The B. M. Bower Megapack

by B. M. Bower

  When he had quite blotted the girl from his story, he was appalled at the gap he must fill in the continuity and in the theme. He had left old Dave Wiswell, his dried little cattleman, a childless old man—or else a “squaw” man whose squaw has, presumably, died before the story began. Somehow he could not “see” his cattleman as one who would set aside the barrier of race and take a squaw for his wife. He could not see Annie-Many-Ponies as anything save what she was—a beautiful young savage with an odd adornment of civilized speech and some of the civilized customs, it is true, but a savage for all that. He did not want to spoil her by portraying her as a half-caste in his picture.

  He must make his story a man’s story, with the full interest centered about the man’s hopes, his temptations, his achievements. The woman—Annie, as he saw the woman now—must be of secondary interest. He laid his head against the chair back in his favorite attitude for uninterrupted thought, and stared into the fire. In this way he had stared out into the night of the Dakota prairie; at first brooding in discontent because things were not as he would have them, then drifting into dreams of what he would like; then weaving his dreams together and creating a something complete in itself. So had he created his Big Picture,—the picture which was already beginning to live in the narrow strips of negative. A few hundred feet of that negative were even dry and filed away ready for cutting; unimportant scenes, to be sure, with all of his “big stuff” yet to be produced. His mind went methodically over the completed scenes, judging each one separately, seeking some change of plot that would yet permit these scenes to be used. From there his thought drifted to the day’s work in the blizzard,—the day’s work that had been lost because of atmospheric conditions. Blizzard stuff he must have, he told himself stubbornly. Not only was that a phase of the range which he must portray if his picture were to be complete; he must have it to lead the story up to that tragic, pitifully eloquent scene which had come out clear and photographically perfect,—the scene of the old cow’s struggle against the storm and of her final surrender, too weak to match her puny strength against the furies of wind and snow and cold. That scene would live long in the minds of those who saw it; that scene alone would lift his picture above the dead level of mediocrity. But he must have another blizzard.…

  His eyelids drooped low over his tired eyes; through their narrowing opening he stared at the yellow glow of the fire. Only half awake, he dreamed of the herd drifting down that bleak hillside, with Andy and the Native Son riding doggedly after them. Only half awake, his story changed, grew indistinct, clarified in stray scenes, held aloof from him, grew and changed, and was another story. And always in the background of his mind went that drifting herd. Sometimes snow-whitened, their backs humped in the wind, their heads lowered and swaying weakly from side to side, the cattle marched and marched before him, sometimes obscured by the blackness of night, a vague procession of moving shadows; sometimes revealed suddenly when the lightning split the blackness. Like a phantom herd—

  “The phantom herd!” Aloud he cried the words. “The Phantom Herd!” He sat up straight in his chair. Here was his title, for which his mind had groped so long and could not grasp. His title—

  “What—that you, Luck?” Andy Green’s voice came sleepily from the next room. “What yuh want?”

  “I’ve got my title!” Luck called back, his voice exultant. “And I’ve got my story, too! Get up, Andy, and let me tell you the plot!”

  Whereupon Andy proved himself a real friend and an unselfish one. He felt as if getting up out of bed was the final, supreme torture under which a man may live; but he got up, for there was something in Luck’s voice that thrilled him even through the clogging sleep-hunger. Presently he was sitting in his trousers and socks and shirt, sleepy-eyed beside Luck.

  “Shoot it outa your system,” he mumbled, and began feeling stupidly for his cigarette papers. “E—a-ough! “ he yawned, if so inarticulate a sound may be spelled. “I knew you’d have to work your story over,” he said, more normal of tone after the yawn. And he added bluntly, “Rosemary’s one grand little woman—but she couldn’t act if you trained her a thousand years. What’s your next best bet?”

  “No next best; it’s the picture this time. The Phantom Herd. Get that as a title?”

  “Gee!” Andy softly paid tribute. Then he grinned. “By gracious, they sure didn’t act to me like any phantom herd when we first headed ’em into that wind!”

  “Them babies are going to march us up to a pile of real money, though,” Luck asserted eagerly.

  “Listen. Here’s the story—the part I’ve changed; all the first part is the same—the trail-herd and all. You’re old Dave’s son, and you’re wild. You quarrel, and he turns you out, thinking he’ll let you rustle for yourself awhile, and maybe tame down and come back more like he wants you to be. But you don’t tame that way. You throw in with Miguel, and you two turn rustlers. You hold a grudge against your dad, and you rustle from him mostly, on the plea that by rights what’s his is yours—you know. Annie is Mig’s sweetheart, and she’s a kind of go-between—keeps you posted on what’s taking place on the outside, and all that. I haven’t,” he explained hastily, “doped out the details yet. I’m giving you the main points I want to bring out. Well, here’s the big stuff; you get a big herd together. You’re holding ’em in a box canyon,—I know the spot, all right,—waiting for a chance to drive them outa the country; see? This blizzard hits, and you take advantage of it to drive the herd out under cover of the storm. But the blizzard beats you. You trail ’em along, but there’s only two of you, and you can’t keep ’em from swinging away from the wind. You try to hold the herd into the storm,—that’s where I’ll get my big storm effects,—but they swing off in spite of you. Your horses get tired; all you can do is follow the herd. Lord! I wish that stuff I took today wasn’t spoiled! I sure would have had some big stuff there. Well, Mig’s horse goes down in a drifted wash. You’re trying to point the herd then, and the storm’s so thick you don’t miss him at first, we’ll say.

  “Anyway, as I’ve doped it out, Mig loses his life. You find him dead—whether then or later I don’t know yet. The punch is this: You have been getting pretty sick of the life, and wishing you had behaved yourself and stayed with your dad. But you’ve been afraid of Mig. You couldn’t see any chance of taking the back trail as long as he was alive to tell on you. Now he’s dead. I guess maybe you better find him right there in the blizzard—hurt maybe—anyway, just about all in. You try to save him, sabe? You can’t, though.”

  “I still don’t see no phantom herd,” observed Andy, wriggling his toes luxuriously in the warmth of the fire.

  “Well, listen. You’ll see it in a minute. You go back home after your pard’s dead. You have a close squeak yourself, see? And the thing works on your mind. Cutting out the frills, you see things. You see a herd drifting before a storm, maybe,—a blizzard like yesterday, with your pal riding point. You try to come up with it—no herd there. You come to yourself and go back home. Then maybe some black night you’re brooding before a fire like this—I can get a great firelight effect on your face, sitting like this”—Luck, actor that he was, made Andy see just how the scenes would look—“have a flare in the fire to throw the light back on you; see what I mean? And outside a thunderstorm is rolling up. A bright flash of lightning startles you. You go to the door and open it; you see the herd drifting past with Mig trailing along on his horse—black shadows, and then standing out clear in the lightning—”

  “How the deuce—”

  “I’ll do that with ‘lap dissolves’ and double exposures. Lots of work that will be, and careful work, but the result will be—why, Lord! It will be immense! That herd and the lone rider haunt you till you’re on the edge of being crazy. Then I’ll bring out somehow that it’s a nervous condition, which of course it is. And I’ll bring old Dave in strong; he follows you some night, and he finds out what you’re after. You tell him—make a clean breast of your rustling, see? Just unb
urden your mind to your dad. He’s big enough to see that he isn’t altogether clear of guilt himself, for sending you off the way he did. Anyway, that pulls you out of it. The phantom herd and rider pass over the sky line some night—Lord, I can see what a picture I can get out of that!—and out of your life.”

  “Unh-hunh—that’s a heap better than your first story, Luck.”

  “Andy, are you boys going to talk all night?” the voice of Rosemary came plaintively from the next room.

  “Here. You go back to bed,” Luck generously commanded. “I just wanted to get your idea of what it sounds like. I’ll block it out before I turn in. Go on, now.”

  So Luck wrote his new story of The Phantom Herd that night. He had a midnight supper of warmed-over coffee and cold bean sandwiches, but he did not have any sleep. When he had finished with a last big, artistic scene that made his pulse beat faster in the writing of it, the white world outside was growing faintly pink under the rising sun.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A LETTER FROM CHIEF BIG TURKEY

  Annie-Many-Ponies, keen of eye when her heart directed her glances, saw the Kyle postmark on a letter while Applehead was sorting Luck’s mail from the weekly batch he had just brought. Luck also spied the Kyle postmark and the familiar handwriting of George-Low-Cedar, who was a cousin of Annie-Many-Ponies and the most favored scribe of Big Turkey’s numerous family. There was no mistaking those self-conscious shadings on the downward strokes of the pen, or the twice-curled tails of all the capitals. The capital M, for instance, very much resembled a dandelion stem split and curled by the tongue of a little girl.

  George-Low-Cedar and none other had written that letter, and Big Turkey himself had probably composed it in great deliberation over his pipe, while the smoke of his tepee fire curled over his head, and his squaw crouched in the shadow listening stolidly while her heart ached with longing for the girl-child who had gone a-wandering. Annie-Many-Ponies slid unobtrusively to the door and flattened her back against the wall beside it, ready to slip out into the dusk if she read in Wagalexa Conka’s face that the letter was unpleasant.

  Luck did not say a word while he held the letter up and looked at it; he did not say a word, but Annie-Many-Ponies knew, as well as though he had spoken, that he too feared what the contents might be. So she stood flat against the wall and watched his face, and saw how his fingers fumbled at the flap of the envelope, and how slowly he drew out the cheap, heavily ruled, glazed paper that is sold alongside plug tobacco and pearl buttons and safety pins in the Indian traders’ stores. Staring from under her straight brows at that folded letter, Annie-Many-Ponies had a swift, clear vision of the little store set down in the midst of barrenness and dust, and of the squaws sitting wrapped in bright shawls upon the platform while their lords gravely purchased small luxuries within. As a slim, barefooted papoose, proud of her shapeless red calico slip buttoned unevenly up the back with huge white buttons, and of her hair braided in two sleek braids and tied with strips of the same red calico, she had stood flattened against the wall of the store while her father, Big Turkey, bought tobacco. She had hoped that the fates might be kind and send her a five-cent bag of red-and-white gum drops. Instead, Big Turkey had brought her a doll,—a pink-cheeked doll of the white people. In her cheap suitcase which she had carried wrapped in her shawl on her back to the ranch, Annie-Many-Ponies still had that doll. So with her eyes fixed upon the letter, her mind stared trance-like at the vision of that long-ago day which had been to her so wonderful.

  Then Wagalexa Conka looked at her and smiled, and the vision of the store and the slim, barefooted papoose with her doll vanished. The smile meant that all was well, that she might stay with Wagalexa Conka and be his Indian girl in the picture of The Phantom Herd. Annie-Many-Ponies smiled back at him,—the slow, sweet, sphinx-like smile which Luck called “heart-twisting,”—and slipped out into the night with her heart beating fast in a strange mixture of joy that she might stay, and of homesickness for the little store set down in the midst of barrenness and dust, and for that long-ago day that had been so wonderful.

  “Read this,” said Luck, still smiling, and gave the letter into the flour-dusted hands of Rosemary. “Ever see a real, dyed-in-the-wool, Indian letter? Sure takes a load off my mind, too; you never can tell how an idea is going to hit an Indian. Pass it on to the boys.”

  So Rosemary read, with the whole Happy Family crowding close to look over her shoulder:

  Kyle, P. Office Pine Ridge, So. D Monday, Nov.

  Luck Lindsay at Motion Pictures ranch, Albequrqe, New M.

  Friend son,

  I this day gets letter from agent at agency who tell my girl you sisters are now at New mexicos with you pictures. shes go way one days at night times and tomorrow mornings i no find him. i am glad she sees you. you Take care same as with shows them Buffalo bill. all indians have hard times for cold and much hays and fires of prairies loses much. them indians shake you hands with good hearts they have with you. send me blue silks ribbon send Me pictures so i can see you. Again i shake you by hand with good heart same as I see you. Speak one Letters quick again.

  you father, BIG TURKEY.

  “Pretty good spelling, for an Indian letter,” Rosemary commented suspiciously. “Are you sure an Indian wrote it, Luck Lindsay?”

  “Why, certainly, I’m sure!” Luck was shuffling his other letters with the air of a man whose mind has for the moment lost its load of trouble. “George-Low-Cedar wrote it. I know his writing. He’s Annie’s cousin, and he thinks he’s highly educated. Indians have great memories, and once they learn to spell a word, they never seem to forget it. They learn to spell in school. What they don’t learn is how to put the words together the way we do. Cousin George is also shaky on capitals, you notice. Now tomorrow we can go ahead with that big cattle-stuff. I can take my time about making Annie’s scenes; I was afraid I might have to rush them all through first thing, so as to send her back. I’m sure glad she can stay; she’s good to have around, to help in the house.”

  Rosemary screwed up her lips and gave him a queer look, but Luck had turned his attention to another letter, and she did not say what was in her mind. Annie-Many-Ponies, speaking theoretically, was good to have around to help Rosemary. In actual practice, however, Rosemary found her not so good. Personally Annie was fastidiously tidy, which Rosemary ungenerously set down to youthful vanity rather than to innate cleanliness. When it came to washing dishes, however, Annie-Many-Ponies left much to be desired. She was prone to disappear about the time she reached the biscuit-basin and the frying-pan stage of the thrice-daily performance. She was prone to fancy she heard Wagalexa Conka calling her, or Shunka Chistala barking in pursuit of the cat, or a hen cackling out in the weeds; whatever the sound, it invariably became a summons which Annie-Many-Ponies must instantly obey. Then she forgot to come back within the next two or three hours, and Rosemary must finish the dishes herself. But all this, as Rosemary well knew, was an unimportant detail of the general scheme of work going on at Applehead’s ranch.

  To her it seemed wonderful, the way Luck was pushing his picture to completion against long odds sometimes, fighting some difficulty always. Much as she secretly resented certain Indian traits in Annie-Many-Ponies, and pleased as she would secretly have been if the girl had been recalled to the reservation, she was generously relieved because Luck could now go ahead with his round-up and trail-herd scenes while the weather was mild and sunny, and need not hurry the Indian-girl scenes at all.

  In the ten days since the blizzard, Luck had worked hard. Some night scenes in a cow-town he had already taken, driving late in the afternoon into Albuquerque with his radium flares and his full company. Rosemary’s memory cherished those nights as rare and precious experiences. First there were the old-time scenes, half Mexican in their atmosphere, when the dried little man was young, and the trail-herd started north. For these scenes Luck himself played the part of Dave Wiswell, turning the camera work over to Bill Holmes. Then there were the scene
s of a later period,—scenes of carousal which depicted her beloved Andy as a very wild young man who spent his nights riotously. One full day of sunshine had also been spent at the stockyards there, taking shipping scenes.

  On this day the two women had stayed at home, and Rosemary had nearly quarreled with Annie-Many-Ponies because Annie would not mend her stockings, but had spent the whole afternoon teaching Shunka Chistala to chase prairie dogs, the game being to try and frighten them away from their holes and then catch them. Annie-Many-Ponies attended to the strategic direction of the enterprise and let Shunka Chistala do most of the running. The high, clear laughter of the girl and her unintelligible cries to the little black dog had irritated Rosemary to the point of tears.

  There had been no more days wasted because of spoiled film,—Luck was carefully guarding against that,—and it seemed to Rosemary that there were miles of it developed and dried and pigeon-holed, ready for assembling. That part of the work she was especially interested in, because it was done in the house.

  To her it might seem that miles of film had been made, but to Luck it seemed as though the work crawled with maddening deliberation. Delays fretted him. The mounting expense account worried him, though as a matter of fact it mounted slowly, considering the work he was doing and the size of the company he was maintaining. When he took film clippings to a town photographer to have enlargements made for “stills,”—the pictures which must accompany each set of prints as advertising matter,—the cost of the work gave him the blues for the rest of that day. Then there were the Chavez boys, whom he had found it expedient to use occasionally in his big range scenes and in his “cow-town stuff.” They had no conception of regular rates as extras, but Luck had a conscience, and he had also established a precedent. Whenever he used them in pictures, he gave Tomas five dollars and left it to Tomas to divide with Ramone. And five dollars, added to other fives and tens and twenty-fives, soon amounts to an amazing whole when anxiety holds the pencil.