The B. M. Bower Megapack

by B. M. Bower

  “Well, why don’t you let her stay?” Weary demanded. “She will anyway—mama! We’re not what you can call over-run with women on this job.”

  “Why don’t you make a squaw-man outa Dave?” Pink suggested boldly, “and let her be his daughter instead of Rosemary?”

  “Say, what does that there walka-some-darn-thing mean, that she calls yuh?” Big Medicine wanted to know. “By cripes, I hate talk I don’t savey.”

  “Wagalexa Conka?” Luck smiled shamefacedly. “Oh, that’s just a name the Indians gave me. Means Big Turkey, in plain English. Her father, old Chief Big Turkey, adopted me into the tribe, and they call me by his name. Annie-Many-Ponies has heard it used ever since she was a kid. By tribal law I’m her brother. Well, what’s the word, boys? Shall we let her stay or not? We could use her, all right, and put a dash of old-plains’ color in the picture that I haven’t got, as it stands. It’s up to you to decide.”

  “You’re wrong,” Pink grinned. “She’s decided that, herself. Gee, she’s pretty!”

  “Certainly she is; but get this, boys: She isn’t going to stay just because she’s pretty, and if I had a different bunch than you fellows, she’d have to go for that reason. I’m responsible for her—sabe? Bill Holmes, you get this; I saw you eyeing her pretty strong. That girl is the daughter of an influential chief, and she comes pretty near being the pride of the reservation. There can’t be any romantic stuff, if they let her stay. Her father and the Agent will consent, if they do consent, on the strength of the confidence they have in me. They’re going to keep that confidence. Get that, and get it strong, because I sure mean what I’m telling you.” He eased the tenseness with a laugh. “I don’t mean to offend anybody,” he said, “and that’s why I’m putting it straight before the play comes up. Annie-Many-Ponies has got a heart-twisting smile, but she’s a squaw just the same. She’s got the ways of the Injun to the marrow of her bones, and I’ll bet right now if you were to shake her hard enough, you’d jingle a knife out of her clothes.” He stopped and lighted the cigarette he had been carefully rolling. “Well,” he finished after the pause, “does she stay or go?”

  The Happy Family answered him with, various phrases, the meaning of which was that he could suit himself about that; as far as they were concerned, she could stay and welcome.

  So she stayed, and Rosemary hung up a calico curtain across the one bedroom, so that Annie-Many-Ponies might have a corner to call her own. She stayed; and Luck rewrote two reels of his scenario so that there should be a place in it for a beautiful Indian girl who rode like a whirlwind and did not know the meaning of fear, and who had a mind of her own, and who was just exactly as harmless in that camp as half a quart of nitroglycerine, and added thereby a good bit to the load of responsibility which Luck was shouldering.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “PAM. BLEAK MESA—CATTLE DRIFTING BEFORE WIND—”

  “Pam. bleak mesa—snow—cattle drifting before wind. Dale and Johnny dis. riding to foreground. Reg. cold—horses leg-weary—boys all in—”

  Out toward Bear Canyon, where the land to the north rose brokenly to the mountains, Luck found the bleak stretches of which he had dreamed that night on the observation platform of a train speeding through the night in North Dakota,—a great white wilderness unsheltered by friendly forests, uninhabited save by wild things that moved stealthily across its windswept ridges. Beyond, the mountains rose barrenly, more bleak than the land that lay at their feet.

  “Pam. bleak mesa—snow—” With the camera set halfway up a gentle slope commanding a steeper hill beyond, down which the boys would send the cattle in a slow, uneasy march before the storm, Luck focused his telephoto lens upon bleakness enough to satisfy even his voracious appetite for realism. Bill Holmes, his tan pumps wrapped in gunny sacks for protection against the snow that was a foot deep on the level and still falling, thrashed his body with his arms, like a windmill whose paddles have suddenly gone limp in a high wind. When he was ready, Luck stopped long enough to blow on his fingers and to turn and watch for the signal from Annie-Many-Ponies, stationed on a higher ridge to the right of him,—the signal that the cattle were coming.

  Through the drive of the snowstorm he saw her tall, straight figure as through a thin, shifting, white veil. The little black dog, for whom she had conceived a fierce affection in defiance of Rosemary’s tacit opposition, was lying with its tail curled tight around its feet and its nose, hunting warmth in the shelter of her flapping garments. Annie-Many-Ponies was staring away to the north, shielding her keen eyes from the snow with one slim, brown hand, while she watched for the coming of the herd.

  Luck looked at her, silhouetted against the sky. He had no scene written in his script to match the picture she made; he had no negative to waste. But he swung his camera around and, using the telephoto lens he had adjusted for his cattle scenes, he called to her to hold that pose, and indulged his artistic sense in a ten-or-twelve foot scene which showed Annie-Many-Ponies wholly absorbed in gazing upon farther bleakness.

  Annie-Many-Ponies was so keenly conscious of her duty to the camera that she dared not break her pose, even to give the signal, until he had yelled, “All right, Annie!” and swung the camera back with its recording eye fixed upon that narrow depression between two blunt ears of hilltop, through which the herd was to be sent down to the ridge and on past the camera to the flat, where other scenes were to be taken later on, when the cattle were hungry enough to browse miserably upon the bosquet of young cotton woods.

  “Cows come!” she called out, because Luck had his back to her at the moment and did not see the wave of hand she had been told to give him.

  Luck, squinting into the view-finder, caught the swaying vanguard of the herd and swore. He had meant to “pan. bleak mesa” for half a minute before those swaying heads and horns appeared over the brow of the ridge. Now, even though he began to turn the crank the instant he glimpsed them, he would not have quite the effect which he had meant to have. He would be compelled to make two scenes of it, and pan. his bleak mesa afterwards and trust to a “cut-in scene” to cover the break. He did not trust Bill Holmes to turn the crank on that slow, plodding march of misery. With his diaphragm of the camera wide open to get all the light possible, because the air was filled with falling snow, he followed the herd, as it wound snakelike down the easiest descents, making for the more sheltered small canyons that opened out upon the flat. “Cattle drifting before the wind,” read the script; and now Luck saw them coming, their snow-whitened backs humped to the driving storm, heads lowered and swaying weakly from side to side with the shambling motion of their feet. They were drifting before the wind, just as he had planned that they should do. That they shuffled wearily down that hill with poor cows and unweaned calves straggling miserably behind the main body in “the drag herd,” proved how well the boys had done the work which he had sent them out at daylight to do.

  The boys had gone out, under the leadership of Applehead, who knew that range as he knew his own dooryard, just when daylight began to break coldly upon the storm that had come with the sunset. Luck had already ridden out with them and had chosen his location for the blizzard scenes.

  He had gone with them over every foot of that drive, and had told them just where the main body of riders was to fall back behind the ridge that would hide them from the camera, leaving Andy Green and the Native Son—since these were the two whom he always visualized in the scene—to come on alone in the wake of the herd. Under the leadership of old Applehead, they had combed every draw that sheltered so much as a lone cow and calf.

  Luck had told them to bring in every hoof they could spot and get over that ridge by ten o’clock. He had a nervous dread of the storm breaking before noon, and his heart was set on getting that never-to-be-successfully-faked blizzard scene. Realism ruled him absolutely, now that he was actually producing some of the big scenes of this picture. He had told them just where to watch for Annie-Many-Ponies and the flag she would wave,—a black flag, so
that the boys could not fail to see it in the vague whiteness of the storm. He had located the jutting ledge behind which Happy Jack was to sneak, that he might watch for the signal as an extra precaution against an unseasonable appearance of the two riders over the ridge.

  When the herd straggled down in what seemed an endless stream of storm-driven animals, Luck knew that the boys had done their work well. He knew cattle as he knew pictures; he knew that a full two thousand came over that ridge through a shallow pass he had chosen, “‘Every hoof’ is right,” he remarked to Bill Holmes with a dry approval. “I’d hate to go hunting meat where that bunch was gathered from. Looks like they’d combed the country for fifty miles around.” He sent a quick glance to the pinnacle where Annie-Many-Ponies stood waiting to give the signal. He wished that she had realized the importance of these cattle scenes keenly enough to have given him the signal at the cost of breaking her pose. But he had only himself to blame. He should not have taken the risk, even though he had believed that the cattle would not arrive for another half hour. He should have been ready; he had told the boys to send them right over the ridge when they came up to it, because he wanted to preserve unbroken that indescribable atmosphere of a long, weary journey.

  Still they came; a good twenty-five hundred, he was ready to wager, when the last few stragglers, so weak that they wobbled when they hesitated before descending a particularly steep place, came down the slope. It surely did eat up film to take the full magnitude of that march, but Luck turned and turned and gloated in the bigness of it all.

  “All right, Annie,” he called out when he had taken the last of the herd as they filed out of sight into the narrow gully that would lead them to the flat half a mile below, where he meant to get other scenes. “Wave flag now for boys to come!”

  Annie-Many-Ponies lifted high the black flag and waved it in slow, sweeping half circles above her head. “Boys, come,” she called, a moment after.

  Luck, still not trusting the camera to Bill Holmes, swung back slowly to the pass and made a panorama of the desolate hillside and the chill, forbidding mountains behind. At the pass he stopped. “How close?” he shouted to Annie. “Come now,” she called down to him, and Luck began to turn the crank again, watching like a hawk for the first bobbing black specks which would show that the boys were nearing the crest of the ridge.

  They came, on the very instant that he would have chosen for their coming. Side by side they rode, drooping of shoulders, and yet with their bodies braced backward for the descent which at the top was rather steep. “Register cold—horses leg-weary—boys all in—” read the script which Luck knew by heart. It was cold enough, and the camera must have registered it in the way the snow was heaped upon their hatbrims, drifted upon their shoulders, packed in the wrinkles of their clothing and in the manes and tails of the horses. And the horses certainly were leg-weary; so weary that Luck knew how the boys must have ridden to gather the cattle and to put their mounts in that condition of realistic exhaustion. In the story they were supposed to have ridden nearly all night,—the night-guard who had been on duty when the storm struck and the cattle began to drift, and who had stuck to their posts even though they could not turn the herd.

  That might be stretching the probabilities just a shade, but Luck felt that the effects he wanted to get justified the slight license he had used in his plot. The effects were there, in generous measure. He turned the crank on the whole of their descent and got them riding up into the foreground pinched with cold, miserable as men may be. They did not look at him—they dared not until he had given the word that the scene was ended.

  “Ride on past, down into that gully where the cattle went,” he directed them sharply. “I’ll holler when you’re outa sight. You can turn around and come back then; the scene ends where your hat-crowns bob outa sight. And listen! You’re liable to lose your cattle if you don’t spur up a little, so try and get a little speed into them cayuses of yours!”

  Obediently Andy’s quirt rose and descended on the flank of his horse. It started, broke into a shuffling trot, and slowed again to a walk. There was no speed to be gotten out of those cayuses,—which was what Luck meant to show on the screen; for this, you must know, was the painting of one grim phase of the range-man’s life. The Native Son spurred his horse and got a lunge or two that settled presently to the same plodding walk. Luck pammed them out of sight, bethought him of the rest of the boys, and commanded Annie-Many-Ponies to call them in.

  They came, half frozen, half starved, and so tired they did not know which discomfort irked them most. They found Luck; his nose purple with cold marking the footage on his working script with numbed fingers. He barely glanced at them, and turned away to tell Bill Holmes to take the camera on down the draw to where that huddle of rocks stood up on the hillside. Andy and Miguel came back and met the others halfway.

  “Say, boss, when do we eat?” Big Medicine inquired anxiously. “By cripes, I’m holler plumb down to my toes,—and them’s froze stiff.”

  “Eat? We eat when we get these storm scenes taken,” Luck told him heartlessly. “I’m afraid it’ll clear up.”

  “Afraid it’ll clear up!” Pink burrowed his chin deeper into his breath-frosted collar and shivered.

  “Oh, quit kicking,” the Native Son advised ironically. “We’re only living some of Luck’s big minutes he used to tell about.”

  Luck looked around at them and grinned a little. “Part of the business, boys,” he said. “Think of the picture stuff there is in this storm!”

  “Why, sure!” Weary responded with exaggerated cheerfulness. “I’ve been freezing artistically ever since daylight. Darn me for leaving my old sourdough coat at home when I hit for the land of orange blossoms and singing birds and sunshine.”

  “Aw, gwan! I never was warm a minute in Los Angeles except when I got hot at the Acme. Montana never seen the day it was as cold as here.”

  “Come on, boys, let’s get these dissolve scenes of cattle perishing in a blizzard. After that—hey, Annie! You come, make plenty fire, plenty coffee. I show you location.”

  Annie called gently to the little dog, and came striding down through the snow to fall in docilely three paces behind her adored “brother,” Wagalexa Conka after the submissive manner of squaws toward the human male in authority over them.

  “Coffee!” Weary murmured ecstatically. “Plenty fire, plenty coffee—oh, mama!”

  Down in the flat where the bushes grew sparsely along the tiny arroyo now gone dry, the herd had stopped from sheer exhaustion, and were already nibbling desultorily upon the tenderest twigs. This was what Luck wanted in his scene, though the cattle must be moved into the location he had chosen where was just the background effect he wanted to get, with the bare mesa showing in the far distance. There was a dreary interval of riding and shouting and urging the cattle up over a low spur of the bluff and down the other side, and the placing of them to Luck’s satisfaction. I fear that more than one of the boys wondered why that first bit of the flat would not do, and why Luck insisted that they should bring the herd to one particular point and no other, and why they must wear out their horses, and themselves just fussing around among the cattle, scattering one bunch, bringing others closer together, and driving certain animals up to foreground, when they very much objected to going there.

  Luck had concealed his camera behind the rocks so that he could get a “close shot” without registering the fact that the cattle were watching him. His commands to “Edge that black steer over about even with that white bank!” and later, “Put that cow and calf out this way and drive the others back a little, so she will have the immediate foreground to herself,” were easier given than obeyed. The cow and calf, for instance, were much inclined to shamble back with the others, and did not show any appreciation for the foreground, wherein they were vastly unlike any other “extras” ever brought before a camera. Still, in spite of all these drawbacks, the moment arrived when Luck began to turn the crank with his eyes keen for e
very detail of that bunch of forlorn, hungry, range cattle huddled under the scant shelter of a ten-foot bank, while the snows fell steadily in great flakes which Luck knew would give a grand storm-effect on the screen. The Happy Family, free for the moment, crowded close to the fire of dead sagebrush which Annie-Many-Ponies had lighted in the lee of a high rock, and sniffed longingly at the smell which came steaming up from the dented two-gallon coffee-boiler blackened from many a camp fire.

  Luck was turning the crank and watching his “foreground stuff” so that he did not at first see the two riders who came loping down the hill which he was using for background. Whether he would or no, he had got them in several feet of good scene before he saw them and stopped his camera. He shouted, but they came on headlong, slipping and sliding in the loose snow. There could be no doubt that they were headed straight for the group and felt that their business was urgent, so Luck stepped out from behind the rocks and started toward them, motioning for them to keep out, away from the cattle.

  “Better let me git in the lead right now,” Applehead advised hastily, and jumped in front of Luck as the two came lunging up. “I know these here hombres, to my sorrer, too, now I’m tellin’ yuh!”

  But Luck, feeling that his leadership might as well be established then as any time, pushed the old man back.

  “What you want?” he demanded of the foremost who rode up. “Didn’t you hear me tell you to keep out around the cattle?”

  “Adonde va con mi vaca?” snapped the first rider in high-keyed Spanish.

  “My brother say where you go with our cattle?” interrupted the other one, evidently proud of his English.

  “I know what he said,” Luck snubbed this one bluntly. “I don’t know that they are your cattle. I don’t care. We’re using them to make motion pictures. Get outa the way so we can go on with our work.” Had he not spoiled several feet of film because of their coming he might have been more inclined to placate them. As it was, he did not welcome their interference, he did not like their looks, and their tones were to his temper as tow would be to a fire. Their half Mexican, half American dress irritated him; the interruption exasperated him. He was hungry and cold and keyed to a high nervous tension in his anxiety to make the most of his present big opportunity; he knew too well that he might not have another chance all winter, with the snow falling as if under his direction.