to explode. "I should have to take it up with the directors--"
"Directors! Hell, man, that train's due in an hour! What _are_ you
around here--a man in authority, or just a dummy made up to look like
one? Do you mean to tell me you're afraid to stake me to enough money to
make El Paso and return? What, for the Lord's sake, do I look like,
anyway,--a crook?"
Mr. White's head was more than six feet in the air when he stood up, and
Luck Lindsay in his high-heeled boots lacked a good six inches of that
altitude; but for all that, Luck Lindsay was a bigger man than Mr.
White. He dominated the cashier; he made the cashier conscious of his
dyspepsia and his thin hair and his flabby muscles and his lack of
enthusiasm with life.
"The directors have to pass on all bank loans," he explained
apologetically, "but I can lend you the money out of my personal account.
If you will excuse me, I'll get the money before my assistant closes the
vault. And shall I put these inside for you?" He rose and started for the
inner door with a deprecating smile.
"Aren't you going to take a note?" Luck studied the man with
sharpened glance.
"My check will be a sufficient record of the transaction, I think." And
Mr. White, with two or three words scribbled at the bottom, proceeded to
make the check a record. "I am glad to be able to stake you, Mr. Lindsay,
and I hope your trip will be successful."
He got another Luck Lindsay smile for that, and the apology he had coming
to him. And then in a very few minutes Luck hurried out and back to the
little house on the edge of town.
"Where's my bag? So long, boys; I'm going to drift. I'll change clothes
on the train--haven't got time now. Here's five dollars, Andy, for the
stable bill and so on. Bill, you're the only one of the bunch that
shirked, so you can carry this box of reels to the depot for me. _Adios_,
boys, I'm sure going to romp all over that Convention, believe me, if
they don't swear _The Phantom Herd's_ a winner from the first scene!"
CHAPTER NINETEEN
WHEREIN LUCK MAKES A SPEECH
Luck stood on the platform of the Texas Cattlemen's Convention and looked
down upon the work-lined, brown faces of the men whose lives had for the
most part been spent out of doors. Their sober attentiveness confused him
for a minute so that he forgot what he wanted to say--he, Luck Lindsay,
who had faced the great audiences of Madison Square Garden and had smiled
his endearing smile and made his bow with perfect poise and an eye for
pretty faces; who had without a quiver faced the camera, many's the time,
in difficult scenes; who had faced death more times than he could count,
and what was to him worse than death,--blank failure. But these old
range-men with the wind-and-sun wrinkles around their eyes, and their
ready-to-wear suits, and their judicial air of sober attention,--these
were to him the jury that would weigh his work and say whether it was
worthy. These men--
And then one of them suddenly cleared his throat with a rasping sound
like old Dave Wiswell, his dried little cowman of the picture, and
embarrassment dropped from Luck like a cloak flung aside. He was here to
put his work to the test; to let these men say whether _The Phantom Herd_
was worthy to be called a great picture, one of which the West could be
proud. So he pushed back his mop of hair--grayer than the hair of many
here old enough to be his father--with the fiat of his palm, and looked
straight into the faces of these men and said what he had to say:
"Mr. Chairman, and gentlemen of this Convention, I consider it a great
privilege to be able to stand here and speak to you--a greater privilege
than any of you realize, perhaps. For my heart has always been in the
range-land, my people have been the people of the plains. I have to-day
been honored by the hand-grip of old-timers who were riding circle,
trailing long-horns, and working cattle when I was a boy in short pants.
"I have trailed herds on the pay roll of one man who remembers me here
to-day, and of others who have crossed the Big Divide. I have seen the
open range shrink before the coming of barbed wire and settlers. I have
watched the 'long shadow' fall across God's own cattle country.
"Since I entered the motion-picture business, my one great aim and my one
great dream has been to produce one real Western picture. One picture
that I could present with pride to such a convention as this, and have
men who have spent their lives in the cattle industry give it the stamp
of their approval; one picture that would make such men forget the
present and relive the old days when they were punchers all and proud of
it. Such an opportunity came to me last fall and I made the most of it. I
got me a bunch of real boys, and went to work on the picture I have
called _The Phantom Herd._ From the trail-herds going north I have tried
to weave into my story a glimpse of the whole history of the range
critter, from the shivering, new-born calf that hit the range along with
a spring blizzard, to the big, four-year-old steer prodded up the chutes
into the shipping cars.
"I want you, who know the false from the real, to see _The Phantom Herd_
and say whether I have done my work well. I finished the picture
yesterday, and I have brought it down here for the purpose of asking you
to honor me by accepting an invitation to a private showing of the
picture this evening, here in this hall. I want you to come and bring
your wives and your children with you if you can. I want you to see _The
Phantom Herd_ before it goes to the public--and to-morrow I shall face
you again and accept your verdict. You know the West. You will know a
Western picture when you see it. I know you know, and I want you to tell
me what you think of it. Your word will be final, as far as I am
concerned. Gentlemen, I hope you will all be present here to-night at
eight o'clock as my guests. I thank you for your attention."
Luck went away from there feeling, and telling himself emphatically, that
he had made a "rotten" talk. He had not said what he had meant to say, or
at least he had not said it the way he had meant to say it. But he was
too busy to dwell much upon his deficiencies as an orator; he had yet to
borrow a projection machine and operator from somewhere--for, as usual,
he had issued his invitation before he had definitely arranged for the
exhibition, and had trusted to luck and his own efforts to be able to
keep his promise.
Luck (or his own efforts) landed him within easy conversational reach of
a man who was preparing to open a little theater on a side street. The
seats were not in yet, but he had his machine, and he meant to operate it
himself, while his wife sold tickets and his boy acted as usher,--a
family combination which to Luck seemed likely to be a success. This man,
when Luck made known his needs, said he was perfectly willing to "limber
up" his machine and himself on _The Phantom Herd_, if Luck would let his
wife and boy see the picture, and would pay the slight operating
expenses. So that was settled very easily.
At five minutes to eight that evening all of the cattlemen and a few
favored, influential citizens of El Paso whom Luck had invited personally
sat waiting before the blank screen. Up in the operator's cramped
quarters Luck was having a nervous chill and trying his best not to show
it, and he was telling the operator to give it time enough, for the
Lord's sake, and to be sure he had everything ready before he started in,
and so forth, until the operator was almost as nervous as Luck himself.
"Now, look here," he cried exasperatedly at last. "You know your
business, and I know mine. You're going to have me named in your
write-ups as the movie-man that run this show for the convention, ain't
you? And I'm going to open up a picture house next week in this town,
ain't I? And I ain't going to advertise myself as a bum operator, am I?
Now you _vamos_ outa here and get down there in the audience, if you
don't want me to get the fidgets and spoil something. Go on--beat it!"
Luck must have been in a strange condition, for he beat it promptly and
without any retort, and slid furtively into a chair between two old
range-men just as the operator's boy-usher switched off the lights.
Luck's heart began to pound so that he half expected his neighbors to
tell him to close his muffler,--only they were of the saddle-horse
fraternity and would not have known what the phrase meant.
_The Phantom Herd_ flashed suddenly upon the screen and joggled there
dizzily, away over to one side. Luck clapped his hand to his perspiring
forehead and murmured "Oh, my Gawd!" like a prayer, and shut his eyes to
hide from them the desecration. He opened them to find that the caste was
just flicking off and the first scene dissolving in.
The man at his left gave a long sigh and crossed his knees, and leaned
back and began to chew tobacco rapidly between his worn old molars.
_"Oh, a ten dollar hoss and a forty dollar saddle,
I'm goin' to punchin' Texas cattle."_
The sub-title dissolved slowly into a scene showing a cow-puncher (who
was Weary) swinging on to his rangy cow-Horse and galloping away after
the chuck-wagon just disappearing in the wake of the dust-flinging
_remuda_. Back somewhere in the dusk of the audience, a man began to hum
the tune that went with the words, and the heart of Luck Lindsay gave an
exultant bound. He had used lines from "The Old Chisholm Trail" and other
old-time range songs for his sub-titles, to keep the range atmosphere
complete, and that cracked voice humming unconsciously told how it
appealed to these men of the range.
Luck did not slide down in his seat so that his head rested on the
chair-back while _The Phantom Herd_ was being shown. Instead, he sat
leaning forward, with his face white and strained, and watched for weak
points and for bad photography and scenes that could have been bettered.
He saw the big trail-herd go winding away across the level, with Weary
riding "point" and Happy Jack bringing up the "drag," and the others
scattered along between; riding slouched in their saddles, hatbrims
pulled low over eyes smarting with the dust that showed in a thin film at
the head of the herd and grew thicker toward the drag, until riders and
animals were seen dimly through a haze.
"My--I can just feel that dust in m' throat!" muttered the man at his
right, and coughed.
Luck saw the storm come muttering up just as the cattle were bedding down
for the night. He saw the lightning, and he knew that those who watched
with him were straining forward. He heard some one say involuntarily:
"They'll break and run, sure as hell!" and he knew that he had done that
part of his work well.
He saw the night scenes he had taken in town. He almost forgot that all
this was his work, so smoothly did the story steal across his senses and
beguile him into half believing it was true and not a fabric which he had
built with careful planning and much toil. He saw the round-up scenes;
the day-herd, the cutting-out and the branding, the beef-herd driven to
the shipping cars. True, those steers were not exactly prime beef,--he
had caught the culls only, late in the season for these scenes--but they
passed, with one audible comment that this was a poor season for beef!
"We rounded 'em up and we put 'em in the cars--"
The sub-title sang itself familiarly into the minds of the range men.
More than one voice was heard to begin a surreptitious humming of the
old tune, and to cease abruptly with the sudden self-consciousness of
the singer.
But there was the story, growing insensibly out of the range work. Luck,
more at ease now in his mind, studied it critically. There was the
quarrel between old Dave and Andy, his son. He saw the old man out with
his men, standing his shift of night-guard, stubbornly resisting the
creeping years and his load of trouble; riding around the sleeping herd
with his head sunk on his chest, meeting the younger guard twice on each
complete circle, and yet never seeming to see him at all.
"Sing low to your cattle, sing low to your steers--"
The words and the scene opened wide the door of memory and let whole
troops of ghosts come drifting in out of the past. The hall, Luck roused
himself to notice, was very, very still; so still that the sizzling sound
of the machine at the rear was distinct and oppressive.
There was the blizzard, terrible in its biting realism. There was the old
cow and calf, separated from the herd, fighting in the primal instinct to
preserve themselves alive,--fighting and losing. There was that other,
more terrible fight for existence, the fight of the Native Son against
the snow and the cold. Men drew their breath sharply when he fell and did
not rise again. They shivered when the snow began to drift against his
quiet body, to lodge and shift and settle, and grow higher and higher
until the bank was even with his shoulders, to drift over him and make of
him a white mound--And then, when Andy staggered up through the swirl,
leading his horse and shouting; when he stumbled against Miguel and tried
to raise him and rouse him, a sound like a groan went through the crowd.
"Close a call as I ever had was in a blizzard like that," the old man at
Luck's left whispered agitatedly to Luck behind his palm, when the lights
snapped on while the operator was changing for the last reel.
There was Andy, haunted and haggard, at home again with his father. There
were those dissolve scenes of the "phantom herd" drifting always across
the skyline whenever Andy looked out into the night or rose startled
from uneasy sleep. Weird, it was,--weird and real and very terrible. And,
at last, there was that wonderful camp-fire scene of the Indian girl who
prayed to her gods before she went to meet her lover who was dead and
could not keep the tryst. There were heart-breaking scenes where the
Indian girl wandered in wild places, looking, hoping, despairing--Luck
had planned every little detail of those scenes, and yet they thrilled
him as though he had come to them unawares.
He did not wait after the last scene faded out slowly. He slipped quietly
into the aisle and went away, while the hands of the old-timers were
stinging with applause. Halfway down the block he heard it still, and his
steps quickened unconsciously. They were calling his name, back there in
the hall. They were all talking at once and clapping their hands and, as
an interlude, shouting the name of Luck Lindsay. But Luck did not heed.
He wanted to get away by himself. He did not feel as though he could say
anything at all to any one, just then. He had seen his Big Picture, and
he had seen that it was as big and as perfect, almost, as he had dreamed
it. To Luck, at that moment, words would have cheapened it,--even the
words of the old cattlemen.
He went to his hotel and straight up to his room, regardless of the fact
that it would have been to his advantage to mingle with his guests and to
listen to their praise. He went to bed and lay there in the dark,
reliving the scenes of his story. Then, after awhile, he drifted off into
sleep, his first dreamless, untroubled slumber in many a night.
By the time the Convention was assembled the next day, however, he had
recovered his old spirit of driving energy. The chairman had invited him
by telephone to attend the afternoon meeting, and Luck went--to be
greeted by a rousing applause when he walked down the aisle to the
platform where the chairman was waiting for him.
Resolutions had already been passed, the Convention as a body thanking
Luck Lindsay for the privilege of seeing what was in their judgment the
greatest Western picture that had ever been produced. The chairman made a
little speech about the pleasure and the privilege, and presented Luck
with a letter of endorsement and signed with due formality by chairman
and secretary and sealed with the official seal. Attached to the letter
was a copy of the vote of thanks, and you may imagine how Luck smiled
when he saw that!
He stayed a little while, and during the recess which presently was
called he shook hands with many an old-timer whose name stood for a good
deal in the great State of Texas. Then he left them, still smiling over
what he called his good luck, and wired a copy of the letter of
endorsement to all the trade journals, to be incorporated in his
full-page advertising. By another stroke of luck he caught most of the
trade journals before their forms closed for the next issue, so that _The
Phantom Herd_ was speedily heralded throughout the profession as the
first really authentic Western drama ever produced. By still another
stroke of what he called luck, an Associated Press man found him out, and
was pleased to ask him many questions and to make a few notes; and Luck,
wise to the value of publicity, answered the questions and saw to it that
the notes recorded interesting facts.
That evening Luck, feeling that he had reached the last mile-post on the
road to success, hunted up a few old-timers who appealed to him most as
true types of the range, and gave them a dinner in a certain place which
he knew was run by an old round-up cook. There was nothing about that
dinner which would have appealed to a cabaret crowd. They talked of the
old days when Luck was a lad, those old-timers; they talked of
trail-herds and of droughts and of floods and blizzards and range wars
and the market prices of beef "on the hoof." They called in the old
round-up cook and cursed him companionably as one of themselves, and
remembered that more than one of them had run when he pounded the bottom
of a frying pan and hollered "Come and get it!" They ate and they smoked
and they talked and talked and talked, until Luck had to indulge himself
in a taxi if he would not miss the eleven o'clock train north. His only
regret, in spite of the fact that he was practically and familiarly broke
again, was that circumstances did not permit the Happy Family to sit with
him at that table. Especially did he regret not having old Applehead and
the dried little man with him that night to make his gathering complete.
CHAPTER TWENTY
"SHE'S SHAPING UP LIKE A BANK ROLL"
"Well," said Luck to the Happy Family, "we've come this far along the
trail, and now I'm stuck again. Bank won't loan any more on the camera,
and I've got a dollar and six bits to market _The Phantom Herd_ with!
Everything's fine so far; she's advertised,--or will be when the
magazines come out,--and she's got some good press notices to back her
up; but she ain't outa the woods yet. I've got to raise some money
somehow. I hate to ask poor old Applehead--"
"Pore old Applehead, my granny!" bawled Big Medicine, laughing his big
_haw-haw._ "Pore ole Applehead's sure steppin' high these days. He'd
mortgage his ranch and feel like a millionaire, by cripes! His ole
Come-Paddy cat jest natcherally walloped the tar outa Shunky Cheestely,
and Applehead seen him doin' it. Come-Paddy, he's hangin' out in the
house now, by cripes, 'cept when he takes a sashay down to the stable
lookin' fer more. And Shunky, he's bedded down under the Ketch-all, when
he ain't hittin' fer the tall timber with his tail clamped down between
his legs. Honest to grandma, Luck, you couldn't hit Applehead at a better
time. He'll borry money er do anything yuh care to ask, except shut up
that there cat uh hisn."
"Well, luck may come my way; I'll just sit tight a few days and see,"
said Luck. "When that positive film comes, I'll have to rustle money
somewhere to get it outa the express office, so we can make more
prints. And--"
"And grind our daylights out again on that there drum that never does git
wound up?" groaned Big Medicine, and felt his biceps tenderly.
"We won't rush the next job quite so hard," Luck soothed, perfectly
amiable and easy to live with, now that the worst was over. "We made a
darn good set of prints, just the same; boys, you oughta seen that
picture! I've a good mind to get some house here in town to run it; say,
I might raise some money that way, if I can't do it any other." And then
his enthusiasm cooled. "Town isn't big enough for a long-enough run," he
considered disgustedly. "I'm past the two-bit stage of the game now."
"Well, you ask Applehead to raise the money," advised Weary. "Or one of
us will write to Chip for some. Mamma! The world's full of money! Seems
like it ought to be easy to get hold of some."
"It is--but it ain't," Luck stated somewhat ambiguously, and turned the
talk to his meeting with the old-timers, and prepared to "sit tight" and
wait for his god Good Luck to smile upon him.
The smile arrived at noon the next day, in the form of a wire from
Philadelphia. Luck read it and gave a whoop of joy quite at variance with
his usual surface calm.
Can Offer You Fifteen Hundred Dollars for Pennsylvania Rights The
Phantom Herd Usual Ten Cents Per Foot Positive Prints if Accepted Wire at
Once and Ship to This Point
RJ Crittenden
"I hollered too soon," groaned Luck, when he had read it the second time,
pushing back his hair distractedly. "How the devil am I going to send him
any positive prints at ten cents a foot or ten cents an inch or any other
price? Till I get that shipment of positive, I can't fill any orders at
all! And until I begin to fill orders, I can't realize on the film. Can
you beat that? I'll have to wire him to wait, and that's two thousand
dollars tied up!"
"Aw, gwan!" Happy Jack croaked argumentatively. "Why don't you send him
what you took to the Convention?"
Luck stared at Happy stupefied before he said a word. "Say, Miguel, you
saddle your ridge-runner while I get ready to take this wire hack to
town and send it off," he snapped, preparing to write. "Sure, I'll send
that set of prints! Happy, you can go to the head of the class. Now
it's only a case of sit tight till the money comes. The prints are
packed and in the bank vault, so I'll just get them out and send them
C.O.D. to Mr. Crittenden, along with the states rights contract. How's
that for luck, boys?"
"Pretty good--for Luck," grinned Andy meaningly. "Fly at it, you coming
millionaire!"
"Just a case of sit tight, boys. _Adios!"_ cried Luck jubilantly as he
hurried away.
Once start along a smooth trail, and everything seems to conspire toward
a pleasant trip. To prove it, Luck found another telegram waiting for him
in Albuquerque. This was from Martinson, and might be interpreted as an
apology more or less abject. Certainly it was an urgent request that he
return immediately to Los Angeles and to his old place at the Acme, and
produce Western pictures under no supervision whatever.
Luck gave a little chuckle when he pocketed that message, but he did not
send any answer. He meant to wait and talk it over with the boys first.
"Better proposition than before," Martinson said. Well, perhaps it would
be best to look into it; Luck was too experienced to believe that one
success means permanent success; there are too many risks for the free
lance to run when a single failure means financial annihilation. If the
Acme would come to his terms, it might be to his advantage to take his
boys back and accept this peace-offering. At any rate, he appreciated to
the full the triumph they had scored.
Next, by some twist of the red tape in the Philadelphia express
office,--or perhaps R.J. Crittenden was a good fellow and asked them to
do it,--the two thousand dollars came by wire, just three days after Luck
had received notice that his shipment of positive film was being held for
him at the express office in Albuquerque. Also came other offers, mostly
by wire, for states rights to _The Phantom Herd._ And when the Happy
Family realized what those offers meant, they didn't care how hard or how
long Luck worked them in the little house which he had turned into a
laboratory.
Being human, intensely so in some ways, the first set of prints they
turned out Luck sent to Los Angeles with a mental godspeed and a hope
that Bently Brown and Martinson would see it and "get wise to what a
_real_ Western picture looked like." There were other orders ahead of Los
Angeles in Luck's book, but they waited a little longer so that he might
the sooner taste a little of the sweets of revenge.
Whether Bently Brown and Martinson saw _The Phantom Herd,_ Luck was a
long, long time finding out. But he learned that some one else did see
it, and that right speedily. For among his many telegrams that came
clicking into Albuquerque was this one which makes a fitting end to
this story:
Luck Lindsay
Albuquerque
New Mexico