The Phantom Herd - B. M. Bower (love novels in english txt) 📗

Before breakfast he had selected a site for his stage, on the sunny side of the hill back of the house, where it would be partially sheltered from the sweeping winds of New Mexico. All day he would have the sun behind him while he worked, and he considered the situation an ideal one. He had the lumber hauled up there and unloaded, while Rosemary and Applehead were cooking breakfast for ten hungry people. He laid out his foundation and explained to the boys just how it should be built, and even sacrificed his appetite to his impatience by going a quarter of a mile to where he remembered seeing some old barbed wire strung along a fence to keep it off the ground so that stock could not tangle in it. He got the wire and brought it back with him to guy out the uprights for the diffusers. So on the whole he began the day as well as even he could desire.

Then little hindrances began to creep in to delay him. For one thing, the Happy Family had only a comedy acquaintance with grease paint, and their make-up reminded Luck unpleasantly of Bently Brown's stories. As they appeared one by one, with their comically crooked eyebrows and their rouge-widened lips and staring, deep-shadowed eyes, Luck sent them back to take it all off and start over again under his supervision. The outcome was that he gave a full hour to making up the faces of his characters and telling them how to do it themselves. Even Rosemary made her brows too heavy and her lips too red, and her cheeks were flushed unevenly. Luck was a busy man that morning, but he was not taking scenes by nine o'clock, for all his haste.

With a kindly regard for Rosemary's nervousness lest she fail him, he set up his camera and told her to walk down part way to the corral, looking—supposedly—to see if her dad had come home. She must stand there irresolutely, then turn and walk back toward the camera, registering the fact that she was worried. That sounds simple enough, doesn't it?

What Luck most wanted was to satisfy himself as to whether Rosemary could possibly play the part of old Dave's daughter. If she could, he would sleep sounder that night; if she could not,—Luck was not at all clear as to what he should do if she failed. He told her just where to walk into the "scene," which is the range of the camera. He went down part way to the corral and drew a line with his toe, and told her to stop when she reached that line and to look away up the trail which wound down among the rocks and sage. When he called to her she was to turn and walk back, trying to imagine that she was much worried and disappointed.

"Your dad was to have come last night," Luck suggested. "You tried to keep him from going in the first place, and now we've got to establish the fact that he is away behind time getting home. You know, this is where his horse falls with him, and he lies out all night, and Big Medicine brings him in next day. You kind of have a hunch that something is wrong, and you keep looking for him. Sabe." He fussed with the camera, adjusting it to what seemed to him the right focus. "Want to rehearse it first?" he added considerately.

"No," Rosemary gasped, "I don't. I know how to walk, and how to turn around and come back. I've been doing those things for twenty-two years or so, but Luck Lindsay, if you don't let me do it right away quick, I just know I'll stub my toe and fall down, or something!" The worst of it was, she meant what she said. Rosemary, I am sorry to say, was so scared that her teeth chattered.

"All right, you go on and do it now," Luck permitted, and began to turn the crank at seventeen in order to hold her action slow, while he watched her. Groaning inwardly, he continued to turn, while Rosemary went primly down the winding trail, stood with her toes on the line Luck had marked for her, gazed stiffly off to the right, and then, when he called to her, turned and came back, staring fixedly over his head. You have seen little girls with an agonized self-consciousness walk up an aisle to a platform where they must bow to their fathers and mothers and their critical schoolmates and "speak a piece." Rosemary resembled the most bashful little girl that you can recall.

"All right," said Luck tonelessly, and placed his palm over the lens while he gave the crank another turn. "We'll try it again to-morrow. Don't worry. You'll get the hang of it all right."

His very smile, meant to encourage her, brought swift tears that rolled down and streaked the powder and rouge on her cheeks. She had made a mess of it all; she knew that just as well as Luck knew it. He gave her shoulder a reassuring pat as she went by, and that finished Rosemary. She retreated into the gloomy, one-windowed bedroom with its litter of half-unpacked suitcases and an overflowing trunk, and she cried heartbrokenly because she knew she would never in this world be able to forget that terrible, winking eye and the clicking whirr of Luck's camera. Just to think of facing it gave her a "goose-flesh" chill,—and she did so want to help Luck!

With the Happy Family and old Dave, Luck fared better. They, fortunately for him, were already what he called camera-broke. They could forget all about the camera while they caught and saddled their horses. They could mount and ride away unconcernedly without even thinking of trying to act. Luck's spirits rose a little while he turned the crank, and just for pure relief at the perfect naturalness of it, he gave that scene an extra ten feet of footage.

With Applehead he had some difficulty. Applehead looked the part of sheriff, all right. He wore his trousers tucked inside his boots because he always wore them so, especially when he rode. He wore his big six-shooter buckled snugly about his middle instead of dangling far down his thigh, because he had always worn it that way. He wore his sheriffs badge pinned on his vest and his coat unbuttoned, so that the wind blew it open now and then and revealed the star. Altogether he looked exactly as he had looked when he was serving one of his four terms of office. But when he faced the camera, he was inclined to strut, and Luck had no negative to waste. He resorted to strategy, which consisted of a little wholesome sarcasm.

"Listen, Applehead! the public is going to get the idea that you sure hate yourself!" he remarked, standing with his hands on his hips while Applehead came strutting into the foreground. "You'll never make any one believe you were ever a real, honest-to-God sheriff. They'll put you down as an extra picked up through a free employment agency and feeling like you owned the plant because you're earning a couple of dollars. Go back down there to your horse and wait till some of that importance evaporates!"

Applehead went off swearing to himself, and Luck got a fifteen-foot scene of the departure of a very indignant sheriff who is with difficulty holding his anger subordinate to his official dignity. Before he had time to recover his usual good humor, Luck with further disparaging comment called him back. Applehead, smarting under the sarcasm, came ready for war, and Luck turned the crank until the sheriff was almost within reach of him.

"Gol darn you, Luck, I'll take that there camery and bust it over your danged head!" he spluttered. "I'll show ye! Call me a bum that's wearin' a shurf's star fer the first time in his life, will ye! Why, I'll jest about wear ye out if—"

"All right, pard; I was just aiming to make you come up looking mad. You did fine." Luck stopped to roll a smoke as though nothing had occurred but tiresome routine.

Applehead looked down at him uncertainly. He looked at the Happy Family, saw them grinning, and gave a mollified chuckle. "We-ell, you was takin' a danged long chance, now I'm tellin' yuh, boy!" he warned. "I was all set to tangle with yuh; and if I had, I reckon I'd a spiled something 'fore I got through."

It was noon by the sun, and a film of haze was spreading across the sky. Luck shot another scene or two and shouldered his precious camera reluctantly, when Rosemary, red-lidded but elaborately cheerful in her manner, called them in to dinner.

"She's goin' to storm, shore's you live," Applehead predicted, sniffing into the wind like a dog confronted by a strange scent. A little later he looked up from his full plate with a worried air. "How's a storm goin' to hit ye, Luck?" he asked. "Kinda put a stop to the pitcher business, won't it?"

"Not if it snows, it won't," Luck answered calmly, helping himself to the
brown beans boiled with bacon. "We'll round up a bunch of cattle, and
I'll shoot my blizzard stuff. I'll need more negative, though, for that.
If I knew for sure it's going to storm—"

"I'm tellin' yuh it is, ain't I?" Applehead blew into his saucer of coffee,—his table manners not being the nicest in the world. "I kin smell snow two days off, and that there wind comin' up the canyon has got snow behind it, now I'm tellin' ye. 'Nother thing, I kin tell by the way Compadre walks, liftin' his feet high and bushin' up what's left of his tail. That there cat's smarter'n some humans, and he shore kin smell snow comin', same's I do. He hates snow worse'n pizen." Applehead drank his coffee in great gulps. "I'll bet he's huntin' a warm corner somewheres, right now."

"No, he ain't, by cripes!" Big Medicine corrected him. "That there Come-Paddy cat of yourn has got worse troubles than snow! Dog's got him treed up the windmill. I seen—"

Applehead did not wait to hear what Big Medicine had seen. He drank the remainder of his coffee in one great, scalding gulp, and went out to rescue his cat and to put the fear of death into the little black dog. When he returned, puffing a little, to his interrupted meal and had told them a few of the things he meant to do to that dog if it refused to mend its ways, he declared again that he could "shore smell snow behind that wind."

"I wish it would hold off till that raw stock gets here," Luck observed anxiously. "I wired the order in, but at that I'm afraid it won't get here before the end of the week. I'll have one of you boys pack me some water into the dark room so I can develop negatives right after dinner. I want to see how she's coming out before I take any more."

"I thought Andy'd fixed a hose fer that dark room," Happy Jack said forebodingly. If there was water to be carried, Happy was pessimistically certain that he would have to carry it.

"I turned that hose over to the missus for a colander," Andy explained soberly. "By gracious, I couldn't figure out anything else it could be used for."

"Did you get the barrels fixed like I said?"

"I sure did. Applehead must have had a Dutch picnic or two out here, from the number of beer kegs scattered all over the place. And a couple of big whisky—"

"Them there whisky bar'ls I bought and used fer water bar'ls till I got my well bored. Luck kin mind the time when we hauled water on a sled outa the arroyo down below." Applehead's eyes turned anxiously to Rosemary, toward whom he was beginning to show a timidly worshipful attitude.

"You bet I can. Do you remember the time we hitched that big bronk up with old Wall-eye, to haul water? Got back here a little ways beyond the stable with two barrels sloshing over the top, and the cat—not this one, but a black-and-white cat, that was—the cat jumped out from behind a buck brush. Hot dog! That bronk went straight in the air! Remember that time?" Luck leaned back in his chair to laugh.

"I shore do," Applehead chuckled. "Luck, here, he was walkin' behind the sled and drivin',—and he wasn't as big as he is now, even. That was soon after he come out here to fatten up