Chapter XVIII. A New Kind of Picture

"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