by B. M. Bower
“You might cook me some supper, Jean,” he said, when he had put the lamp on the table. “I see you’ve got eggs and bacon. I’m pretty hungry,—for a man that had his dinner six or seven hours ago.”
Jean cooked supper, and they ate together in the kitchen. It did not seem so gruesome with Lite there, and she told him some funny things that had happened in her work, and mimicked Robert Grant Burns with an accuracy of manner and tone that would have astonished that pompous person a good deal and flattered him not at all. She almost recovered her spirits under the stimulus of Lite’s presence, and she quite forgot that he had threatened her with Hepsibah Atwood.
But when he had wiped the dishes and had taken up his hat to go, Lite proved how tenaciously his mind could hold to an idea, and how even Jean could not quite match him for stubbornness.
“That mattress in the little bedroom looks all right,” he said. “I’ll pack it outside before I go, so it will have all day tomorrow out in the sun. I’ll have Hepsy bring her own bedding. Well—so long.”
Jean would have sworn in perfect good faith that Lite led his horse out of the stable, mounted it, and rode away to the Bar Nothing. He did mount and ride away as far as the mouth of the coulee. But that night he spent in the loft over the shop, and he did not sleep five minutes during the night. Most of the time he spent leaning against his rolled bedding, smoking and gazing at the silent house where Jean slept. You may interpret that as you will.
Jean did not see or hear anything more of him, until about four o’clock the next afternoon, when he drove calmly up to the house and deposited Hepsibah Atwood upon the kitchen steps. He did not wait for Jean to order them away. He hurried the unloading, released the wagon brake, and drove off. So Jean, coming from the spring behind the house, really got her first sight of him as he went rattling down to the gate.
Jean stood and looked after him, twitched her shoulders in a mental yielding of the point for the time being, and said “How-da-do” to the old lady.
She was not so old, as years go; fifty-five or thereabouts. And she could have whispered into Lite’s ear without standing on her toes or asking him to bend his head. Lite was a tall man, at that. She had gray hair that was frizzy around her brows and at the back of her neck, and she had an Irish disposition without the brogue to go with it.
The first thing she did was to find an axe and chop a lot of fence-posts into firewood, as easily as Lite himself could have done it, and in other ways proceeded to make herself very much at home. The next day she dipped the spring almost dry, and used up all the soap in the house; and for three days went around with her skirts tucked up and her arms bare and the soles of her shoes soggy from wet floors. Jean kept out of her way, but she owned to herself that, after all, it was not unpleasant to come home tired and not have to cook a solitary supper and eat it in silent meditation.
The third night after Hepsy’s arrival, Jean awoke to hear a man’s furtive footsteps in her father’s room. This was the fifth time that the prowler had come in the night, and custom had dulled her fear a little. She had not reached the point yet of getting up to see who it was and what he wanted. It was much easier to lie perfectly still with her six-shooter gripped in her hand and wait for him to go. Beyond stealthily trying her door and finding it fastened on the inside, he had never shown any disposition to invade her room.
Tonight was as all other nights when he came and made that mysterious search, until he went into the little bedroom where slept Hepsibah Atwood. Jean listened to the faint creaking of old boards which told her that he was approaching Hepsy’s room, and she wondered if Hepsy would hear him. Hepsy did hear him. There was a squeak of the old bedstead that told how a hundred and seventy-two pounds of indignant womanhood was rising to do battle.
“Who’s that? Git outa here, or I’ll smash you!” There was no fear but a great deal of determination in Hepsy’s voice, and there was the sound of her bare feet spatting on the floor.
The man’s footsteps retreated hurriedly. Jean heard the kitchen door open and slam shut with a shrill squeal of its rusty hinges, and the sound of a man running down the path. She heard Hepsy muttering threats while she followed to the door and looked out, and she heard the muttering continue while Hepsy returned to bed.
It was very comforting. Jean tucked her gun under her pillow, laughed to herself for having shuddered under the blankets at the sound of a man so easily put to flight, and went to sleep feeling quite secure and for the first time really glad that Hepsibah Atwood was in the house.
She listened the next morning to Hepsy’s colorful account of the affair, but she did not tell Hepsy that the man had been there before. She did not even tell her that she had heard the disturbance, and was lying with her gun in her hand ready to shoot if he came into her room. For a girl as frank and outspoken as was Jean, she had almost as great a talent as Lite for holding her tongue.
CHAPTER XVII
“WHY DON’T YOU GIVE THEM SOMETHING REAL?”
“Well, you don’t seem crazy about it. What’s the matter?” Robert Grant Burns stood in his favorite attitude with his hands on his hips and his feet far apart, and looked down at Jean with a secret anxiety in his eyes. Without realizing it in the least, Jean’s opinion had come to have a certain weight with Robert Grant Burns. “What’s wrong with that?” Burns, having sat up until two o’clock to finish that particular scenario to his liking, plainly resented the expression on Jean’s face while she read it.
“Oh, nothing, only I’m getting awfully sick of these kidnap-and-rescue, and kiss-in-the-last-scene pictures, and Wild West stuff without a real Western man in the whole thing. I’d like to do something real for a change.”
Robert Grant Burns grunted and reached for his slighted brain-child. “What you want? Mother on, knitting. Girl washing dishes. Lover arrives; they sit on front steps and spoon. Become engaged. Lover hitches up team, girl climbs into wagon, they drive to town. Ten scenes of driving to town. Lover gets out, ties team in front of courthouse. Goes in and gets license. Three scenes of license business. Goes out. Two scenes of driving to minister and hitching team to gate. One scene of getting to door. One scene getting inside the house. One scene preacher calling his wife and hired girl. One scene ‘Do you take this woman,’ one scene ‘I do.’ Fifteen scenes getting team untied and driving back to ranch. That’s about as much pep as there is in real life in the far West, these days. Something like that would suit you, maybe. It don’t suit the people who pay good nickels and dimes to get a thrill, though.”
“Neither does this sort of junk, if they’ve got any sense. Think of paying nickel after nickel to see Lee Milligan rush to the girl’s door, knock, learn the fatal news, stagger back and clap his hand to his brow and say ‘Great Heaven! GONE!’” Jean, stirred to combat by the sarcasm of Robert Grant Burns, did the stagger and the hand-to-brow and great-heaven scene with a realism that made Pete Lowry turn his back suddenly. “They’ve seen Gil abduct me or Muriel seven times in a perfectly impossible manner, and they—oh, why don’t you give them something REAL? Things that are thrilling and dangerous and terrible do happen out here, Mr. Burns. Real adventures and real tragedies—” She stopped, and Burns turned his eyes involuntarily toward the kitchen. He had heard all about the history of the Lazy A, though he had been very careful to hide the fact that he had heard it. Jean’s glance, following that of her director, was a revealing one. She bit her lip; and in a moment she went on, with her chin held a shade higher and her pride revolting against subterfuge.
“I didn’t mean that,” she said quietly. “But—well, up to a certain point, I don’t mind if you put in real things, if it will be good picture-stuff. You’re featuring me, anyway, it seems. Listen.” Jean’s face changed. Her eyes took that farseeing look of the dreamer. She was looking full at Burns, but he knew that she did not see him at all. She was looking at a mental picture of her own conjuring, he judged. He stood still and waited curiously, wondering, to use his manner of speech, what the girl was goi
ng to spring now.
“Listen: Instead of all this impossible piffle, let’s start a real story. I—I’ve—”
“What kind of a real story?” The tone of Robert Grant Burns was carefully non-committal, but his eyes betrayed his eagerness. The girl did have some real ideas, sometimes! And Robert Grant Burns was not the one to refuse a real idea because it did not come from his own brain.
“Well,” Jean flushed with an adorable shyness at the apparent egotism of her idea, “since you seem to want me for the central figure in everything, suppose we start a story like this: Suppose I am left here at the Lazy A with my mother to take care of and a ranch and a lot of cattle; and suppose it’s a hard proposition, because there’s really a gang of rustlers that have been running off stock and never getting caught, and they have a grudge against my family and grab our cattle every chance they get. Suppose—suppose they killed my brother when he was about to round them up, and they want to drive me and my mother out of the country. Scare us out, you know. Well,—” she hesitated and glanced diffidently at the boys who had edged up to listen,—“that would leave room for all kinds of feature stuff. Say that I have just one or two boys that I can depend on, boys that I know are loyal. With an outfit the size of ours, that keeps me in the saddle every day and all day; and I would have some narrow escapes, I reckon. You’ve got your rustlers all made to order,—only I’d make them up differently, if I were doing it. Have them look real, you know, instead of stagey.” (Whereat Robert Grant Burns winced.) “Lee could be one of my loyal cowboys; you’d want some dramatic acting, I reckon, and he could do that. But I’d want one puncher who can ride and shoot and handle a rope. For that, to help me do the real work in the picture, I want Lite Avery. There are things I can do that you have never had me do, for the simple reason that you don’t know the life well enough ever to think of them. Real stunts, not these made-to-order, shoot-the-villain-and-run-to-the-arms-of-the-hero stuff. I’d have to have Lite Avery; I wouldn’t start without him.”
“Well, go on.” Robert Grant Burns still tried to sound non-committal, but he was plainly eager to hear all that she had to say.
“Well, that’s the idea. They’re trying to drive us out of the country, without really hurting me. And I’ve got my mind set on staying. Not only that, but I believe they killed my brother, and I’m going to hunt them down and break up their gang or die in the attempt. There’s your plot. It needn’t be overdone in the least, to have thrills enough. And there would be all kinds of chance for real range-stuff, like the handling of cattle and all that.
“We can use this ranch just as it is, and have the outlaws down next the river. I’m glad you haven’t taken any scenes that show the ranch as a whole. You’ve stuck to your close-up, great-heaven scenes so much,” she went on with merciless frankness, “that you’ve really not cheapened the place by showing more than a little bit at a time.
“You might start by making Lee up for my brother, and kill him in the first reel; show the outlaws when they shoot him and run off with a bunch of stock they’re after. Lite can find him and bring him home. Lite would know just how to do that sort of thing, and make people see it’s real stuff. I believe he’d show he was a real cow-puncher, even to the people who never saw one. There’s an awful lot of difference between the real thing and your actors.” She was so perfectly sincere and so matter-of-fact that the men she criticised could do no more than grin.
“You might, for the sake of complications, put a traitor and spy on the ranch. Oh, I tell you! Have Hepsibah be the mother of one of the outlaws. She wouldn’t need to do any acting; you could show her sneaking out in the dark to meet her son and tell him what she has overheard. And show her listening, perhaps, through the crack in a door. Mrs. Gay would have to be the mother. Gil says that Hepsibah has the figure of a comedy cook and what he calls a character face. I believe we could manage her all right, for what little she would have to do, don’t you?”
Jean having poured out her inspiration with a fluency born of her first enthusiasm, began to feel that she had been somewhat presumptuous in thus offering advice wholesale to the highest paid director of the Great Western Film Company. She blushed and laughed a little, and shrugged her shoulders.
“That’s just a suggestion,” she said with forced lightness. “I’m subject to attacks of acute imagination, sometimes. Don’t mind me, Mr. Burns. Your scenario is a very nice scenario, I’m sure. Do you want me to be a braid-down-the-back girl in this? Or a curls-around-the-face girl?”
Robert Grant Burns stood absent-mindedly tapping his left palm with the folded scenario which Jean had just damned by calling it a very nice scenario. Nice was not the adjective one would apply to it in sincere admiration. Robert Grant Burns himself had mentally called it a hummer. He did not reply to Jean’s tentative apology for her own plot-idea. He was thinking about the idea itself.
Robert Grant Burns was not what one would call petty. He would not, for instance, stick to his own story if he considered that Jean’s was a better one. And, after all, Jean was now his leading woman, and it is not unusual for a leading woman to manufacture her own plots, especially when she is being featured by her company. There was no question of hurt pride to be debated within the mind of him, therefore. He was just weighing the idea itself for what it was worth.
“Seems to me your plot-idea isn’t so much tamer than mine, after all.” He tested her shrewdly after a prolonged pause. “You’ve got a killing in the first five hundred feet, and outlaws and rustling—”
“Oh, but don’t you see, it isn’t the skeleton that makes the difference; it’s the kind of meat you put on the bones! Paradise Lost would be a howling melodrama, if some of you picture-people tried to make it. You’d take this plot of mine and make it just like these pictures I’ve been working in, Mr. Burns: Exciting and all that, but not the real West after all; spectacular without being probable. What I mean,—I can’t explain it to you, I’m afraid; but I have it in my head.” She looked at him with that lightening of the eyes which was not a smile, really, but rather the amusement which might grow into laughter later on.
“You’d better fine me for insubordination,” she drawled whimsically, “and tell me whether it’s to be braids or curls, so I can go and make up.” At that moment she saw Gil Huntley beckoning to her with a frantic kind of furtiveness that was a fair mixture of pinched-together eyebrows and slight jerkings of the head, and a guarded movement of his hand that hung at his side. Gil, she thought, was trying to draw her away before she went too far with her trouble-inviting freedom of speech. She laughed lazily.
“Braids or curls?” she insisted. “And please, sir, I won’t do so no more, honest.”
Robert Grant Burns looked at her from under his eyebrows and made a sound between his grunt of indignation and his chuckle of amusement. “Sure you won’t?” he queried shortly. “Stay the way you are, if you want to; chances are you won’t go to work right away, anyhow.”
Jean flashed him a glance of inquiry. Did that mean that she had at last gone beyond the limit? Was Robert Grant Burns going to FIRE her? She looked at Gil, who was sauntering off with the perfectly apparent expectation that she would follow him; and Mrs. Gay, who was regarding her with a certain melancholy conviction that Jean’s time as leading woman was short indeed. She pursed her lips with a rueful resignation, and followed Gil to the spring behind the house.
“Say, you mustn’t hand out things like that, Jean!” he protested, when they were quite out of sight and hearing of the others. “Let me give you a tip, girl. If you’ve got any photo-play ideas that are worth talking about, don’t go spreading them out like that for Bobby to pick and choose!”
“Pick to pieces, you mean,” Jean corrected.
“You’re going to tell me I’m in bad. But I can’t help it; he’s putting on some awfully stagey plots, and they cost just as much to produce as—”
“Listen here. You’ve got me wrong. That plot of yours could be worked up into a dandy series; the
idea of a story running through a lot of pictures is great. What I mean is, it’s worth something. You don’t have to give stuff like that away, make him a present of it, you know. I just want to put you wise. If you’ve got anything that’s worth using, make ’em pay for it. Put ’er into scenario form and sell it to ’em. You’re in this game to make money, so why overlook a bet like that?”
“Oh, Gil! Could I?”
“Sure, you could! No reason why you shouldn’t, if you can deliver the goods. Burns has been writing his own plays to fit his company; but aside from the features you’ve been putting into it, it’s old stuff. He’s a darned good director, and all that, but he hasn’t got the knack of building real stories. You see what I mean. If you have, why—”
“I wonder,” said Jean with a sudden small doubt of her literary talents, “if I have!”
“Sure, you have!” Gil’s faith in Jean was of the kind that scorns proof. “You see, you’ve got the dope on the West, and he knows it. Why, I’ve been watching how he takes the cue from you right along for his features. Ever since you told Lee Milligan how to lay a saddle on the ground, Burns has been getting tips; and half the time you didn’t even know you were giving them. Get into this game right, Jean. Make ’em pay for that kind of thing.”
Jean regarded him thoughtfully, tempted to yield. “Mrs. Gay says a hundred dollars a week—”