by Bower, B M
Lite did a great deal of thinking in the next two or three minutes, but being such a bottled-up person, he did not say half of what he thought; and Jean, closely as she watched his face, could not read what was in his mind. Of Aleck he thought, and the slender chance there was of any one doing what Jean hoped to do; of Art Osgood, and the meager possibility that Art could shed any light upon the killing of Johnny Croft; of the Lazy A, and the probable price that Carl would put upon it if he were asked to sell the ranch and the stock; of the money he had already saved, and the chance that, if he went to Carl now and made him an offer, Carl would accept. He weighed mentally all the various elements that went to make up the depressing tangle of the whole affair, and decided that he would write at once to Rossman, the lawyer who had defended Aleck, and put the whole thing into his hands. He would then know just where he stood, and what he would have to do, and what legal steps he must take.
He looked at Jean and grinned a little. "I'm not pretty enough for a picture actor," he said whimsically. "Better let me be a rustler and wear a mask, if you don't want folks to throw fits."
"You'll be what I want you to be," Jean told him with the little smile in her eyes that Lite had learned to love more than he could ever say. "I'm going to make us both famous, Lite. Now, come on, Bobby Burns has probably chewed up a whole box of those black cigars, waiting for us to show up."
I am not going to describe the making of "Jean, of the Lazy A." It would be interesting, but this is not primarily a story of the motion-picture business, remember. It is the story of the Lazy A and the problem that both Jean and Lite were trying to solve. The Great Western Film Company became, through sheer chance, a factor in that problem, and for that reason we have come into rather close touch with them; but aside from the fact that Jean's photo-play brought Lite into the company and later took them both to Los Angeles, this particular picture has no great bearing upon the matter.
Robert Grant Burns had intended taking his company back to Los Angles in August, when the hot winds began to sweep over the range land. But Jean's story was going "big." Jean was throwing herself into the part heart and mind. She lived it. With Lite riding beside her, helping her with all his skill and energy and much enthusiasm, she almost forgot her great undertaking sometimes, she was so engrossed with her work. With his experience, suggesting frequent changes, she added new touches of realism to this story that made the case-hardened audience of the Great Western's private projection room invent new ways of voicing their enthusiasm, when the negative films Pete Lowry sent in to headquarters were printed and given their trial run.
They were just well started when August came with its hot winds. They stayed and worked upon the serial until it was finished, and that meant that they stayed until the first October blizzard caught them while they were finishing the last reel.
Do you know what they did then? Jean changed a few scenes around at Lite's suggestion, and they went out into the hills in the teeth of the storm and pictured Jean lost in the blizzard, and coming by chance upon the outlaws at their camp, which she and Lite and Lee had been hunting through all the previous installments of the story. It was great stuff,—that ride Jean made in the blizzard,—and that scene where, with numbed fingers and snow matted in her dangling braid, she held up the rustlers and marched them out of the hills, and met Lite coming in search of her.
You will remember it, if you have been frequenting the silent drama and were fortunate enough to see the picture. You may have wondered at the realism of those blizzard scenes, and you may have been curious to know how the camera got the effect. It was wonderful photography, of course; but then, the blizzard was real, and that pinched, half frozen look on Jean's face in the close-up where she met Lite was real. Jean was so cold when she turned the rustlers over to Lite that when she started to dismount and fell in a heap,—you remember?—she was not acting at all. Neither was Lite acting when he plunged through the drift and caught Jean in his arms and held her close against him just as that scene ended. In the name of realism they cut the scene, because Lite showed that he forgot all about the outlaws and the part he was playing.
So they finished the picture, and the whole company packed their trunks thankfully and turned their faces and all their thoughts westward.
Jean was not at all sure that she wanted to go. It seemed almost as though she were setting aside her great undertaking; as though she were weakly deserting her dad when she closed the door for the last time upon her room and turned her back upon Lazy A coulee. But there were certain things which comforted her; Lite was going along to look after the horses, he told her just the day before they started. For Robert Grant Burns, with an eye to the advertising value of the move, had decided that Pard must go with them. He would have to hire an express car, anyway, he said, for the automobile and the scenery sets they had used for interiors. And there would be plenty of room for Pard and Lite's horse and another which Robert Grant Burns had used to carry him to locations in rough country, where the automobile could not go. The car would run in passenger service, Burns said,—he'd fix that,—so Lite would be right with the company all the way out.
Jean appreciated all that as a personal favor, which merely proved how unsophisticated she really was. She did not know that Robert Grant Burns was thinking chiefly of furnishing material for the publicity man to use in news stories. She never once dreamed that the coming of "Jean, of the Lazy A" and Jean's pet horse Pard, and of Lite, who had done so many surprising things in the picture, would be heralded in all the Los Angeles papers before ever they left Montana.
Jean was concerned chiefly with attending to certain matters which seemed to her of vital importance. If she must go, there was something which she must do first,—something which for three years she had shrunk from doing. So she told Robert Grant Burns that she would meet him and his company in Helena, and without a word of explanation, she left two days in advance of them, just after she had had another maddening talk with her Uncle Carl, wherein she had repeated her intention of employing a lawyer.
When she boarded the train at Helena, she did not tell even Lite just where she had been or what she had been doing. She did not need to tell Lite. He looked into her face and saw there the shadow of the high, stone wall that shut her dad away from the world, and he did not ask a single question.
CHAPTER XIX
IN LOS ANGELES
When she felt bewildered, Jean had the trick of appearing merely reserved; and that is what saved her from the charge of rusticity when Robert Grant Burns led her through the station gateway and into a small reception. No less a man than Dewitt, President of the Great Western Film Company, clasped her hand and held it, while he said how glad he was to welcome her. Jean, unawed by his greatness and the honor he was paying her, looked up at him with that distracting little beginning of a smile, and replied with that even-more distracting little drawl in her voice, and wondered why Mrs. Gay should become so plainly flustered all at once.
Dewitt took her by the arm, introduced her to a curious-eyed group with a warming cordiality of manner, and led her away through a crowd that stared and whispered, and up to a great, beautiful, purple machine with a colored chauffeur in dust-colored uniform. Dewitt was talking easily of trivial things, and shooting a question now and then over his shoulder at Robert Grant Burns, who had shed much of his importance and seemed indefinably subservient toward Mr. Dewitt. Jean turned toward him abruptly.
"Where's Lite? Did you send some one to help him with Pard?" she asked with real concern in her voice. "Those three horses aren't used to towns the size of this, Mr. Burns. Lite is going to have his hands full with Pard. If you will excuse me, Mr. Dewitt, I think I'll go and see how he's making out."
Mr. Dewitt glanced over her head and met the delighted grin of Jim Gates, the publicity manager. The grin said that Jean was "running true to form," which was a pet simile with Jim Gates, and usually accompanied that particular kind of grin. There would be an interesting half column in the next d
ay's papers about Jean's arrival and her deep concern for Lite and her wonderful horse Pard, but of course she did not know that.
"I've got men here to help with the horses," Mr. Dewitt assured her, while he gently urged her into the machine. "They'll be brought right out to the studio. I'm taking you home with me in obedience to my wife's, orders. She is anxious to meet the young woman who can out-ride and out-shoot any man on the screen, and can still be sweet and feminine and lovable. I'm quoting my wife, you see, though I won't say those are not my sentiments also."
"Your poor wife is going to receive a shock," said Jean in an unimpressed tone. "But it's dear of her to want to meet me." Back of her speech was an irritated impatience that she should be gobbled and carried off like this, when she was sure that she ought to be helping Lite get that fool Pard unloaded and safely through the clang and clatter of the down-town district.
Robert Grant Burns, half facing her on a folding seat, sent her a queer, puzzled glance from under his eyebrows. Four months had Jean been working under his direction; four months had he studied her, and still she puzzled him. She was not ignorant—the girl had been out among civilized folks and had learned town ways; she was not stupid—she could keep him guessing, and he thought he knew all the quirks of human nature, too. Then why, in the name of common sense, did she take Dewitt and his patronage in this matter-of-fact way, as if it were his everyday business to meet strange employees and take them home to his wife? He glanced at Dewitt and caught a twinkle of perfect understanding in the bright blue eyes of his chief. Burns made a sound between a grunt and a chuckle, and turned his eyes away immediately; but Dewitt chose to make speech upon the subject.
"You haven't spoiled our new leading woman—yet," he observed idly.
"Oh, but he has," Jean dissented. "He has got me trained so that when he says smile, my mouth stretches itself automatically. When he says sob, I sob. He just snaps his fingers, Mr. Dewitt, and I sit up and go through my tricks very nicely. You ought to see how nicely I do them."
Mr. Dewitt put up a hand and pulled at his close-cropped, white mustache that could not hide the twitching of his lips. "I have seen," he said drily, and leaned forward for a word with the liveried chauffeur. "Turn up on Broadway and stop at the Victoria," he said, and the chin of the driver dropped an inch to prove he heard.
Dewitt laid his fingers on Jean's arm to catch her attention. "Do you see that picture on the billboard over there?" he asked, with a special inflection in his nice, crisp voice. "Does it look familiar to you?"
Jean looked, and pinched her brows together. Just at first she did not comprehend. There was her name in fancy letters two feet high: "JEAN, OF THE LAZY A." It blared at the passer-by, but it did not look familiar at all. Beneath was a high-colored poster of a girl on a horse. The horse was standing on its hind feet, pawing the air; its nostrils flared red; its tail swept like a willow plume behind. The machine slowed and stopped for the traffic signal at the crossing, and still Jean studied the poster. It certainly did not look in the least familiar.
"Is that supposed to be me, on that plum-colored horse?" she drawled, when they slid out slowly in the wake of a great truck.
"Why, don't you like it?" Dewitt looked at Jim Gates, who was again grinning delightedly and surreptitiously scribbling something on the margin of a folded paper he was carrying.
Jean turned upon him a mildly resentful glance. "No, I don't. Pard is not purple; he's brown. And he's got the dearest white hoofs and a white sock on his left hind foot; and he doesn't snort fire and brimstone, either." She glanced anxiously at the jam of wagons and automobiles and clanging street-cars. "I don't know, though," she amended ruefully, "I think perhaps he will, too, when he sees all this. I really ought to have stayed with him."
"You don't think Lite quite capable of taking care of him."
"Oh, yes, of course he is! But I just feel that way."
Dewitt shifted a little, so that he was half facing her, and could look at her without having to turn his head. If his eyes told anything of his thoughts, the President of the Great Western Film Company was curious to know how she felt about her position and her sudden fame and the work itself. Before they had worked their way into the next block, he decided that Jean was not greatly interested in any of these things, and he wondered why.
The machine slowed, swung to the curb, and crept forward and stopped in front of the Victoria. Dewitt looked at Burns and Pete Lowry, who was on the front seat.
"I thought you'd like to take a glance at the lobby display the Victoria is making," he said casually. "They are running the Lazy A series, you know,—to capacity houses, too, they tell me. Shall we get out?"
The chauffeur reached back with that gesture of toleration and infinite boredom common to his kind and swung open the door.
Robert Grant Burns started up. "Come on, Jean," he said eagerly. "I don't suppose that eternal calm of yours will ever show a wrinkle on the surface, but let's have a look, anyway."
Pete Lowry was already out and half way across the pavement. Pete had lain awake in his bed, many's the night, planning the posing of "stills" that would show Jean at her best; he had visioned them on display in theater lobbies, and now he collided with a hurrying shopper in his haste to see the actual fulfillment of those plans.
Jean herself was not so eager. She went with the others, and she saw herself pictured on Pard; on her two feet; and sitting upon a rock with her old Stetson tilted over one eye and her hair tousled with the wind. She was loading her six-shooter, and talking to Lite, who was sitting on his heels with a cigarette in his fingers, looking at her with that bottled-up look in his eyes. She did not remember when the picture was taken, but she liked that best of all. She saw herself leaning out of the window of her room at the Lazy A. She remembered that time. She was talking to Gil outside, and Pete had come up and planted his tripod directly in front of her, and had commanded her to hold her pose. She did not count them, but she had curious impressions of dozens of pictures of herself scattered here and there along the walls of the long, cool-looking lobby. Every single one of them was marked: "Jean, of the Lazy A." Just that.
On a bulletin board in the middle of the entrance, just before the marble box-office, it was lettered again in dignified black type: "JEAN OF THE LAZY A." Below was one word: "To-day."
"It looks awfully queer," said Jean to Mr. Dewitt, who wanted to know what she thought of it all; "they don't explain what it's all about, or anything."
"No, they don't." Dewitt pulled his mustache and piloted her back to the machine. "They don't have to."
"No," echoed Robert Grant Burns, with the fat chuckle of utter content in the knowledge of having achieved something. "From the looks of things, they don't have to." He looked at Jean so intently that she stared back at him, wondering what was the matter; and when he saw that she was wondering, he gave a snort.
"Good Lord!" he said to himself, just above a whisper, and looked away, despairing of ever reading the riddle of Jean's unshakable composure. Was it pose Was the girl phlegmatic,—with that face which was so alive with the thoughts that shuttled back and forth behind those steady, talking eyes of hers? She was not stupid; Robert Grant Burns knew to his own discomfiture that she was not stupid. Nor was she one to pose; the absolute sincerity of her terrific frankness was what had worried Robert Grant Burns most. She must know that she had jumped into the front rank of popular actresses, and stood out before them all,—for the time being, at least. And,—he stole a measuring sidelong glance at her, just as he had done thousands of times in the past four months,—here she was in the private machine of the President of the Great Western Film Company, with that great man himself talking to her as to his honored guest. She had seen herself featured alone at one of the biggest motion-picture theaters in Los Angeles; so well known that "Jean, of the Lazy A" was deemed all-sufficient as information and advertisement. She had reached what seemed to Robert Grant Burns the final heights. And the girl sat there, calm, abstracted, actuall
y not listening to Dewitt when he talked! She was not even thinking about him! Robert Grant Burns gave her another quick, resentful glance, and wondered what under heaven the girl WAS thinking about.
As a matter of fact, having accepted the fact that she seemed to have made a success of her pictures, her thoughts had drifted to what seemed to her more vital. Had she done wrong to come away out here, away from her problem? The distance worried her. She had not even found out who was the mysterious night-prowler, or what he wanted. He had never come again, after that night when Hepsy had scared him away. From long thinking about it, she had come to a vague, general belief that his visits were somehow connected with the murder; but in what manner, she could not even form a theory. That worried her. She wished now that she had told Lite about it. She was foolish not to have done something, instead of sticking her head under the bedclothes and just shivering till he left. Lite would have found out who the man was, and what he wanted. Lite would never have let him come and go like that. But the visits had seemed so absolutely without reason. There was nothing to steal, and nothing to find. Still, she wished she had told Lite, and let him find out who it was.
Then her talk with the great lawyer had been disquieting. He had not wanted to name his fee for defending her dad; but when he had named it, it did not seem so enormous as she had imagined it to be. He had asked a great many questions, and most of them puzzled Jean. He had said that he would take up the matter,—by which she believed he meant an investigation of her uncle's title to the Lazy A. He said that he would see her father, and he told her that he had already been retained to investigate the whole thing, so that she need not worry about having to pay him a fee. That, he said, had already been arranged, though he did not feel at liberty to name his client. But he wanted to assure her that everything was being done that could be done.