The Phantom Herd Part 19

I suppose they thought that his orders to range-herd the cattle they had gathered came from the same mood, but they did not seem to mind. They did whatever he told them to do, and they did it cheerfully,--which, in the circ.u.mstances, is saying a good deal for the Happy Family. So with the sun warm as early May, and the new gra.s.s showing tiny green blade-tips in the sheltered places, they began range-herding two thousand head of cattle that needed all the territory they could cover for their feeding grounds.

The twenty-fifth day of March brought no faintest promise of anything that looked like snow. Applehead sharpened his hoe and went pecking at the soil around the roots of his grape-vine arbor, thereby irritating Luck to the point of distraction. He had reached a nervous tension where he could not eat, and he could not sleep, and life looked a nightmare of hard work and disappointments, of hopes luring deceitfully only to crush one at the moment of fulfilment.

It was because he could not sleep, but spent the nights stretched upon his side with his wide-open eyes boring into vacancy and a drab future, that he heard the wind whine over the ridgepole of the squat bunk-house and knew that it had risen from a dead calm since bedtime. The languor of nervous exhaustion was pulling his eyelids down over his tired eyes, and he knew that it must be nearly morning; for sleep never came to him now until after Applehead's brown rooster had crowed for two o'clock.

He closed his eyes and dreamed that he was "shooting" blizzard scenes with the snow to his armpits. He was chilled to the middle of his bones, and his hand went down unconsciously and groped for the blankets he had pushed off in his restlessness. In his sleep he was yelling to the Cattlemen's Convention to wait,--not to adjourn yet, because he had something to show them.

"Well, show'em, dang it, an' shut up!" muttered Applehead crossly, and turned over on his good ear so that he could sleep undisturbed.

Luck, half awakened by the movement, curled up with his knees close to his chin and went on with his dream. With the wind still mooing lonesomely around the corners of the house, he slept more soundly than he had slept for weeks, impelled, I suppose, by a subconscious eas.e.m.e.nt from his greatest anxiety.

A slow tap-tap-tapping on the closed door near his head woke him just before dawn. The lightest sleeper of them all, Luck lifted his head with a start, and opened his sleep-blurred eyes upon blackness. He called out, and it was the voice of Annie-Many-Ponies that answered.

"Wagalexa Conka! You come quick. Plenty snow come. You be awful glad when you see. Soon day comes. You hurry. I make plenty breakfast, Wagalexa Conka."

As a soldier springs from sleep when calls the bugle, Luck jumped out into the icy darkness of the room. With one jerk he had the door open and stood glorying in the wild gust of snow that broke over him like a wave.

In his bare feet he stood there, and felt the snow beat in his face, and said never a word, since big emotions never quite reached the surface of Luck's manner.

"Day come quick, Wagalexa Conka!" The voice of Annie-Many-Ponies urged him from without, like the voice of Opportunity calling from the storm.

"All right. You run now and have breakfast ready. We come quick." He held the door open another half minute, and he heard Annie-Many-Ponies laugh as she fought her way back to the house through the blinding blizzard. He saw a faint glow through the snow-whirl when she opened the kitchen door, and he shut out the storm with a certain vague reluctance, as though he half feared it might somehow escape into a warm, sunny morning and prove itself no more than a maddeningly vivid dream.

"Hey! Wake up!" he shouted while he groped for a match and the lamp.

"Roll into your sourdoughs, you sons-uh-guns--"

"Say, Applehead," came a plaintive voice from Pink's hunk, "make Luck turn over on the other side, can't yuh? Darn a man that talks in his sleep!"

"By cripes, Luck's got to sleep in the hay loft--er I will," Big Medicine growled, making the boards of his bunk squeak with the flop of his disturbed body.

Then Luck found the lamp and struck a match, and it was seen that he was very wide awake, and that his face had the look of a man intent upon accomplishment.

The Native Son sat up in one of the top bunks and looked down at Luck with a queer solemnity in his eyes. "What is this, _amigo_?" he asked with a stifled yawn. "Another one of your Big Minutes?"

"_Quien sabe_?" Luck retorted, reaching for his clothes as his small ebullition subsided to a misleading composure. "Storm's here at last, and we'll have to be moving. Roll out and saddle your ridge-runners; Annie's got breakfast all ready for us."

"Aw, gwan!" grumbled Happy Jack from sheer force of habit, and made haste to hit the floor with his feet before Luck replied to that apparent doubt of his authority.

"Dress warm as you can, boys," Luck advised curtly, lacing his own heavy buckskin moccasins over thick German socks, which formed his cold-weather footgear. "She's worse than that other one, if anything."

"Mamma!" Weary murmured, in a tone of thanksgiving. "She didn't come any too soon, did she?"

Luck did not reply. He pulled his hat down low over his forehead, opened the door and went out, and it was as though the wind and snow and darkness swallowed him bodily. The horses must first be fed, and he fought his way to the stables, where Applehead's precious hay was dwindling rapidly under Luck's system of keeping mounts and a four-horse team up and ready for just such an emergency. He labored through the darkness to the stable door, lighted the lantern which hung just inside, and went into the first stall. The manger was full, and the feed-box still moist from the lapping tongue of the gray horse that stood there munching industriously. Annie-Many-Ponies had evidently fed the horses before she called Luck, and he felt a warm glow of grat.i.tude for her thoughtfulness.

He stopped at the bunk-house to tell the boys that they had nothing to do but eat breakfast before they saddled, and found them putting on overcoats and gloves and wrangling over the probable location of the herd that would have drifted in the night. So they ploughed in a straggling group to the house, where Annie-Many-Ponies was already pouring the coffee when they trooped in.

Day was just breaking when they rode out into the full force of the belated storm and up on the mesa where they had left the cattle scattered and feeding more or less contentedly at sundown. They had not gone a mile until their bodies began to shrink under the unaccustomed cold. Bill Holmes, town-bred and awkward in the open, thankfully resigned to the Indian girl the dignity of driving the mountain wagon with its four-horse team, and huddled under blankets, while Annie-Many-Ponies piloted them calmly straight across country in the wake of the riders whom her beloved Wagalexa Conka was leading on the snuffy bay. Save for the difference in his clothes, Annie-Many-Ponies thought that he much resembled that great little war-chief of the white people who rode ahead of his column in a picture hanging on the wall of the mission school. Napoleon was the great little war-chief's name, and her heart swelled with pride as she drove steadily through the storm and thought what a great war-chief her brother Wagalexa Conka might have made, were these but the days of much fighting.

There was to be no trouble with "static" this time, if Luck could help it. To be doubly safe from blurred film, he had brought his ray filter along, for the flakes of snow were large and falling fast. He had chosen a different location, because of the direction of the wind and the difficulty the boys would have had in driving the cattle back in the face of it to the side hill where he had first taken the scenes of the drifting herd.

To-day he "shot" them first as they were filing reluctantly out through a narrow pa.s.s which was supposed to be the entrance to the box canyon where the two rustlers, Andy and Miguel, had kept them hidden away.

Artistically speaking, the cattle were in perfect condition for such a scene, every rib showing as they trooped past the clicking camera cleverly concealed in a clump of bushes; hip bones standing up, lean legs shambling slowly through the snow that was already a foot deep. Cattle hidden for days and days in a box canyon would not come out fat and sleek and stepping briskly, and Luck was well pleased with the realism of his picture, even while he pitied the poor beasts.

Later he took the drifting of the herd, and he knew in his heart that the scenes were better than those he had lost. He took tragic scenes of the Native Son in his struggle to keep up and to keep going. He took him as he fell and lay p.r.o.ne in the snow beside his fallen horse while the blizzard whooped over him, and the snow fell upon his still face. In his zeal he nearly froze the Native Son, who must lie there during two or three "cut-back" scenes, and while Andy was coming up in search of him.

When Andy lifted him and found him actually limp in his arms, the anxiety which a "close-up" revealed in his face was not all art. However, he did not say anything until Luck's voracious scene-appet.i.te had been at least partially satisfied.

"By gracious, I believe the son-of-a-gun is about froze," he snapped out then; Luck grinned mirthlessly and called to Annie for the precious thermos bottle, and poured a cup of strong black coffee, added a generous dash of the apricot brandy which he spoke of familiarly as his "cure-all," and had the Native Son very much alive and tramping around to restore the circulation to his chilled limbs before Bill Holmes had carried the camera to the location of the next scene.

"By rights I should have left you the way you were till I got this last death scene where Andy buries you under the rock ledge so he can get home alive himself," Luck told Miguel heartlessly, when they were ready for work again. "You were in proper condition, brother. But I'm human. So you'll have to do a little more acting, from now on."

With his mats placed with careful precision, he took his dissolve "vision stuff" of the blizzard and the death of Miguel,--scenes which were to torment the conscience of Andy the rustler into full repentance and confession to his father. While the boys huddled around Annie's camp fire and guzzled hot coffee and ate chilled sandwiches, Luck took some fine scenes of the phantom herd marching eerily along the skyline of a little slope.

He "shot" every effective blizzard scene he had dreamed of so despairingly when the weather was fine. Some scenes of especial importance to his picture he took twice, so as to have the "choice-of-action" so much prized by producers. This, you must know, was a luxury in which Luck had not often permitted himself to indulge. With raw negative at nearly four cents a foot, he had made it a point to shoot only such scenes as gave every promise of being exactly what he wanted.

But with this precious blizzard that numbed his fingers most realistically while he worked, but never once worried him for fear the sun was going to shine before he had finished, he was as lavish of negative as though he had a million-dollar corporation at his back.

That evening, when they were luxuriating before the fireplace heaped with dry wood which the flames were licking greedily, Luck became, for the first time in months, the old Luck Lindsay who had fascinated them at the Flying U. He told them stories of his days with the "Bill show," and called upon the giggling Annie-Many-Ponies for proof of their truth; whereat Annie-Many-Ponies would nod her head vigorously and declare that it was "No lie. I see him plenty times do them thing. I know." He disputed energetically with Big Medicine over the hardships of the day's work; and as a demonstration of the fact that he was perfectly able to go out right then and shoot another seven hundred feet of film, he seized upon the _tom-tom_ which Annie-Many-Ponies had made from a green calf hide and an old cheese box, and in his moccasins he danced the Sioux Buffalo Dance and several other dances in which Annie-Many-Ponies finally joined and teetered around in the circle which the Happy Family enthusiastically widened for the performers.

Work there was yet to do, and plenty of it. Even if the weather came clear on the morrow as he desired, he must make every minute count, if he would take his picture to the Cattlemen's Convention. Work there was, and problems there were to be solved. But he had his big blizzard stuff, and he had his scenes of the phantom herd. So for an hour or two, on this evening of triumph, Luck Lindsay threw care into a far corner, and danced and sang as the Happy Family had never known he could do.

"Here, Annie, take the drum; it's 'call the dog and put out the fire and all go home.' If my luck stays with me, and the sun shines to-morrow, we'll take these interiors of the double-exposure stuff. And then we'll be eating on the run and sleeping as we ride, till that picture pops out on the screen for the old cattlemen to see. Good night, folks; I'm going to sleep to-night!"

He went out whistling like a schoolboy going fishing. For luck was with him once more, and his _Phantom Herd_ was almost a reality as a picture.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

A FEW OF THE MINOR DIFFICULTIES

However obliging fate may desire to be, certain of nature's laws must be observed. Whether luck was disposed to stay with Luck Lindsay or not, a storm such as the fates had conjured for his needs could not well blow itself out as suddenly as it had blown itself in; so Luck did not get all of his interior double-exposure stuff done the next day, nor his remaining single-exposure stuff either. When his own reason and Applehead's earnest a.s.surances convinced him that the day after the real blizzard day was going to be unfit for camera work, Luck took Weary, Pink, and the Native Son to Albuquerque, rented a little house he had discovered to be vacant, and set them to work building a drying drum for his prints, according to the specifications he furnished them.

He hauled his tanks from the depot and showed the boys how to install them so as to have the benefit of the running water, and got his printer set up and ready to work; for he knew that he would have to make his first prints himself, with the help of the Happy Family, the photographer having neither the room nor the time for the work, and Luck having no more than barely money enough to pay house rent and the charges on his tanks and printer.

Then, being an obliging young man when the fates permitted him to indulge his natural tendencies, Luck made a hurried trip to a certain little shop that had dusty mandolins and watches and guns and a cheap kodak in the dingy window. He went in with his watch in his pocket ticking cheerfully the minutes and hours that were so full of work and worry. When he came out, the watch was ticking just as cheerfully in a drawer and the chain was looped prosperously across his vest from b.u.t.tonhole to empty pocket.

He went straight across to a grocery store and bought some salt pork and coffee and cornmeal and matches which Rosemary had timidly asked him if he could get. She explained apologetically that she was beginning to run out of things, and that she had no idea they were going to have such awful appet.i.tes, and that of course there were two extra people to feed, and that they certainly could dispose of their share three times a day,--meaning, of course, Annie-Many-Ponies and Bill Holmes.

Even while his brain was doing swift mental gymnastics in addition and subtraction, Luck had told her he would get whatever she wanted. His watch brought enough to buy everything she asked for except a can of syrup; and that, he told her, the groceryman must have overlooked, for he certainly had ordered it. He called the groceryman names enough to convince Rosemary that her list had not been too long for his purse, and that Luck's occasional statement that he was broke must be taken figuratively; Luck breathed a sigh of relief that Rosemary, at least, was once more spared the knowledge that all was not yet plain sailing to a smooth harbor.

The next day being sunny, Luck finished the actual camera work on _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 a.s.sembled 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 a.s.semble.

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-t.i.tle _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 dest.i.tution, 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 himself with men and responsibilities that he might pile up money in the bank.

You can easily see where the coming of Luck and his outfit might strain the financial resources of Applehead, even though Luck tried to bear all extra expense for him. No, thought Luck, Applehead would have to mortgage something if he were to attempt raising money then. And Luck would have taken a pack-outfit and made the trip to El Paso on horseback before he would see Applehead go in debt for him. As it was, he was seriously considering that pack-horse proposition as a last resort, and trying to invent some way of shaving his work down so that he would have time for the trip. But certain grim facts could not be twisted to meet his needs.

He simply had to print his positive for projection on the screen. And that positive simply had to go through certain processes that took a certain amount of time; and it simply had to be dry and polished before he could wind it on his reels. Reels? Lord-ee! He didn't have any reels to wind it on!

"What's the matter? Spoil something?" Bill Holmes asked indifferently, pausing to look at Luck before he took up the next strip of celluloid ribbon with its perforated edges and its little squares of shadowlike pictures that to the unpractised eye looked all alike.