Chapter XII. To "Double" for Muriel Gay

While she breakfasted unsatisfactorily upon soda crackers and a bottle of olives which happened to have been left over from a previous luncheon, Jean meditated deeply upon the proper beginning of a book. The memory of last night came to her vividly, and she smiled while she fished with a pair of scissors for an olive. She would start the book off weirdly with mysterious sounds in an empty room. That, she argued, should fix firmly the interest of the reader right at the start.

By the time she had fished the olive from the bottle, however, her thoughts swung from the artistic to the material aspect of those mysterious footsteps. What had the man wanted or expected to find? She set down the olive bottle impulsively and went out and around to the kitchen door and opened it. In spite of herself, she shuddered as she went in, and she walked close to the wall until she was well past the brown stain on the floor. She went to the old-fashioned cupboard and examined the contents of the drawers and looked into a cigar-box which stood open upon the top. She went into her father's bedroom and looked through everything, which did not take long, since the room had little left in it. She went into the living-room, also depressingly dusty and forlorn, but try as she would to think of some article that might have been left there and was now wanted by some one, she could imagine no reason whatever for that nocturnal visit. At the same time, there must have been a reason. Men of that country did not ride abroad during the still hours of the night just for the love of riding. Most of them went to bed at dark and slept until dawn.

She went out, intending to go back to her literary endeavors; if she never started that book, certainly it would never make her rich, and she would never be able to make war upon circumstances. She thought of her father with a twinge of remorse because she had wasted so much time this morning, and she scarcely glanced toward the picture-people down by the corrals, so she did not see that Robert Grant Burns turned to look at her and then started hurriedly up the path to the house.

"Say," he called, just before she disappeared around the corner. "Wait a minute. I want to talk to you."

Jean waited, and the fat man came up breathing hard because of his haste in the growing heat of the forenoon.

"Say, I'd like to use you in a few scenes," he began abruptly when he reached her. "Gay can't put over the stuff I want; and I'd like to have you double for her in some riding and roping scenes. You're about the same size and build, and I'll get you a blond wig for close-ups, like that saddling scene. I believe you've got it in you to make good on the screen; anyway, the practice you'll get doubling for Gay won't do you any harm."

Jean looked at him, tempted to consent for the fun there would be in it. "I'd like to," she told him after a