"Day's work, boys!" called Luck through his little megaphone at three o'clock one day, and doubled up his working script that was much crumpled and scribbled with hasty pencil marks. "No use spoiling good film," he remarked to his assistant, glancing up at the sweeping fog bank, off to the west. "By the time we rehearse the next scene, she'll be too dark to shoot. You go and order these cavalry costumes, Beckitt; and, say! You tell them down there that if they're shy on the number, they better set down and make enough, because they won't see a cent of our money if there's so much as a canteen lacking. And tell 'em to send army guns. That last assortment of junk they sent out was pathetic. I want equipment for fifty U.S. Cavalry, time of the early eighties. That don't mean forty-nine--get me? You're inclined to let those fellows have it their own way too much. I want this cavalry--"
"There ain't any close-ups of cavalry, are there?" Beckitt demurred. "I told them last time I thought those guns would do, because I knew the detail wouldn't--"
"Listen." Luck's tone was deliberately tolerant. "That's maybe the reason you've been searching your soul for all along--the reason why you can't get past the assistant-director stage. I want those fifty cavalrymen equipped! Do you get that?" While his eyes held Beckitt uncomfortably with their stern steadfastness, Luck thrust the script into his coat pocket that had a permanent, motion-picture-director sag to it. "If I meant that any old gun would do, I'd give my orders that way. Now, remember, there isn't going to be any waiting around while you go back and argue, nor any makeshifts, nor anything but fifty cavalrymen fully equipped. Here's the list complete for to-morrow's order. You see that it's filled!"
Beckitt took the list which he should have made himself, since that was what he was paid for doing, and went off in the sulks and the company machine. Luck pulled a solacing cigar from an inner pocket and licked down the roughened outer leaves, and scowled thoughtfully across the studio yard. The camera man was figuring up footage or something, and his assistant was hurrying to get the tripod folded and put away. There was a new briskness in the movements of every one save Luck himself, after he spoke that last sentence through the megaphone.
The Happy Family--or that part of it which had thrown away pitchforks and taken to the pictures--came clanking across the stage toward Luck. You would never have known the Happy Family, unless it were the Native Son who wore his usual regalia in exaggerated form. The Happy Family had wide, flapping chaps that made them drag their feet they were so heavy and so long, and great Mexican spurs whose rowels dug tiny trenches in the ground when they walked. They wore the biggest Stetsons that famous hat brand ever was stamped upon. They had huge bandanas draped picturesquely over their chests, and their sleeves were rolled to the elbows and their eyes rimmed with deep pencil shadings. At their hips swung six-shooters of violent pattern and portent. Around their middles sagged belts filled with blank cartridges. A sack of tobacco was making the rounds as they came on, and Luck watched them through speculatively narrowed lids.
"Say, by cripes, that there saloon is the driest poison-palace I ever surged out of with two guns spittin' death and dumnation!" Big Medicine complained, coming up with the plain intention of lighting his cigarette from Luck's cigar. "How'd we stack up this time, boss? Bein' soused on cold tea, I couldn't rightly pass judgment. How many was it I murdered in cold blood, in that there scene where I laid 'em out with black powder? Four, or five? Pink, here, claims I killed him twicet, whereas he oughta be left alive enough to jump on his horse and ride three hundred and fifty miles to fall dead in his best girl's arms. He claims he made that ride day before yesterday, and done some pitiful weaving around in the saddle, out there in the hills, and that he died in that blond lady's arms first thing this morning, and I hadn't no right to kill him twicet afterwards in the saloon fight. Now I leave it to you, boss. How about this here killin' Pink off every oncet in a while?"
Deep in his throat Luck chuckled. "Well, Pink certainly does die pathetic," he soothed the perturbed murderer, dropping his professional brusqueness for frank comradeship. "He's about the best little close-up dier I ever worked with. He can get a sob anytime he rolls his eyes and gasps and falls backward." He clapped his hand down on Pink's shoulder and gave it a little shake.
"That's all right," drawled the Native Son, taking off his sombrero to deepen the crease and the dents, because three girls were coming across the lot. "But I've got a complaint of my own to make. When you holler for Bud to start the rough stuff, he just goes powder crazy. He shot me up four times in that scene! Twice he held the gun so close my scalp's all powder-marked, and by rights he should have blowed the top of my head plumb into the street. He gets so taken up with this slaughter-house business that he'll wind up by shooting himself a few times if you don't watch him."
"One thing," Weary put in mildly, "I want to speak about, Luck. We need more blood for those murders. I didn't have half enough for all the mortal wounds Bud gave me. By rights that saloon should be plumb reeking with gore when we're all killed off--the way Bud flies at it with those two six-shooters. No bullets hit the walls anywhere, so it stands to reason they all land in a soft spot on our persons. I needed a large bucket of blood--and I had about a half teacupful." He grinned. "Mamma! That was sure some slaughter, though!"
"Where's Tracy Gray Joyce?" Luck inquired irrelevantly, with a hasty glance around them. "To-morrow, he'll have to come into that same slaughter pen and seize the murderer and subdue him by the steely glint of his eye and by his unflinching demeanor." He pulled the corners of his mouth down expressively. "That's the way the scenario reads," he added defensively.
"Well, say, by cripes, he better amble down to the city and buy him some more glint!" Big Medicine bawled, and laughed afterwards with his big haw-haw-haw. "And I'll gamble there ain't enough unflinchin' demeanor on the Coast to put that boy through the scene. Honest-to-gran'-ma, Luck, that there Tracy Gray Joyce gits pale, and his Adam's apple pumps up and down when I come up and smile at him! What color do yuh reckon he'll turn to when he stands up to me right after me slaying all these innocent boys--and me a-foamin' at the mouth and gloatin' over the foul deed I've just did? Say? How's he going to keep that there Adam's apple from shootin' clean up through his hair, and his knees from wobblin'? How--"
"He won't," said Luck suddenly, with a brightening of his eyes. "He won't. I hope they do wobble. You go ahead, Bud, and foam at the mouth. You--you look at Tracy Gray Joyce. Not in the rehearsing, understand; leave out the foam and the gloating till we turn the camera on the scene. Sabe? On the quiet, boys."
"Sure," came the guarded chorus. It was remarkable what a complete understanding there was between Luck and the Happy Family. It was that complete understanding which had kept Luck's spirits up during his unloved task of producing Bently Brown stuff in film.
"Well, say!" Big Medicine leaned close and throttled his voice down to a hoarse whisper. "What kinda hee-ro will your Tracy Gray Joyce look like, when I start up foamin' and gloatin' at him?"
Luck smiled. "That," he said calmly, "is for the camera to find out." He was going to say something more on the subject, but some one called to him anxiously from over toward the office. So he told them adios hurriedly and went his busy way, and left the Happy Family discussing him gravely among themselves.
The Happy Family were so interested in this new work that they were ready to see the bright side even of these weird performances which purported to be Western drama. If you did not take it seriously, all this violence of dress and behavior was fun. The Happy Family was slipping into a rivalry of violence; and the strange part of it was that Luck Lindsay, stickler for realism, self-confessed enthusiast on the uplifting of motion pictures to a fine art, permitted their violence,--which was not as the violence of other, better trained Western actors. The Happy Family, after their first self-conscious tendency to duck behind something or somebody, had come to forget the merciless, recording eye of the camera. They had come to look upon their work as a game, played for the amusement of Luck Lindsay, who watched them always, and for the open ridicule of Bently Brown, writer of these tales of blood and heroics.
And Luck not only permitted but encouraged them in this exaggeration,--to the amazement of the camera man who had turned the crank on more Western dramas than he could remember. Scenes of violence--such as the saloon row in which Big Medicine had forgotten that Pink was to be left alive, and so had killed him twice--made the camera man and the assistant laugh when they should have shuddered; and to wonder why Luck Lindsay, wholly biased though he was in favor of the Happy Family, did not seem to realize that they were not getting the right punch into the pictures.
Luck was not behaving at all in his usual manner with his company. Evenings, instead of holding himself aloof from his subordinates, he would head straight for the furnished bungalow which the Flying U boys had taken possession of, with Rosemary Green to give the home atmosphere which saved the place from becoming a mere bunk-house de luxe. If he could possibly manage it, Luck would reach headquarters in time for dinner--the Happy Family blandly called it supper, of course--and would proceed to forget the day's irritations while he ate what he ambiguously called "real cookin'."
There was a fireplace in that bungalow, and a fairly large living-room surrounding the fireplace. The Happy Family extravagantly indulged themselves in wood, even at the unbelievable price they must pay for it; and after supper they would light the fire and hunt up chairs enough, and roll cigarettes, and talk themselves quite away from the present and into the past of glowing memory.
The horses they rode--before that fireplace--would have made any Frontier Day celebration famous enough to be mentioned in the next encyclopedia published. The herds they took through hard winters and summer droughts would have made them millionaires all, if they could only have turned them into flesh-and-blood animals. They talked of blizzards and of high water and of short grass and of thunderstorms. They added little touches to the big range picture Luck had planned to make. Starting off suddenly in this wise: "Say, Luck, why don't you have--?" and the fires of enthusiasm would flare again in Luck's eyes, and the talk would grow eager.
But--and here was the key to the remarkable interpretation which Luck permitted the Happy Family to give the Bently Brown stories--some time before the evening was too old, Luck would swing the talk around to the work they were doing. He would pull a Bently Brown scenario from his pocket and read, with much sarcastic comment, the scenes they were later to enact. He would incite the Happy Family to poking fun at such lurid performances as Bently Brown described in all seriousness and in detail. He would encourage comment and argument and the play of their caustic imaginations upon the action of the story. He would gradually make them see the whole thing in the light of a huge joke; he would, without saying much himself, bring the Happy Family into the mood of wanting to make Bently Brown appear ridiculous to all beholders.
Is it any wonder, then, if the camera man and the assistants should exchange puzzled glances when Luck put the Happy Family through their scenes? Exits and entrances, the essential details of the action, Luck directed painstakingly, as always he had done. Why, then, said camera man to assistants, should he let those fellows go in and ball up the dramatic business and turn whole scenes into farce with their foolery? And why had he chosen Tracy Gray Joyce as leading man? And that eye-rolling, limp sentimentalist, Lenore Honiwell, as his leading woman? Luck was known to despise these two, personally and professionally. They could not, to save their lives, get through a dramatic scene together without giving the observers a sickish feeling. To see Tracy Gray Joyce lay his hand upon the left side of his cravat and cast his eyes upward always made Luck shiver; yet Tracy Gray Joyce would he have for leading man, and none other. To see Lenore Honiwell throw back her head, close her eyes, and heave one of those terrific motion-picture sighs always made the camera man snort; yet Luck, who before had considered her scarcely worth a civil bow when he met her, had actually coaxed her away from a director who really admired her style of acting.
And when Luck, who had always gone about his work impervious to curious onlookers, suddenly changed his method and ordered all interior sets screened in, and all bystanders away from the immediate vicinity of his exterior scenes, the Acme people began to call him "swell-headed"--when they did not call him worse. Even his excuse that he was working with boys new to the business and did not want them rattled failed to satisfy most of them.
The Happy Family, in the tiny, bare dressing rooms which they called box-stalls in merciless candor, were smearing their faces liberally with cold cream and still arguing among themselves over the doubtful blessing of owning as many lives as a cat, and bewailing the bruises they had received while sacrificing a few of their lives to the blood-lust of Big Medicine and Pink, the two official, Bently-Brown bad men. Outside their two connecting "stalls" a fine drizzle was making the studio yard an empty place of churchyard gloom and incidentally justifying Luck in quitting so early. Big Medicine was swabbing paint from his eyebrows and bellowing his opinion of a man that will keep a-comin', by cripes, after he's shot the third time at close range, and then kick because he takes so much killing off. This was aimed at the Native Son, who had evidently died hard, and who meant to retaliate as soon as he got that dab of paint out of his eye. But the door opened violently against his person and startled him into forgetting his next observation.
This was Luck, and he had the look of a man who owns a guilty secret, and is ready to be rather proud of his guilt,--providing society consents to wink at it with him. He was not smiling, exactly; he had a wicked kind of twinkle in his eyes.
"Hurry up, boys! My Lord, how you fellows do primp and jangle in here! They're going to run our first picture, The Soul of Littlefoot Law. Don't you fel--"
"The which?" Big Medicine whirled upon him, rubbing his left eye into a terrifying, bloodshot condition while he glared with the other.
"The Soul of Littlefoot Law," Luck repeated distinctly with a perfect neutrality of manner.
"'S that what you call all that ridin' and shootin' we done, that you said was by moonlight?" Pink inquired pugnaciously--for a young man who had died the death four different times that day.
"That's what it's called," Luck averred with firmness.
"Aw--where does Soul of Littlefoot Law come in at?" Happy Jack scoffed.
"It doesn't, so far as I know."
"Aw, there ain't no sense in such a name as that. Is that where I got shot off'n my horse, and Bud, here, done his best to run over me?"
"That's the one. My Lord, boys, how long does it take you fellows to get your make-up off? They'll have the film run and passed and released and out on the five-cent circuit on its fifteenth round before you--" Luck, director though he was, found it wise to pass out quickly and hold the door shut behind him for a minute. "Honest, boys, you want to hurry," he called through the closed door. He waited until the sounds within indicated that they were hurrying quite violently, and then he went his way; and he still had the look in his eyes of one who bears in his soul a secret guilt of which he is inclined to be proud.
When the Acme people gathered resignedly in the private projection room, however, Luck's wicked little twinkle had turned a shade anxious. He excused himself from the chair between Martinson and Mollie Ryan, the stenographer, and went over to confer with the Happy Family and the dried little man who kept clannishly together as usual, and he forgot to return to his place.
The Acme people, personally and individually, were sick and tired of all motion pictures that did not portray with vividness the beauty or the talents of themselves, or the faults of their acquaintances. No Acme people, save Lenore Honiwell and Tracy Gray Joyce and a phlegmatic character woman, were in this picture at all. The camera man who took it did not think highly of it and considered the wonderful photography as good as wasted, and he had said as much--and more--to his intimates. Beckitt, Luck's assistant, had privately announced it as the rottenest piece of cheese he had ever seen under a Wild-West label, and disclaimed all responsibility. They of the cutting and trimming clan had not said anything at all. Martinson, having heard the rumors, felt that they confirmed his own suspicion that Luck had made a big blunder in bringing those cowboys into the company. They were not actors. They did not pretend to be actors.
You will see that it was a critical audience indeed that gathered there in the projection room that rainy afternoon to see the trial run of _The Soul of the Littlefoot Law_. It would take a good deal to win any approbation from that bunch.
And then they were looking at the first scene, which Was a night in Whoopalong, the fake town over there beyond the big stage. The Happy Family, all disguised as cowboys, came surging out of the darkness. H-m-m. That was the bunch that Luck Lindsay had done so much bragging about, and called "real boys," was it? silently commented the audience. No different from any other cowboys, as far as any one could see.
True, they used about half the usual amount of film footage in getting to foreground; probably underspeeded the camera,--an old, old trick which has helped to put the dash and ginger into many a poor horseman's act.
But the "XY cowboys" certainly surged up to foreground, and it was seen that they rode with reins in their teeth, and that each and every man fired two huge six-shooters straight up at the moon every time their horses hit the ground with forefeet. The Happy Family leaned forward and craned around the heads of those in front that they might see all of it. Luck had told them before making this scene to "eat 'em alive," and the Happy Family had very nearly done so. Andy Green nudged his wife, Rosemary, and whispered hurriedly that this was where the camera man had pulled up his tripod by the roots and beat it, thinking he was going to be run over; and that was why the scene was cut unexpectedly just where Andy set his horse on its haunches and posed, a heroic figure of a cowboy rampant, immediately before the lens.
Luck, glancing hurriedly to right and left, slid down and rested the nape of his neck on the back of his chair, slipped a fresh stick of gum between his teeth, hung his hat on his knee, and prepared to view his work with critical mind and impartial, and with his conscience like his body at ease. The thing had certainly started off with zip enough, since zip was what Mart claimed the Public demanded.
The next scene was a continuation of the one before,--the camera man having evidently recovered himself and gotten to work again. The Happy Family, still surging and still shooting two guns apiece at the pale moon, were shown entering the saloon door four abreast and with the rest crowding for place. Still there was zip; all kinds of zip. The Happy Family nudged and grinned in the dusk and were very much pleased with themselves as XY cowboys seeking mild entertainment in town.
Some one behind remarked upon the surging and the shooting, and Big Medicine turned his head quickly and sent a hoarse stage whisper in the general direction of the mumble.
"Ah-h, that there ain't anything! Luck never let us turn ourselves loose there a-tall. You wait, by cripes, till yuh see us where we git warmed up and strung out proper! You wait! Honest to gran'--" It was Luck's elbow that stopped him by the simple expedient of cutting off his wind. Big Medicine gave a grunt and said no more.
Thereafter, the Happy Family discovered that there was a certain continuity in the barbaric performances in which Luck had grinningly encouraged them to indulge themselves. They beheld themselves engaged in various questionable enterprises, and they laughed in naive enjoyment as certain bloodcurdling traits in their characters were depicted with startling vividness. Accented by make-up and magnified on the screen, the goggling, frog-like ugliness of Big Medicine became like unto ogres of childish memory; his smile was a thing to make one's back hair stand up with a cold, prickling sensation. Happy Jack stared at himself and his exaggerated awkwardness incredulously, with a sheepish grin of appreciation. The rest of them watched and missed no slightest gesture.
So they saw the plot of Bently Brown unfold, scene by scene; unfold in violence and malevolent intrigue and zip and much fighting. Also unfolded something of which Bently Brown had never dreamed; something which the audience, though greeting it with laughter, failed at first to recognize for what it was worth, because every one knew all about the Bently-Brown Western dramas, and every one believed that they were to be made after the usual recipe more elaborately stirred. So every one had been chortling through several scenes before the significance of their laughter occurred to them.
Comedy--that was it. Comedy, that had slipped in with cap and bells just when the door was flung open for black-robed Tragedy. But it was too late to stop laughing when they discovered the trick. They saw it now, in the very sub-titles which Luck had twisted impishly into sly humor that pointed to the laugh, in the deeds of blood that followed. They saw it in the goggling ferocity of Big Medicine; in the innocent-eyed, dimpled fiendishness of Pink; in the lank awkwardness of Happy Jack. They saw it in the sentimental mannerisms of Lenore Honiwell, whose sickish emotionalism slipped pat into the burlesque. They rocked in their seats at the heroics of Tracy Gray Joyce, who could never again be taken seriously, since Luck had tagged him mercilessly as an unconscious comedian.
Oh, yes, there was zip to the picture! But there was no explanation of the title. The Soul of Littlefoot Law remained as great a mystery when the picture was finished as it had been at the start. Littlefoot Law, by the way, was Pink. That much the audience discovered, and no more; for as to his soul, he did not seem to own one.
Luck, still hunched down so that his back hair rubbed against his chair back, was laughing with his jaws wide apart and his fine teeth still gleaming in the half darkness, when Ted, general errand boy at the office, came straddling over intervening laps and laid a compelling hand on his shoulder.
"Say, Luck," he whispered excitedly, "the audience author's with Mart, and they both want t' see you. And, say, I guess you're in Dutch, all right; the author's awful mad, and so is Mart. But say, no matter what they do to you, Luck, take it from me, that pit'cher's a humdinger! I like to died a-laughing!"
