Half a mile she galloped, and met Lite coming home. She glanced over her shoulder before she pulled Pard down to a walk, and Lite's greeting, as he turned and rode alongside her, was a question. He wanted to know what was the matter with her. He listened with his old manner of repression while she told him, and he made no comment whatever until she had finished.
"You must have made him pretty sore," he said dispassionately. "I don't think myself that you ought to stay over to the ranch alone. Why don't you do as he says?"
"And go back to the Bar Nothing?" Jean shivered a little. "Nothing could make me go back there! Lite, you don't understand. He acted like a crazy man; and I hadn't said anything to stir him up like that. He was—Lite, he scared me! I couldn't stay on the ranch with him. I couldn't be in the same room with him."
"You can't go on staying at the Lazy A," Lite told her flatly.
"There's no other place where I'd stay."
"You could," Lite pointed out, "stay in town and go back and forth with the rest of the bunch. It would be a lot better, any way you look at it."
"It would be a lot worse. There's my book; I wouldn't have any chance to write on that. And there's the expense. I'm saving every nickel I possibly can, Lite, and you know what for. And there's the bunch—I see enough of them during working hours. I'd go crazy if I had to live with them. Lite, they've put me in playing leads! I'm to get a hundred dollars a week! Just think of that! And Burns says that I'll have to go back to Los Angeles with them when they go this fall, because the contract I signed lasts for a year."
She sighed. "I rode over to tell you about it. It seemed to be good news, when I left home. But now, it's just a part of the black tangle that life's made up of. Aunt Ella started things off by telling me what a disgrace it is for me to work in these pictures. And Uncle Carl—" She shivered in spite of herself. "I just can't understand Uncle Carl's going into such a rage. It was—awful."
Lite rode for some distance before he lifted his head or spoke. Then he looked at Jean, who was staring straight ahead and seeing nothing save what her thoughts pictured.
He did not say a word about her going to Los Angeles.
He was the bottled-up type; the things that hit him hardest he seldom mentioned, so by that rule it might be inferred that her going hit hard. But his voice was normally calm, and his tone was the tone of authority, which Jean knew very well, and which nearly always amused her because she firmly believed it to be utterly useless.
He said in the tone of an ultimatum: "If you're bound to stay at the ranch, you've got to have somebody with you. I'll ride in and get Hepsy Atwood in the morning. You're getting thin. I don't believe you take time to cook enough to eat. You can't work on soda crackers and sardines. The old lady won't charge much to come and stay with you. I'll come over after I'm through work to-morrow and help her get things looking a little more like living."
"You'll do nothing of the sort." Jean looked at him mutinously. "I'm all right just as I am. I won't have her, Lite. That's settled."
"Sure, it's settled," Lite agreed, with more than his usual pertinacity. "I'll have her out here by noon, and a supply of real grub. How are you fixed for bedding?"
"I won't have her, I tell you. You're always trying to make me do things I won't do. Don't be silly."
"Sure not." Lite shifted in the saddle with the air of a man who rides at perfect ease with himself and with the world. "She'll likely have plenty of bedding of her own," he meditated, after a brief silence.
"Lite, if you haul Hepsibah out here, I'll send her back!"
"I'll haul her out," said Lite in a tone of finality, "but you won't send her back." He paused. "She ain't much protection, maybe," he remarked somewhat enigmatically, "but it'll beat staying alone nights. You—you can't tell who might come prowling around the place."
"What do you mean? Do you know about—" Jean caught herself on the verge of betrayal.
"You want to keep your gun handy. Just on general principles," Lite remonstrated. "You can't tell; it's away off from everywhere."
"I won't have Hepsy Atwood. Haven't I enough to drive me mad, without her?"
"Is there anybody else that you'd rather have?" Lite looked at her speculatively.
"No, there isn't. I won't have anybody. It would be a nuisance having some old lady in the house gabbling and gossiping. I'm not the least bit afraid, except,—I'm not afraid, and I like to be alone. I won't have her, Lite."
Lite said no more about it until they reached the house, huddled lonesomely against the barren bluff, its windows staring black into the dusk. Jean did not seem to expect Lite to dismount, but he did not wait to see what she expected him to do. In his most matter-of-fact manner he dismounted and turned his horse, still saddled, into the stable with Pard. He preceded Jean up the path, and went into the kitchen ahead of her; lighted a match and found the lamp, and set its flame to brightening the dingy room.
Jean had not done much in the way of making that part of the house more attractive. She used the kitchen to cook in, because the stove was there, and the dishes. She had spread an old braided rug over the brown stain on the floor, and she ate in her own room with the door shut.
Without being told, Lite seemed to know all about her secret aversion to the kitchen. He took up the lamp and went now on a tour of inspection through the house. Jean followed him, wondering a little, and thinking that this was the way that mysterious stranger came and prowled at night, except that he must have used matches to light the way, or a candle, since the lamp seemed never to be disturbed. Lite went into all the rooms and held the lamp so that its brightness searched out all the corners. He looked into the small, stuffy closets. He stood in the middle of her father's room and seemed to meditate deeply, while Jean stood in the doorway and watched him inquiringly. He came back finally to the kitchen and looked into the cupboard, as though he was taking an inventory of her supply of provisions.
"You might cook me some supper, Jean," he said, when he had put the lamp on the table. "I see you've got eggs and bacon. I'm pretty hungry,—for a man that had his dinner six or seven hours ago."
Jean cooked supper, and they ate together in the kitchen. It did not seem so gruesome with Lite there, and she told him some funny things that had happened in her work, and mimicked Robert Grant Burns with an accuracy of manner and tone that would have astonished that pompous person a good deal and flattered him not at all. She almost recovered her spirits under the stimulus of Lite's presence, and she quite forgot that he had threatened her with Hepsibah Atwood.
But when he had wiped the dishes and had taken up his hat to go, Lite proved how tenaciously his mind could hold to an idea, and how even Jean could not quite match him for stubbornness.
"That mattress in the little bedroom looks all right," he said. "I'll pack it outside before I go, so it will have all day to-morrow out in the sun. I'll have Hepsy bring her own bedding. Well—so long."
Jean would have sworn in perfect good faith that Lite led his horse out of the stable, mounted it, and rode away to the Bar Nothing. He did mount and ride away as far as the mouth of the coulee. But that night he spent in the loft over the shop, and he did not sleep five minutes during the night. Most of the time he spent leaning against his rolled bedding, smoking and gazing at the silent house where Jean slept. You may interpret that as you will.
Jean did not see or hear anything more of him, until about four o'clock the next afternoon, when he drove calmly up to the house and deposited Hepsibah Atwood upon the kitchen steps. He did not wait for Jean to order them away. He hurried the unloading, released the wagon brake, and drove off. So Jean, coming from the spring behind the house, really got her first sight of him as he went rattling down to the gate.
Jean stood and looked after him, twitched her shoulders in a mental yielding of the point for the time being, and said "How-da-do" to the old lady.
She was not so old, as years go; fifty-five or thereabouts. And she could have whispered into Lite's ear without standing on her toes or asking him to bend his head. Lite was a tall man, at that. She had gray hair that was frizzy around her brows and at the back of her neck, and she had an Irish disposition without the brogue to go with it.
The first thing she did was to find an axe and chop a lot of fence-posts into firewood, as easily as Lite himself could have done it, and in other ways proceeded to make herself very much at home. The next day she dipped the spring almost dry, and used up all the soap in the house; and for three days went around with her skirts tucked up and her arms bare and the soles of her shoes soggy from wet floors. Jean kept out of her way, but she owned to herself that, after all, it was not unpleasant to come home tired and not have to cook a solitary supper and eat it in silent meditation.
The third night after Hepsy's arrival, Jean awoke to hear a man's furtive footsteps in her father's room. This was the fifth time that the prowler had come in the night, and custom had dulled her fear a little. She had not reached the point yet of getting up to see who it was and what he wanted. It was much easier to lie perfectly still with her six-shooter gripped in her hand and wait for him to go. Beyond stealthily trying her door and finding it fastened on the inside, he had never shown any disposition to invade her room.
To-night was as all other nights when he came and made that mysterious search, until he went into the little bedroom where slept Hepsibah Atwood. Jean listened to the faint creaking of old boards which told her that he was approaching Hepsy's room, and she wondered if Hepsy would hear him. Hepsy did hear him. There was a squeak of the old bedstead that told how a hundred and seventy-two pounds of indignant womanhood was rising to do battle.
"Who's that? Git outa here, or I'll smash you!" There was no fear but a great deal of determination in Hepsy's voice, and there was the sound of her bare feet spatting on the floor.
The man's footsteps retreated hurriedly. Jean heard the kitchen door open and slam shut with a shrill squeal of its rusty hinges, and the sound of a man running down the path. She heard Hepsy muttering threats while she followed to the door and looked out, and she heard the muttering continue while Hepsy returned to bed.
It was very comforting. Jean tucked her gun under her pillow, laughed to herself for having shuddered under the blankets at the sound of a man so easily put to flight, and went to sleep feeling quite secure and for the first time really glad that Hepsibah Atwood was in the house.
She listened the next morning to Hepsy's colorful account of the affair, but she did not tell Hepsy that the man had been there before. She did not even tell her that she had heard the disturbance, and was lying with her gun in her hand ready to shoot if he came into her room. For a girl as frank and outspoken as was Jean, she had almost as great a talent as Lite for holding her tongue.
"Well, you don't seem crazy about it. What's the matter?" Robert Grant Burns stood in his favorite attitude with his hands on his hips and his feet far apart, and looked down at Jean with a secret anxiety in his eyes. Without realizing it in the least, Jean's opinion had come to have a certain weight with Robert Grant Burns. "What's wrong with that?" Burns, having sat up until two o'clock to finish that particular scenario to his liking, plainly resented the expression on Jean's face while she read it.
"Oh, nothing, only I'm getting awfully sick of these kidnap-and-rescue, and kiss-in-the-last-scene pictures, and Wild West stuff without a real Western man in the whole thing. I'd like to do something real for a change."
Robert Grant Burns grunted and reached for his slighted brain-child. "What you want? Mother on, knitting. Girl washing dishes. Lover arrives; they sit on front steps and spoon. Become engaged. Lover hitches up team, girl climbs into wagon, they drive to town. Ten scenes of driving to town. Lover gets out, ties team in front of courthouse. Goes in and gets license. Three scenes of license business. Goes out. Two scenes of driving to minister and hitching team to gate. One scene of getting to door. One scene getting inside the house. One scene preacher calling his wife and hired girl. One scene 'Do you take this woman,' one scene 'I do.' Fifteen scenes getting team untied and driving back to ranch. That's about as much pep as there is in real life in the far West, these days. Something like that would suit you, maybe. It don't suit the people who pay good nickels and dimes to get a thrill, though."
"Neither does this sort of junk, if they've got any sense. Think of paying nickel after nickel to see Lee Milligan rush to the girl's door, knock, learn the fatal news, stagger back and clap his hand to his brow and say 'Great Heaven! GONE!'" Jean, stirred to combat by the sarcasm of Robert Grant Burns, did the stagger and the hand-to-brow and great-heaven scene with a realism that made Pete Lowry turn his back suddenly. "They've seen Gil abduct me or Muriel seven times in a perfectly impossible manner, and they—oh, why don't you give them something REAL? Things that are thrilling and dangerous and terrible do happen out here, Mr. Burns. Real adventures and real tragedies—" She stopped, and Burns turned his eyes involuntarily toward the kitchen. He had heard all about the history of the Lazy A, though he had been very careful to hide the fact that he had heard it. Jean's glance, following that of her director, was a revealing one. She bit her lip; and in a moment she went on, with her chin held a shade higher and her pride revolting against subterfuge.
"I didn't mean that," she said quietly. "But—well, up to a certain point, I don't mind if you put in real things, if it will be good picture-stuff. You're featuring me, anyway, it seems. Listen." Jean's face changed. Her eyes took that farseeing look of the dreamer. She was looking full at Burns, but he knew that she did not see him at all. She was looking at a mental picture of her own conjuring, he judged. He stood still and waited curiously, wondering, to use his manner of speech, what the girl was going to spring now.
"Listen: Instead of all this impossible piffle, let's start a real story. I—I've—"
"What kind of a real story?" The tone of Robert Grant Burns was carefully non-committal, but his eyes betrayed his eagerness. The girl did have some real ideas, sometimes! And Robert Grant Burns was not the one to refuse a real idea because it did not come from his own brain.
"Well," Jean flushed with an adorable shyness at the apparent egotism of her idea, "since you seem to want me for the central figure in everything, suppose we start a story like this: Suppose I am left here at the Lazy A with my mother to take care of and a ranch and a lot of cattle; and suppose it's a hard proposition, because there's really a gang of rustlers that have been running off stock and never getting caught, and they have a grudge against my family and grab our cattle every chance they get. Suppose—suppose they killed my brother when he was about to round them up, and they want to drive me and my mother out of the country. Scare us out, you know. Well,—" she hesitated and glanced diffidently at the boys who had edged up to listen,—"that would leave room for all kinds of feature stuff. Say that I have just one or two boys that I can depend on, boys that I know are loyal. With an outfit the size of ours, that keeps me in the saddle every day and all day; and I would have some narrow escapes, I reckon. You've got your rustlers all made to order,—only I'd make them up differently, if I were doing it. Have them look real, you know, instead of stagey." (Whereat Robert Grant Burns winced.) "Lee could be one of my loyal cowboys; you'd want some dramatic acting, I reckon, and he could do that. But I'd want one puncher who can ride and shoot and handle a rope. For that, to help me do the real work in the picture, I want Lite Avery. There are things I can do that you have never had me do, for the simple reason that you don't know the life well enough ever to think of them. Real stunts, not these made-to-order, shoot-the-villain-and-run-to-the-arms-of-the-hero stuff. I'd have to have Lite Avery; I wouldn't start without him."
"Well, go on." Robert Grant Burns still tried to sound non-committal, but he was plainly eager to hear all that she had to say.
"Well, that's the idea. They're trying to drive us out of the country, without really hurting me. And I've got my mind set on staying. Not only that, but I believe they killed my brother, and I'm going to hunt them down and break up their gang or die in the attempt. There's your plot. It needn't be overdone in the least, to have thrills enough. And there would be all kinds of chance for real range-stuff, like the handling of cattle and all that.
"We can use this ranch just as it is, and have the outlaws down next the river. I'm glad you haven't taken any scenes that show the ranch as a whole. You've stuck to your close-up, great-heaven scenes so much," she went on with merciless frankness, "that you've really not cheapened the place by showing more than a little bit at a time.
"You might start by making Lee up for my brother, and kill him in the first reel; show the outlaws when they shoot him and run off with a bunch of stock they're after. Lite can find him and bring him home. Lite would know just how to do that sort of thing, and make people see it's real stuff. I believe he'd show he was a real cow-puncher, even to the people who never saw one. There's an awful lot of difference between the real thing and your actors." She was so perfectly sincere and so matter-of-fact that the men she criticised could do no more than grin.
"You might, for the sake of complications, put a traitor and spy on the ranch. Oh, I tell you! Have Hepsibah be the mother of one of the outlaws. She wouldn't need to do any acting; you could show her sneaking out in the dark to meet her son and tell him what she has overheard. And show her listening, perhaps, through the crack in a door. Mrs. Gay would have to be the mother. Gil says that Hepsibah has the figure of a comedy cook and what he calls a character face. I believe we could manage her all right, for what little she would have to do, don't you?"
Jean having poured out her inspiration with a fluency born of her first enthusiasm, began to feel that she had been somewhat presumptuous in thus offering advice wholesale to the highest paid director of the Great Western Film Company. She blushed and laughed a little, and shrugged her shoulders.
"That's just a suggestion," she said with forced lightness. "I'm subject to attacks of acute imagination, sometimes. Don't mind me, Mr. Burns. Your scenario is a very nice scenario, I'm sure. Do you want me to be a braid-down-the-back girl in this? Or a curls-around-the-face girl?"
Robert Grant Burns stood absent-mindedly tapping his left palm with the folded scenario which Jean had just damned by calling it a very nice scenario. Nice was not the adjective one would apply to it in sincere admiration. Robert Grant Burns himself had mentally called it a hummer. He did not reply to Jean's tentative apology for her own plot-idea. He was thinking about the idea itself.
Robert Grant Burns was not what one would call petty. He would not, for instance, stick to his own story if he considered that Jean's was a better one. And, after all, Jean was now his leading woman, and it is not unusual for a leading woman to manufacture her own plots, especially when she is being featured by her company. There was no question of hurt pride to be debated within the mind of him, therefore. He was just weighing the idea itself for what it was worth.
"Seems to me your plot-idea isn't so much tamer than mine, after all." He tested her shrewdly after a prolonged pause. "You've got a killing in the first five hundred feet, and outlaws and rustling—"
"Oh, but don't you see, it isn't the skeleton that makes the difference; it's the kind of meat you put on the bones! Paradise Lost would be a howling melodrama, if some of you picture-people tried to make it. You'd take this plot of mine and make it just like these pictures I've been working in, Mr. Burns: Exciting and all that, but not the real West after all; spectacular without being probable. What I mean,—I can't explain it to you, I'm afraid; but I have it in my head." She looked at him with that lightening of the eyes which was not a smile, really, but rather the amusement which might grow into laughter later on.
"You'd better fine me for insubordination," she drawled whimsically, "and tell me whether it's to be braids or curls, so I can go and make up." At that moment she saw Gil Huntley beckoning to her with a frantic kind of furtiveness that was a fair mixture of pinched-together eyebrows and slight jerkings of the head, and a guarded movement of his hand that hung at his side. Gil, she thought, was trying to draw her away before she went too far with her trouble-inviting freedom of speech. She laughed lazily.
"Braids or curls?" she insisted. "And please, sir, I won't do so no more, honest."
Robert Grant Burns looked at her from under his eyebrows and made a sound between his grunt of indignation and his chuckle of amusement. "Sure you won't?" he queried shortly. "Stay the way you are, if you want to; chances are you won't go to work right away, anyhow."
Jean flashed him a glance of inquiry. Did that mean that she had at last gone beyond the limit? Was Robert Grant Burns going to FIRE her? She looked at Gil, who was sauntering off with the perfectly apparent expectation that she would follow him; and Mrs. Gay, who was regarding her with a certain melancholy conviction that Jean's time as leading woman was short indeed. She pursed her lips with a rueful resignation, and followed Gil to the spring behind the house.
"Say, you mustn't hand out things like that, Jean!" he protested, when they were quite out of sight and hearing of the others. "Let me give you a tip, girl. If you've got any photo-play ideas that are worth talking about, don't go spreading them out like that for Bobby to pick and choose!"
"Pick to pieces, you mean," Jean corrected.
"You're going to tell me I'm in bad. But I can't help it; he's putting on some awfully stagey plots, and they cost just as much to produce as—"
"Listen here. You've got me wrong. That plot of yours could be worked up into a dandy series; the idea of a story running through a lot of pictures is great. What I mean is, it's worth something. You don't have to give stuff like that away, make him a present of it, you know. I just want to put you wise. If you've got anything that's worth using, make 'em pay for it. Put 'er into scenario form and sell it to 'em. You're in this game to make money, so why overlook a bet like that?"
"Oh, Gil! Could I?"
"Sure, you could! No reason why you shouldn't, if you can deliver the goods. Burns has been writing his own plays to fit his company; but aside from the features you've been putting into it, it's old stuff. He's a darned good director, and all that, but he hasn't got the knack of building real stories. You see what I mean. If you have, why—"
"I wonder," said Jean with a sudden small doubt of her literary talents, "if I have!"
"Sure, you have!" Gil's faith in Jean was of the kind that scorns proof. "You see, you've got the dope on the West, and he knows it. Why, I've been watching how he takes the cue from you right along for his features. Ever since you told Lee Milligan how to lay a saddle on the ground, Burns has been getting tips; and half the time you didn't even know you were giving them. Get into this game right, Jean. Make 'em pay for that kind of thing."
Jean regarded him thoughtfully, tempted to yield. "Mrs. Gay says a hundred dollars a week—"
"It's good pay for a beginner. She's right, and she's wrong. They're featuring you in stuff that nobody else can do. Who would they put in your place, to do the stunts you've been doing? Muriel Gay was a good actress, and as good a Western lead as they could produce; and you know how she stacked up alongside you. You're in a class by yourself, Jean. You want to keep that in mind. They aren't just trying to be nice to you; it's hard-boiled business with the Great Western. You're going awfully strong with the public. Why, my chum writes me that you're announced ahead on the screen at one of the best theaters on Broadway! 'Coming: Jean Douglas in So-and-so.' Do you know what that means? No, you don't; of course not. But let me tell you that it means a whole lot! I wish I'd had a chance to tip you off to a little business caution before you signed that contract. That salary clause should have been doctored to make a sliding scale of it. As it is, you're stuck for a year at a hundred dollars a week, unless you spring something the contract does not cover. Don't give away any more dope. You've got an idea there, if Burns will let you work up to it. Make 'em pay for it."
"O-h-h, Gil!" came the throaty call of Burns; and Gil, with a last, earnest warning, left her hurriedly.
Jean sat down on a rock and meditated, her chin in her palms, and her elbows on her knees. Vague shadows; of thoughts clouded her mind and then slowly clarified into definite ideas. Unconsciously she had been growing away from her first formulated plans. She was gradually laying aside the idea of reaching wealth and fame by way of the story-trail. She was almost at the point of admitting to herself that her story, as far as she had gone with it, could never be taken seriously by any one with any pretense of intelligence. It was too unreal, too fantastic. It was almost funny, in the most tragic parts. She was ready now to dismiss the book as she had dismissed her earlier ambitions to become a poet.
But if she and Lite together could really act a story that had the stamp of realism which she instinctively longed for, surely it would be worth while. And if she herself could build the picture story they would later enact before the camera,—that would be better, much better than writing silly things about an impossible heroine in the hope of later selling the stuff!
Automatically her thoughts swung over to the actual building of the scenes that would make for continuity of her lately-conceived plot. Because she knew every turn and every crook of that coulee and every board in the buildings snuggled within it, she began to plan her scenes to fit the Lazy A, and her action to fit the spirit of the country and those countless small details of life which go to make what we call the local color of the place.
There never had been an organized gang of outlaws just here in this part of the country, but—there might have been. Her dad could remember when Sid Cummings and his bunch hung out in the Bad Lands fifty miles to the east of there. Neither had she ever had a brother, for that matter; and of her mother she had no more than the indistinct memory of a time when there had been a long, black box in the middle of the living-room, and a lot of people, and tears which fell upon her face and tickled her nose when her father held her tightly in his arms.
But she had the country, and she had Lite Avery, and to her it was very, very easy to visualize a story that had no foundation in fact. It was what she had done ever since she could remember—the day-dreaming that had protected her from the keen edge of her loneliness.
"What you doing now?" Robert Grant Burns came around the corner of the house looking for her, half an hour later, and found her sitting on the doorstep with the old atlas on her knees and her hat far back on her head, scribbling away for dear life.
Jean smiled abstractedly up at him. "Why, I'm—why-y, I'm becoming a famous scenario writer! Do you want me to go and plaster my face with grease-paint, and become a mere common leading lady again?"
"No, I don't." Robert Grant Burns chuckled fatly and held out his hand with a big, pink cameo on his little finger. "Let's see what a famous scenario looks like. What is it,—that plot you were telling me awhile ago?"
"Why, yes. I'm putting on the meat." There was a slight hesitation before Jean handed him the pages she had done. "I expect it's awfully crude," she apologized, with one of her diffident spells. "I'm afraid you'll laugh at me."
Robert Grant Burns was reading rapidly, mentally photographing the scenes as he went along. He held out his hand again without looking toward her. "Lemme take your pencil a minute. I believe I'd have a panoram of the coulee,—a long shot from out there in the meadow. And show the brother and you leaving the house and riding toward the camera; at the gate, you separate. You're going to town, say. He rides on toward the hills. That fixes you both as belonging here at the ranch, identifies you two and the home ranch both in thirty feet or so of the film, with a leader that tells you're brother and sister. See what I mean?" He scribbled a couple of lines, crossed out a couple, and went on reading to where he had interrupted Jean in the middle of a sentence.
"I see you're writing in a part for that Lite Avery; how do you know he'd do it? Or can put it over if he tries? He don't look to me like an actor."
"Lite," declared Jean with a positiveness that would have thrilled Lite, had he heard her, "can put over anything he tries to put over. And he'll do it, if I tell him he must!" Which showed what were Jean's ideas, at least on the subject of which was the master.
"What you going to call it a The Perils of the Prairie, say?" Burns abandoned further argument on the subject of Lite's ability.
"Oh, no! That's awfully cheap. That would stamp it as a melodrama before any of the picture appeared on the screen."
Robert Grant Burns had not been serious; he had been testing Jean's originality. "Well, what will we call it, then?"
"Oh, we'll call it—" Jean nibbled the rubber on her pencil and looked at him with that unseeing, introspective gaze which was a trick of hers. "We'll call it—does it hurt if we use real names that we've a right to?" She got a head-shake for answer. "Well, we'll call it,—let's just call it—Jean, of the Lazy A. Would that sound as if—"
"Great! Girl, you're a winner! Jean, of the Lazy A! Say, that title alone will jump the releases ten per cent., if I know the game. Featuring Jean herself; pictures made right at the Lazy A Ranch. Say, the dope I can give our publicity man—"
Thereupon Jean, remembering Gil Huntley's lecture on the commercial side of the proposition, startled his enthusiasm with one naive question.
"How much will the Great Western Film Company pay me extra for furnishing the story I play in?"
"How much?" Robert Grant Burns blurted the words automatically.
"Yes. How much? If it will jump your releases ten per cent. they ought to pay me quite a lot more than they're paying me now."
"You're doing pretty well as it is," Burns reminded her, with a visible dampening of his eagerness.
"For keeping your cut-and-dried stories from falling flat, yes. But for writing the kind of play that will have just as many 'punches' and still be true to life, and then for acting it all out and putting in those punches,—that's a different matter, Mr. Burns. And you'll have to pay Lite a decent salary, or I'll quit right here. I'm thinking up stunts for us two that are awfully risky. You'll have to pay for that. But it will be worth while. You wait till you see Lite in action!"
Gil would have been exuberant over the literal manner in which Jean was taking his advice and putting it to the test, had he overheard her driving her bargain with Robert Grant Burns. He would have been exuberant, but he would never have dared to say the things that Jean said, or to have taken the stand that she took. Robert Grant Burns found himself very much in the position which Lite had occupied for three years. He had well-defined ideas upon the subject before them, and he had the outer semblance of authority; but his ideas and his authority had no weight whatever with Jean, since she had made up her mind.
Before Jean left the subject of salary, Robert Grant Burns found himself committed to a promise of an increase, provided that Jean really "delivered the goods" in the shape of a scenario serial, and did the stunts which she declared she could and would do.
Before she settled down to the actual planning of scenes, Robert Grant Burns had also yielded to her demands for Lite Avery, though you may think that he thereby showed himself culpably weak, unless you realize what sort of a person Jean was in argument. Without having more than a good-morning acquaintance with Lite, Burns agreed to put him on "in stock" and to pay him the salary Jean demanded for him, provided that, in the try-out of the first picture, Lite should prove he could deliver the goods. Burns was always extremely firm in the matter of having the "goods" delivered; that was why he was the Great Western's leading director. Mere dollars he would yield, if driven into a corner and kept there long enough, but he must have results.
These things being settled, they spent about two hours on the doorstep of Jean's room, writing the first reel of the story; which is to say that Jean wrote, and Burns took each sheet from her hands as it was finished, and read and made certain technical revisions now and then. Several times he grunted words of approbation, and several times he let his fat, black cigar go out, while he visualized the scenes which Jean's flying pencil portrayed.
"I'll go over and get Lite," she said at last, rubbing the cramp out of her writing-hand and easing her shoulders from their strain of stooping. "There'll be time, while you send the machine after some real hats for your rustlers. Those toadstool things were never seen in this country till you brought them in your trunk; and this story is going to be real! Your rustlers won't look much different from the punchers, except that they'll be riding different horses; we'll have to get some paint somewhere and make a pinto out of that wall-eyed cayuse Gil rides mostly. He'll lead the rustlers, and you want the audience to be able to spot him a mile off. Lite and I will fix the horse; we'll put spots on him like a horse Uncle Carl used to own."
"Maybe you can't get Lite," Burns pointed out, eyeing her over a match blaze. "He never acted to me like he had the movie-fever at all. Passes us up with a nod, and has never showed signs of life on the subject. Lee can ride pretty well," he added artfully, "even if he wasn't born in the saddle. And we can fake that rope work."
"All right; you can send the machine in with a wire to your company for a leading woman." Jean picked up her gloves and turned to pull the door shut behind her, and by other signs and tokens made plain her intention to leave.
"Oh, well, you can see if he'll come. I said I'd try him out, but—"
"He'll come. I told you that before." Jean stopped and looked at her director coldly. "And you'll keep your word. And we won't have any fake stuff in this,—except the spots on the pinto." She smiled then. "We wouldn't do that, but there isn't a pinto in the country right now that would be what we want. You had better get your bunch together, because I'll be back in a little while with Lite."
As it happened, Lite was on his way to the Lazy A, and met Jean in the bottom of the sandy hollow. His eyes lightened when he saw her come loping up to him. But when she was close enough to read the expression of his face, it was schooled again to the frank friendship which Jean always had accepted as a matter of course.
"Hello, Lite! I've got a job for you with the movies," Jean announced, as soon as she was within speaking distance. "You can come right back with me and begin. It's going to be great. We're going to make a real Western picture, Lite, you and I. Lee and Gil and all the rest will be in it, of course; but we're going to put in the real West. And we're going to put in the ranch,—the REAL Lazy A, Lite. Not these dinky little sets that Burns has toggled up with bits of the bluff showing for background, but the ranch just as it—it used to be." Jean's eyes grew wistful while she looked at him and told him her plans.
"I'm writing the scenario myself," she explained, "and that's why you have to be in it. I've written in stuff that the other boys can't do to save their lives. REAL stuff, Lite! You and I are going to run the ranch and punch the cows,—Lazy A cattle, what there are left of them,—and hunt down a bunch of rustlers that have their hangout somewhere down in the breaks; we don't know just where, yet. The places we'll ride, they'll need an airship to follow with the camera! I haven't got it all planned yet, but the first reel is about done; we're going to begin on it this afternoon. We'll need you in the first scenes,—just ranch scenes, with you and Lee; he's my brother, and he'll get killed— Now, what's the matter with you?" She stopped and eyed him disapprovingly. "Why have you got that stubborn look to your mouth? Lite, see here. Before you say a word, I want to tell you that you are not to refuse this. It—it means money, Lite; for you, and for me, too. And that means—dad at home again. Lite—"
Bite looked at her, looked away and bit his lips. It was long since he had seen tears in Jean's steady, brown eyes, and the sight of them hurt him intolerably. There was nothing that he could say to strengthen her faith, absolutely nothing. He did not see how money could free her father before his sentence expired. Her faith in her dad seemed to Lite a wonderful thing, but he himself could not altogether share it, although he had lately come to feel a very definite doubt about Aleck's guilt. Money could not help them, except that it could buy back the Lazy A and restock it, and make of it the home it had been three years ago.
Lite, in the secret heart of him, did not want Jean to set her heart on doing that. Lite was almost in a position to do it himself, just as he had planned and schemed and saved to do, ever since the day when he took Jean to the Bar Nothing, and announced to her that he intended to take care of her in place of her father. He had wanted to surprise Jean; and Jean, with her usual headlong energy bent upon the same object, seemed in a fair way to forestall him, unless he moved very quickly.
"Lite, you won't spoil everything now, just when I'm given this great opportunity, will you?" Jean's voice was steady again. She could even meet his eyes without flinching. "Gil says it's a great opportunity, in every way. It's a series of pictures, really, and they are to be called 'Jean, of the Lazy A.' Gil says they will be advertised a lot, and make me famous. I don't care about that; but the company will pay me more, and that means—that means that I can get out and find Art Osgood sooner, and—get dad home. And you will have to help. The whole thing, as I have planned it, depends upon you, Lite. The riding and the roping, and stuff like that, you'll have to do. You'll have to work right alongside me in all that outdoor stuff, because I am going to quit doing all those spectacular, stagey stunts, and get down to real business. I've made Burns see that there will be money in it for his company, so he is perfectly willing to let me go ahead with it and do it my way. Our way, Lite, because, once you start with it, you can help me plan things." Whereupon, having said almost everything she could think of that would tend to soften that stubborn look in Lite's face, Jean waited.
Lite did a great deal of thinking in the next two or three minutes, but being such a bottled-up person, he did not say half of what he thought; and Jean, closely as she watched his face, could not read what was in his mind. Of Aleck he thought, and the slender chance there was of any one doing what Jean hoped to do; of Art Osgood, and the meager possibility that Art could shed any light upon the killing of Johnny Croft; of the Lazy A, and the probable price that Carl would put upon it if he were asked to sell the ranch and the stock; of the money he had already saved, and the chance that, if he went to Carl now and made him an offer, Carl would accept. He weighed mentally all the various elements that went to make up the depressing tangle of the whole affair, and decided that he would write at once to Rossman, the lawyer who had defended Aleck, and put the whole thing into his hands. He would then know just where he stood, and what he would have to do, and what legal steps he must take.
He looked at Jean and grinned a little. "I'm not pretty enough for a picture actor," he said whimsically. "Better let me be a rustler and wear a mask, if you don't want folks to throw fits."
"You'll be what I want you to be," Jean told him with the little smile in her eyes that Lite had learned to love more than he could ever say. "I'm going to make us both famous, Lite. Now, come on, Bobby Burns has probably chewed up a whole box of those black cigars, waiting for us to show up."
I am not going to describe the making of "Jean, of the Lazy A." It would be interesting, but this is not primarily a story of the motion-picture business, remember. It is the story of the Lazy A and the problem that both Jean and Lite were trying to solve. The Great Western Film Company became, through sheer chance, a factor in that problem, and for that reason we have come into rather close touch with them; but aside from the fact that Jean's photo-play brought Lite into the company and later took them both to Los Angeles, this particular picture has no great bearing upon the matter.
Robert Grant Burns had intended taking his company back to Los Angles in August, when the hot winds began to sweep over the range land. But Jean's story was going "big." Jean was throwing herself into the part heart and mind. She lived it. With Lite riding beside her, helping her with all his skill and energy and much enthusiasm, she almost forgot her great undertaking sometimes, she was so engrossed with her work. With his experience, suggesting frequent changes, she added new touches of realism to this story that made the case-hardened audience of the Great Western's private projection room invent new ways of voicing their enthusiasm, when the negative films Pete Lowry sent in to headquarters were printed and given their trial run.
They were just well started when August came with its hot winds. They stayed and worked upon the serial until it was finished, and that meant that they stayed until the first October blizzard caught them while they were finishing the last reel.
Do you know what they did then? Jean changed a few scenes around at Lite's suggestion, and they went out into the hills in the teeth of the storm and pictured Jean lost in the blizzard, and coming by chance upon the outlaws at their camp, which she and Lite and Lee had been hunting through all the previous installments of the story. It was great stuff,—that ride Jean made in the blizzard,—and that scene where, with numbed fingers and snow matted in her dangling braid, she held up the rustlers and marched them out of the hills, and met Lite coming in search of her.
You will remember it, if you have been frequenting the silent drama and were fortunate enough to see the picture. You may have wondered at the realism of those blizzard scenes, and you may have been curious to know how the camera got the effect. It was wonderful photography, of course; but then, the blizzard was real, and that pinched, half frozen look on Jean's face in the close-up where she met Lite was real. Jean was so cold when she turned the rustlers over to Lite that when she started to dismount and fell in a heap,—you remember?—she was not acting at all. Neither was Lite acting when he plunged through the drift and caught Jean in his arms and held her close against him just as that scene ended. In the name of realism they cut the scene, because Lite showed that he forgot all about the outlaws and the part he was playing.
So they finished the picture, and the whole company packed their trunks thankfully and turned their faces and all their thoughts westward.
Jean was not at all sure that she wanted to go. It seemed almost as though she were setting aside her great undertaking; as though she were weakly deserting her dad when she closed the door for the last time upon her room and turned her back upon Lazy A coulee. But there were certain things which comforted her; Lite was going along to look after the horses, he told her just the day before they started. For Robert Grant Burns, with an eye to the advertising value of the move, had decided that Pard must go with them. He would have to hire an express car, anyway, he said, for the automobile and the scenery sets they had used for interiors. And there would be plenty of room for Pard and Lite's horse and another which Robert Grant Burns had used to carry him to locations in rough country, where the automobile could not go. The car would run in passenger service, Burns said,—he'd fix that,—so Lite would be right with the company all the way out.
Jean appreciated all that as a personal favor, which merely proved how unsophisticated she really was. She did not know that Robert Grant Burns was thinking chiefly of furnishing material for the publicity man to use in news stories. She never once dreamed that the coming of "Jean, of the Lazy A" and Jean's pet horse Pard, and of Lite, who had done so many surprising things in the picture, would be heralded in all the Los Angeles papers before ever they left Montana.
Jean was concerned chiefly with attending to certain matters which seemed to her of vital importance. If she must go, there was something which she must do first,—something which for three years she had shrunk from doing. So she told Robert Grant Burns that she would meet him and his company in Helena, and without a word of explanation, she left two days in advance of them, just after she had had another maddening talk with her Uncle Carl, wherein she had repeated her intention of employing a lawyer.
When she boarded the train at Helena, she did not tell even Lite just where she had been or what she had been doing. She did not need to tell Lite. He looked into her face and saw there the shadow of the high, stone wall that shut her dad away from the world, and he did not ask a single question.