for which his mind had groped so long and could not grasp. His title—

"What—that you, Luck?" Andy Green's voice came sleepily from the next room. "What yuh want?"

"I've got my title!" Luck called back, his voice exultant. "And I've got my story, too! Get up, Andy, and let me tell you the plot!"

Whereupon Andy proved himself a real friend and an unselfish one. He felt as if getting up out of bed was the final, supreme torture under which a man may live; but he got up, for there was something in Luck's voice that thrilled him even through the clogging sleep-hunger. Presently he was sitting in his trousers and socks and shirt, sleepy-eyed beside Luck.

"Shoot it outa your system," he mumbled, and began feeling stupidly for his cigarette papers. "E—a-ough!" he yawned, if so inarticulate a sound may be spelled. "I knew you'd have to work your story over," he said, more normal of tone after the yawn. And he added bluntly, "Rosemary's one grand little woman—but she couldn't act if you trained her a thousand years. What's your next best bet?"

"No next best; it's the picture this time. The Phantom Herd. Get that as a title?"

"Gee!" Andy softly paid tribute. Then he grinned. "By gracious, they sure didn't act to me like any phantom herd when we first headed 'em into that wind!"

"Them babies are going to march us up to a pile of real money, though," Luck asserted eagerly.

"Listen. Here's the story—the part I've changed; all the first part is the same—the trail-herd and all. You're old Dave's son, and you're wild. You quarrel, and he turns you out, thinking he'll let you rustle for yourself awhile, and maybe tame down and come back more like he wants you to be. But you don't tame that way. You throw in with Miguel, and you two turn rustlers. You hold a grudge against your dad, and you rustle from him mostly, on the plea that by rights what's his is yours—you know. Annie is Mig's sweetheart, and she's a kind of go-between—keeps you posted on what's taking place on the outside, and all that. I haven't," he explained hastily, "doped out the details yet. I'm giving you the main points I want to bring out. Well, here's the big stuff; you get a big herd together. You're holding 'em in a box canyon,—I know the spot, all right,—waiting for a chance to drive them outa the country; see? This blizzard hits, and you take advantage of it to drive the herd out under cover of the storm. But the blizzard beats you. You trail 'em along, but there's only two of you, and you can't keep 'em from swinging away from the wind. You try to hold the herd into the storm,—that's where I'll get my big storm effects,—but they swing off in spite of you. Your horses get tired; all you can do is follow the herd. Lord! I wish that stuff I took to-day wasn't spoiled! I sure would have had some big stuff there. Well, Mig's horse goes down in a drifted wash. You're trying to point the herd then, and the storm's so thick you don't miss him at first, we'll say.

"Anyway, 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

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 her back. I'm sure glad she can stay; she's good to have around, to help in the house."