The Phantom Herd

by B. M. Bower

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE STORM

  _The Phantom Herd_, as the days slipped nearer and nearer to April, mightalmost have been christened _The Forlorn Hope_. On the twenty-first thesun was so hot that Luck rode in his shirt sleeves to Albuquerque,stubbornly intending to order more "positive" for his prints in the finalwork of putting his Big Picture into marketable form. He did not have theslightest idea of where the money to pay for the stuff was coming from,but he sent the letter ordering the stock sent C.O.D. He was playing forbig results, and he had no intention of being balked at the last minutebecause of his timidity in assuming an ultimate success which wasbeginning to look extremely doubtful.

  On the twenty-second, a lark flew impudently past his head and perchedupon a bush near by and sang straight at him. As a general thing Luckloved to hear bird songs when he rode abroad on a fine morning; but hecame very near taking a shot at that particular lark, as if it werepersonally responsible for the sunny days that had brought it outscouting ahead of its kind.

  On the twenty-third the sky was a brassy blue, and Applehead won Luck'sfierce enmity by remarking that he "calc'lated he'd better get his gardenin." Luck went away off somewhere on the snuffy little bay, that day, anddid not return until after dark.

  On the twenty-fourth he took the boys away back on the mesa, where themountains shoulder the plain, and scattered them on a wide circle,rounding up the cattle that had been permitted to drift where they wouldin their famished search for the scant grass-growth. Bill Holmes and thecamera followed him in the buckboard with the lunch, and Luck, when theboys had met with their gleanings, "shot" two or three short scenes ofpoor cows and their early calves, which would go to help along his range"atmosphere." To the Happy Family it seemed a waste of horseflesh to comba twenty-mile radius of mesa to get a cow and calf which might have beenduplicated within a mile of the ranch. The Happy Family knew that Luckwas wading chin deep in the slough of despond, and they decided that hekept them riding all day just for pure cussedness.

  I suppose they thought that his orders to range-herd the cattle they hadgathered came from the same mood, but they did not seem to mind. Theydid whatever he told them to do, and they did it cheerfully,--which, inthe circumstances, is saying a good deal for the Happy Family. So withthe sun warm as early May, and the new grass showing tiny greenblade-tips in the sheltered places, they began range-herding twothousand head of cattle that needed all the territory they could coverfor their feeding grounds.

  The twenty-fifth day of March brought no faintest promise of anythingthat looked like snow. Applehead sharpened his hoe and went pecking atthe soil around the roots of his grape-vine arbor, thereby irritatingLuck to the point of distraction. He had reached a nervous tension wherehe could not eat, and he could not sleep, and life looked a nightmare ofhard work and disappointments, of hopes luring deceitfully only to crushone at the moment of fulfilment.

  It was because he could not sleep, but spent the nights stretched uponhis side with his wide-open eyes boring into vacancy and a drab future,that he heard the wind whine over the ridgepole of the squat bunk-houseand knew that it had risen from a dead calm since bedtime. The languor ofnervous exhaustion was pulling his eyelids down over his tired eyes, andhe knew that it must be nearly morning; for sleep never came to him nowuntil after Applehead's brown rooster had crowed for two o'clock.

  He closed his eyes and dreamed that he was "shooting" blizzard sceneswith the snow to his armpits. He was chilled to the middle of his bones,and his hand went down unconsciously and groped for the blankets he hadpushed off in his restlessness. In his sleep he was yelling to theCattlemen's Convention to wait,--not to adjourn yet, because he hadsomething to show them.

  "Well, show'em, dang it, an' shut up!" muttered Applehead crossly, andturned over on his good ear so that he could sleep undisturbed.

  Luck, half awakened by the movement, curled up with his knees close tohis chin and went on with his dream. With the wind still mooinglonesomely around the corners of the house, he slept more soundly than hehad slept for weeks, impelled, I suppose, by a subconscious easement fromhis greatest anxiety.

  A slow tap-tap-tapping on the closed door near his head woke him justbefore dawn. The lightest sleeper of them all, Luck lifted his head witha start, and opened his sleep-blurred eyes upon blackness. He called out,and it was the voice of Annie-Many-Ponies that answered.

  "Wagalexa Conka! You come quick. Plenty snow come. You be awful gladwhen you see. Soon day comes. You hurry. I make plenty breakfast,Wagalexa Conka."

  As a soldier springs from sleep when calls the bugle, Luck jumped outinto the icy darkness of the room. With one jerk he had the door open andstood glorying in the wild gust of snow that broke over him like a wave.In his bare feet he stood there, and felt the snow beat in his face, andsaid never a word, since big emotions never quite reached the surface ofLuck's manner.

  "Day come quick, Wagalexa Conka!" The voice of Annie-Many-Ponies urgedhim from without, like the voice of Opportunity calling from the storm.

  "All right. You run now and have breakfast ready. We come quick." He heldthe door open another half minute, and he heard Annie-Many-Ponies laughas she fought her way back to the house through the blinding blizzard. Hesaw a faint glow through the snow-whirl when she opened the kitchen door,and he shut out the storm with a certain vague reluctance, as though hehalf feared it might somehow escape into a warm, sunny morning and proveitself no more than a maddeningly vivid dream.

  "Hey! Wake up!" he shouted while he groped for a match and the lamp."Roll into your sourdoughs, you sons-uh-guns--"

  "Say, Applehead," came a plaintive voice from Pink's hunk, "makeLuck turn over on the other side, can't yuh? Darn a man that talksin his sleep!"

  "By cripes, Luck's got to sleep in the hay loft--er I will," Big Medicinegrowled, making the boards of his bunk squeak with the flop of hisdisturbed body.

  Then Luck found the lamp and struck a match, and it was seen that he wasvery wide awake, and that his face had the look of a man intent uponaccomplishment.

  The Native Son sat up in one of the top bunks and looked down at Luckwith a queer solemnity in his eyes. "What is this, _amigo_?" he askedwith a stifled yawn. "Another one of your Big Minutes?"

  "_Quien sabe_?" Luck retorted, reaching for his clothes as his smallebullition subsided to a misleading composure. "Storm's here at last, andwe'll have to be moving. Roll out and saddle your ridge-runners; Annie'sgot breakfast all ready for us."

  "Aw, gwan!" grumbled Happy Jack from sheer force of habit, and made hasteto hit the floor with his feet before Luck replied to that apparent doubtof his authority.

  "Dress warm as you can, boys," Luck advised curtly, lacing his own heavybuckskin moccasins over thick German socks, which formed his cold-weatherfootgear. "She's worse than that other one, if anything."

  "Mamma!" Weary murmured, in a tone of thanksgiving. "She didn't come anytoo soon, did she?"

  Luck did not reply. He pulled his hat down low over his forehead, openedthe door and went out, and it was as though the wind and snow anddarkness swallowed him bodily. The horses must first be fed, and hefought his way to the stables, where Applehead's precious hay wasdwindling rapidly under Luck's system of keeping mounts and a four-horseteam up and ready for just such an emergency. He labored through thedarkness to the stable door, lighted the lantern which hung just inside,and went into the first stall. The manger was full, and the feed-boxstill moist from the lapping tongue of the gray horse that stood theremunching industriously. Annie-Many-Ponies had evidently fed the horsesbefore she called Luck, and he felt a warm glow of gratitude for herthoughtfulness.

  He stopped at the bunk-house to tell the boys that they had nothing to dobut eat breakfast before they saddled, and found them putting onovercoats and gloves and wrangling over the probable location of the herdthat would have drifted in the night. So they ploughed in a stragglinggroup to the house, where Annie-Many-Ponies was already pouring thecoffee when they trooped in.

  D
ay was just breaking when they rode out into the full force of thebelated storm and up on the mesa where they had left the cattle scatteredand feeding more or less contentedly at sundown. They had not gone a mileuntil their bodies began to shrink under the unaccustomed cold. BillHolmes, town-bred and awkward in the open, thankfully resigned to theIndian girl the dignity of driving the mountain wagon with its four-horseteam, and huddled under blankets, while Annie-Many-Ponies piloted themcalmly straight across country in the wake of the riders whom her belovedWagalexa Conka was leading on the snuffy bay. Save for the difference inhis clothes, Annie-Many-Ponies thought that he much resembled that greatlittle war-chief of the white people who rode ahead of his column in apicture hanging on the wall of the mission school. Napoleon was the greatlittle war-chief's name, and her heart swelled with pride as she drovesteadily through the storm and thought what a great war-chief her brotherWagalexa Conka might have made, were these but the days of much fighting.

  There was to be no trouble with "static" this time, if Luck could helpit. To be doubly safe from blurred film, he had brought his ray filteralong, for the flakes of snow were large and falling fast. He had chosena different location, because of the direction of the wind and thedifficulty the boys would have had in driving the cattle back in the faceof it to the side hill where he had first taken the scenes of thedrifting herd.

  To-day he "shot" them first as they were filing reluctantly out through anarrow pass which was supposed to be the entrance to the box canyon wherethe two rustlers, Andy and Miguel, had kept them hidden away.Artistically speaking, the cattle were in perfect condition for such ascene, every rib showing as they trooped past the clicking cameracleverly concealed in a clump of bushes; hip bones standing up, lean legsshambling slowly through the snow that was already a foot deep. Cattlehidden for days and days in a box canyon would not come out fat and sleekand stepping briskly, and Luck was well pleased with the realism of hispicture, even while he pitied the poor beasts.

  Later he took the drifting of the herd, and he knew in his heart that thescenes were better than those he had lost. He took tragic scenes of theNative Son in his struggle to keep up and to keep going. He took him ashe fell and lay prone in the snow beside his fallen horse while theblizzard whooped over him, and the snow fell upon his still face. In hiszeal he nearly froze the Native Son, who must lie there during two orthree "cut-back" scenes, and while Andy was coming up in search of him.When Andy lifted him and found him actually limp in his arms, the anxietywhich a "close-up" revealed in his face was not all art. However, he didnot say anything until Luck's voracious scene-appetite had been at leastpartially satisfied.

  "By gracious, I believe the son-of-a-gun is about froze," he snapped outthen; Luck grinned mirthlessly and called to Annie for the preciousthermos bottle, and poured a cup of strong black coffee, added a generousdash of the apricot brandy which he spoke of familiarly as his"cure-all," and had the Native Son very much alive and tramping around torestore the circulation to his chilled limbs before Bill Holmes hadcarried the camera to the location of the next scene.

  "By rights I should have left you the way you were till I got this lastdeath scene where Andy buries you under the rock ledge so he can get homealive himself," Luck told Miguel heartlessly, when they were ready forwork again. "You were in proper condition, brother. But I'm human. Soyou'll have to do a little more acting, from now on."

  With his mats placed with careful precision, he took his dissolve"vision stuff" of the blizzard and the death of Miguel,--scenes whichwere to torment the conscience of Andy the rustler into full repentanceand confession to his father. While the boys huddled around Annie's campfire and guzzled hot coffee and ate chilled sandwiches, Luck took somefine scenes of the phantom herd marching eerily along the skyline of alittle slope.

  He "shot" every effective blizzard scene he had dreamed of sodespairingly when the weather was fine. Some scenes of especialimportance to his picture he took twice, so as to have the"choice-of-action" so much prized by producers. This, you must know, wasa luxury in which Luck had not often permitted himself to indulge. Withraw negative at nearly four cents a foot, he had made it a point to shootonly such scenes as gave every promise of being exactly what he wanted.But with this precious blizzard that numbed his fingers mostrealistically while he worked, but never once worried him for fear thesun was going to shine before he had finished, he was as lavish ofnegative as though he had a million-dollar corporation at his back.

  That evening, when they were luxuriating before the fireplace heaped withdry wood which the flames were licking greedily, Luck became, for thefirst time in months, the old Luck Lindsay who had fascinated them at theFlying U. He told them stories of his days with the "Bill show," andcalled upon the giggling Annie-Many-Ponies for proof of their truth;whereat Annie-Many-Ponies would nod her head vigorously and declare thatit was "No lie. I see him plenty times do them thing. I know." Hedisputed energetically with Big Medicine over the hardships of the day'swork; and as a demonstration of the fact that he was perfectly able to goout right then and shoot another seven hundred feet of film, he seizedupon the _tom-tom_ which Annie-Many-Ponies had made from a green calfhide and an old cheese box, and in his moccasins he danced the SiouxBuffalo Dance and several other dances in which Annie-Many-Ponies finallyjoined and teetered around in the circle which the Happy Familyenthusiastically widened for the performers.

  Work there was yet to do, and plenty of it. Even if the weather cameclear on the morrow as he desired, he must make every minute count, if hewould take his picture to the Cattlemen's Convention. Work there was, andproblems there were to be solved. But he had his big blizzard stuff, andhe had his scenes of the phantom herd. So for an hour or two, on thisevening of triumph, Luck Lindsay threw care into a far corner, and dancedand sang as the Happy Family had never known he could do.

  "Here, Annie, take the drum; it's 'call the dog and put out the fire andall go home.' If my luck stays with me, and the sun shines to-morrow,we'll take these interiors of the double-exposure stuff. And then we'llbe eating on the run and sleeping as we ride, till that picture pops outon the screen for the old cattlemen to see. Good night, folks; I'm goingto sleep to-night!"

  He went out whistling like a schoolboy going fishing. For luck was withhim once more, and his _Phantom Herd_ was almost a reality as a picture.