Chapter 18 - Page 2

The Phantom Herd. That night he and Bill Holmes developed every foot of negative he had exposed since the storm began, and they finished just as Rosemary rapped on the darkroom door and called that breakfast was ready. Bill took it for granted that he could sleep, then, while the negative was drying; but Luck was merciless; that Cattlemen's Convention was only two days off,--counting that day which was already begun,--and there was also a twelve-hour train trip, more or less, between his picture and El Paso.

Bill Holmes had learned to join film in movie theaters, and Luck set him to work at it as soon as he had finished his breakfast. When Bill grumbled that there wasn't any film cement, Luck very calmly went to his trunk and brought some, thereby winning from Rosemary the admiring statement that she didn't believe Luck Lindsay ever forgot a single, solitary thing in his life! So Bill Holmes assembled the film, scene by scene, without even the comfort of cigarettes to keep awake. At his elbow Luck also joined film until the negative in the garret was dry enough to handle, when he began cutting it according to the continuity sheet, ready for Bill to assemble.

Luck's mood was changeable that day. He would glow with the pride of achievement when he held a yard or so of certain scenes to the light and knew that he had done something which no other producer had ever done, and that he had created a film story that would stand up like a lone peak above the level of all other Western pictures. When those night scenes were tinted--and that scene which had for its sub-title Opening Exercises, and which showed the Happy Family mounting Applehead's snakiest bronks and riding away from camp into what would be an orange sunrise after the positive had been through its dye bath--

And then discouragement would seize him, and he would wonder how he was going to get hold of money enough to take him to El Paso and the Convention. And how, in the name of destitution, was he going to pay for that stock of "positive" when it came? Applehead was dead willing to help him,--that went without saying; but Applehead was broke. That last load of horse-feed had cleaned his pockets, as he had cheerfully informed Luck over three weeks before. Applehead was not, and never would be by his own efforts, more than comfortably secure from having to get out and work for wages. He had cattle, but he let them run the range in season and out, and it was only in good years that he had fair beef to ship. He hated a gang of men hanging around the ranch and eating their fool heads off, he frequently declared. So he and Compadre had lived in unprosperous peace, with a little garden and a little grape arbor and a horse for Applehead in the corral, and teams in the pasture where they could feed and water themselves, and a month's supply of "grub" always in the house. Applehead called that comfort, and could not see the advantage of burdening