by B. M. Bower
Robert Grant Burns read that letter through slowly, and then sat down heavily in an old arm-chair in the hotel office, lighted one of his favorite fat, black cigars, and mouthed it absently, while he read the letter through again. He said “John Jimpson!” just above a whisper. He held the letter in his two hands and regarded it strangely. Then he looked up, caught the quizzical, inquiring glance of Pete Lowry, and beckoned that secret-smiling individual over to him. “Read that!” he grunted. “Read it and tell me what you think of it.”
Pete Lowry read it carefully, and grinned when he handed it back. He did not, however, tell Robert Grant Burns just exactly what he thought of it. He merely said that it had to come sometime, he guessed.
“She can’t put over the dramatic stuff,” objected Robert Grant Burns. “She’s got the face for it, all right, and when she registers real emotions, it gets over big. The bottled-up kind of people always do. But she’s never acted an emotion she didn’t feel—”
“How about that all-in stuff, and the listening-and—waiting business she put across before she took a shot at Gil that time she fainted?” Pete reminded him. “If you ask me, that little girl can act.”
“Well, whether she can or not, she’s got to try it,” said Burns with some foreboding. “She’s been going big, with Gay to do all the close-up, dramatic work. The trouble is, Pete, that girl always does as she darn pleases! If I put her opposite Lee in a scene and tell her to act like she is in love with him, and that he’s to kiss her and she’s to kiss back,—” he flung out his hands expressively. “You must know the rest, as well as I do. She’d turn around and give me a call-down, and get on her horse and ride off; and I and my picture could go to thunder, for all of her. That’s the point; she ain’t been through the mill. She don’t know anything about taking orders—from me or anybody else.” It is a pity that Lite did not hear that! He might have amended the statement a little. Jean had been taking orders enough; she knew a great deal about receiving ultimatums. The trouble was that she seldom paid any attention to them. Lite was accustomed to that, but Robert Grant Burns was not, and it irked him sore.
“Well, she’s sure got the screen personality,” Pete defended. “I’ve said it all along. That girl don’t have to act. Put her in the part, and she is the part! She’s got something better than technique, Burns. She’s got imagination. She puts herself in a character and lives it.”
“Put her on a horse and she does,” Burns conceded gloomily. “But will you tell me what kind of work she’ll make of interior scenes, and love scenes, and all that? You’ve got to have it, to pad out your story. You can’t let your leading character do a whole two—or three-reel picture on horseback. There wouldn’t be any contrast. Dewitt don’t know that girl the way I do. If he’d had to side-step and scheme and give in the way I’ve done to keep her working, he wouldn’t put her playing straight leads, not until she’d had a year or two of training—”
“Taming is a better word,” Pete suggested drily. “There’ll be fun when she gets to playing love scenes opposite Lee. You better let him take the heavies, and put Gil in for leads, Burns.”
Robert Grant Burns was so cast down by the prospect that he made no attempt to reply, beyond grunting something about preferring to drive a team of balky mules to making Jean do something she did not want to do. But, such is the mind trained to a profession, insensibly he drifted away into the world of his imagination, and began to draw therefrom the first tenuous threads of a plot wherein Jean’s peculiar accomplishments were to be featured. Robert Grant Burns had long ago learned to adjust himself to circumstances which in themselves were not to his liking. He adjusted himself now to the idea of making Jean the Western star his employers seemed to think was inevitable.
That night before he went to bed he wrote a play which had in it fifty-two scenes. Thirty-five of them were what is known technically as exteriors. In most of them Jean was to ride on horseback through wild places. The rest were dramatic close-ups. Robert Grant Burns went over it carefully when it was finished, and groaning inwardly he cut out two love scenes which were tense, and which Muriel Gay and Lee Milligan would have “eaten up,” as he mentally expressed it. The love interest, he realized bitterly, must be touched upon lightly in his scenarios from now on; which would have lightened appreciably the heart of Lite Avery, if he had only known it, and would have erased from his mind a good many depressing visions of Jean as the film sweetheart of those movie men whom he secretly hated.
Jean did not hesitate five minutes before she signed the contract which Burns presented to her the next morning. She was human, and she had learned enough about the business to see that, speaking from a purely professional point of view, she was extremely fortunate. Not every girl, surely, can hope to jump in a few weeks from the lowly position of an inexperienced “extra” to the supposedly exalted one of leading woman. And to her that hundred dollars a week which the contract insured her looked a fortune. It spelled home to her, and the vindication of her beloved dad, of whom she dared not think sometimes, it hurt her so.
Her book was not progressing as fast as she had expected when she began it. She had been working at it sporadically now for eight weeks, and she had only ten chapters done,—and some of these were terribly short. She had looked through all of the novels that she owned, and had computed the average number of chapters in each; thirty she decided would be a good, conservative number to write. She had even divided those thirty into three parts, and had impartially allotted ten to adventure, ten to mystery and horror, and ten to love-making. Such an arrangement should please everybody, surely, and need only be worked out smoothly to prove most satisfying.
But, as it happened, comedy would creep into the mystery and horror, which she mentally lumped together as agony. Adventure ran riot, and straight love-making chapters made her sleepy, they bored her so. She had tried one or two, and she had found it impossible to concentrate her mind upon them. Instead, she had sat and planned what she would do with the money that was steadily accumulating in the bank; a pitiful little sum, to be sure, to those who count by the thousands, but cheering enough to Jean, who had never before had any money of her own.
So she signed the contract and worked that day so light-heartedly that Robert Grant Burns forgot his pessimism. When the light began to fade and grow yellow, and the big automobile went purring down the trail to town, she rode on to the Bar Nothing to find Lite, and tell him how fortune had come and tapped her on the shoulder.
She did not see Lite anywhere about the ranch, and so she did not put her hopes and her plans and her good fortune into speech. She did see her Aunt Ella, who straightway informed her that people were talking about the way she rode here and there with those painted-up people, and let the men put their arms around her and make love to her. Her Aunt Ella made it perfectly plain to Jean that she, for one, did not consider it respectable. Her Aunt Ella said that Carl was going to do something about it, if things weren’t changed pretty quick.
Jean did not appear to regard her aunt’s disapproval as of any importance whatever, but the words stung. She had herself worried a little over the love-making scenes which she knew she would now be called upon to play. Jean, you will have observed, was not given to sentimental adventurings; and she disliked the idea of letting Lee Milligan make love to her the way he had made love to Muriel Gay through picture after picture. She would do it, she supposed, if she had to; she wanted the salary. But she would hate it intolerably. She made reply with sarcasm which she knew would particularly irritate her Aunt Ella, and left the house feeling that she never wanted to enter it again as long as she lived.
The sight of her uncle standing beside Pard in an attitude of disgusted appraisement of the new Navajo blanket and the silver-trimmed bridle and tapideros which Burns had persuaded her to add to her riding outfit,—for photographic effect,—brought a hot flush of resentment. She went up quietly enough, however. Indeed, she went up so quietly that he started when she appeared almost beside him
and picked up Pard’s reins, and took the stirrup to mount and ride away. She did not speak to him at all; she had not spoken to him since that night when the little brown bird had died! Though perhaps that was because she had managed to keep out of his way.
“I see you’ve been staking yourself to a new bridle,” Carl began in a tone quite as sour as his look. “You must have bought out all the tin decorations they had in stock, didn’t you?”
Jean swung up into the saddle before she looked at him. “If I did, it’s my own affair,” she retorted. “I paid for the tin decorations with my own money.”
“Oh, you did! Well, you might have been in better business than paying for that kind of thing. You might,” he sneered up at her, “have been paying for your keep these last three years, if you’ve got more money of your own than you know what to do with.”
Jean could not ride off under the sting of that gratuitous insult. She held Pard quiet and looked down at him with hate in her eyes. “I expect,” she said in a queer, quiet wrath, “to prove before long that my own money has been paying for my ‘keep’ these last three years; for that and for other things that did not benefit me in the least.”
“I’d like to know what you mean by that!” Carl caught Pard by the bridle-rein and looked up at her in a white fury that startled even Jean, accustomed as she was to his sudden rages that contrasted with his sullen attitude toward the world.
“What do you think I would mean? Let go my bridle. I don’t want to quarrel with you.”
“What did you mean by proving—what do you expect to prove?” His hand was heavy on the rein, so that Pard began to fret under the restraint. “You’ve got to quit running around all over the country with them show folks, and stay at home and behave yourself. You’ve got to quit hanging out at the Lazy A. I’ve stood as much as I’m going to stand of your performances. You get down off that horse and go into the house and behave yourself; that’s what you’ll do! If you haven’t got any shame or decency—”
Jean scarcely knew what she did, just then. She must have dug Pard with her spurs, because the first thing that she realized was the lunge he gave. Carl’s hold slipped from the rein, as he was jerked sidewise. He made an ineffective grab at Jean’s skirt, and he called her a name she had never heard spoken before in her life. A rod or so away she pulled up and turned to face him, but the words she would have spoken stuck in her throat. She had never seen Carl Douglas look like that; she had seen him when he was furious, she had seen him when he sulked, but she had never seen him look like that.
He called her to come back. He made threats of what he would do if she refused to obey him. He shook his fist at her. He behaved like a man temporarily robbed of his reason; his eyes, as he came up glaring at her, were the eyes of a madman.
Jean felt a tremor of dread while she looked at him and listened to him. He was almost within reach of her again when she wheeled and went off up the trail at a run. She looked back often, half fearing that he would get a horse and follow her, but he stood just where she had left him, and he seemed to be still uttering threats and groundless accusations as long as she was in sight.
CHAPTER XVI
FOR ONCE AT LEAST LITE HAD HIS WAY
Half a mile she galloped, and met Lite coming home. She glanced over her shoulder before she pulled Pard down to a walk, and Lite’s greeting, as he turned and rode alongside her, was a question. He wanted to know what was the matter with her. He listened with his old manner of repression while she told him, and he made no comment whatever until she had finished.
“You must have made him pretty sore,” he said dispassionately. “I don’t think myself that you ought to stay over to the ranch alone. Why don’t you do as he says?”
“And go back to the Bar Nothing?” Jean shivered a little. “Nothing could make me go back there! Lite, you don’t understand. He acted like a crazy man; and I hadn’t said anything to stir him up like that. He was—Lite, he scared me! I couldn’t stay on the ranch with him. I couldn’t be in the same room with him.”
“You can’t go on staying at the Lazy A,” Lite told her flatly.
“There’s no other place where I’d stay.”
“You could,” Lite pointed out, “stay in town and go back and forth with the rest of the bunch. It would be a lot better, any way you look at it.”
“It would be a lot worse. There’s my book; I wouldn’t have any chance to write on that. And there’s the expense. I’m saving every nickel I possibly can, Lite, and you know what for. And there’s the bunch—I see enough of them during working hours. I’d go crazy if I had to live with them. Lite, they’ve put me in playing leads! I’m to get a hundred dollars a week! Just think of that! And Burns says that I’ll have to go back to Los Angeles with them when they go this fall, because the contract I signed lasts for a year.”
She sighed. “I rode over to tell you about it. It seemed to be good news, when I left home. But now, it’s just a part of the black tangle that life’s made up of. Aunt Ella started things off by telling me what a disgrace it is for me to work in these pictures. And Uncle Carl—” She shivered in spite of herself. “I just can’t understand Uncle Carl’s going into such a rage. It was—awful.”
Lite rode for some distance before he lifted his head or spoke. Then he looked at Jean, who was staring straight ahead and seeing nothing save what her thoughts pictured.
He did not say a word about her going to Los Angeles.
He was the bottled-up type; the things that hit him hardest he seldom mentioned, so by that rule it might be inferred that her going hit hard. But his voice was normally calm, and his tone was the tone of authority, which Jean knew very well, and which nearly always amused her because she firmly believed it to be utterly useless.
He said in the tone of an ultimatum: “If you’re bound to stay at the ranch, you’ve got to have somebody with you. I’ll ride in and get Hepsy Atwood in the morning. You’re getting thin. I don’t believe you take time to cook enough to eat. You can’t work on soda crackers and sardines. The old lady won’t charge much to come and stay with you. I’ll come over after I’m through work tomorrow and help her get things looking a little more like living.”
“You’ll do nothing of the sort.” Jean looked at him mutinously. “I’m all right just as I am. I won’t have her, Lite. That’s settled.”
“Sure, it’s settled,” Lite agreed, with more than his usual pertinacity. “I’ll have her out here by noon, and a supply of real grub. How are you fixed for bedding?”
“I won’t have her, I tell you. You’re always trying to make me do things I won’t do. Don’t be silly.”
“Sure not.” Lite shifted in the saddle with the air of a man who rides at perfect ease with himself and with the world. “She’ll likely have plenty of bedding of her own,” he meditated, after a brief silence.
“Lite, if you haul Hepsibah out here, I’ll send her back!”
“I’ll haul her out,” said Lite in a tone of finality, “but you won’t send her back.” He paused. “She ain’t much protection, maybe,” he remarked somewhat enigmatically, “but it’ll beat staying alone nights. You—you can’t tell who might come prowling around the place.”
“What do you mean? Do you know about—” Jean caught herself on the verge of betrayal.
“You want to keep your gun handy. Just on general principles,” Lite remonstrated. “You can’t tell; it’s away off from everywhere.”
“I won’t have Hepsy Atwood. Haven’t I enough to drive me mad, without her?”
“Is there anybody else that you’d rather have?” Lite looked at her speculatively.
“No, there isn’t. I won’t have anybody. It would be a nuisance having some old lady in the house gabbling and gossiping. I’m not the least bit afraid, except,—I’m not afraid, and I like to be alone. I won’t have her, Lite.”
Lite said no more about it until they reached the house, huddled lonesomely against the barren bluff, its windows staring black into the du
sk. Jean did not seem to expect Lite to dismount, but he did not wait to see what she expected him to do. In his most matter-of-fact manner he dismounted and turned his horse, still saddled, into the stable with Pard. He preceded Jean up the path, and went into the kitchen ahead of her; lighted a match and found the lamp, and set its flame to brightening the dingy room.
Jean had not done much in the way of making that part of the house more attractive. She used the kitchen to cook in, because the stove was there, and the dishes. She had spread an old braided rug over the brown stain on the floor, and she ate in her own room with the door shut.
Without being told, Lite seemed to know all about her secret aversion to the kitchen. He took up the lamp and went now on a tour of inspection through the house. Jean followed him, wondering a little, and thinking that this was the way that mysterious stranger came and prowled at night, except that he must have used matches to light the way, or a candle, since the lamp seemed never to be disturbed. Lite went into all the rooms and held the lamp so that its brightness searched out all the corners. He looked into the small, stuffy closets. He stood in the middle of her father’s room and seemed to meditate deeply, while Jean stood in the doorway and watched him inquiringly. He came back finally to the kitchen and looked into the cupboard, as though he was taking an inventory of her supply of provisions.