The Phantom Herd | Page 5

did find the men he wanted. That was
Luck's way.
The shadows grew long and spread over the land until the whole vast
country lay darkling under the coming night. Luck went in and ate his
dinner, and came back again to smoke and stare and dream. There was
a moon now that silvered the slopes and set wide expanses shimmering.
Luck, always more or less a dreamer, began to people the plain with the
things that had been but were no more: with buffalo and with Indians
who camped on the trail of the big herds. He saw their villages, the
tepees smoke-grimed and painted with symbols, some of them, huddled
upon a knoll out there near the timber line. He heard the tom-toms and
he saw the rhythmic leaping and treading, the posing and gesturing of
the braves who danced in the firelight the tribal Buffalo Dance.
After that he saw the coming of the cattle, driven up from the south by
wind-browned, saddle-weary cowboys who sang endless chanteys to
pass the time as they rode with their herds up the long trail. He saw the
cattle humped and drifting before the wind in the first blizzards of
winter, while gray wolves slunk watchfully here and there, their shaggy
coats ruffled by the biting wind. He saw them when came the chinook,
a howling, warm wind from out the southwest, cutting the snowbanks
as with a knife that turned to water what it touched, and laying bare the
brown grass beneath. He saw the riders go out with the wagons to
gather the lank-bodied, big-kneed calves and set upon them the searing
mark of their owner's iron.
Urged by the spell of the dried little man's plaintive monologue, the old
range lived again for Luck, out there under the moon, while the train
carried him on and on through the night.
What a picture it all would make--the story of those old days as they
had been lived by men now growing old and bent. With all the cheap,
stagy melodrama thrown to one side to make room for the march of
that bigger drama, an epic of the range land that would be at once
history, poetry, realism!

Luck's cigar went out while he sat there and wove scene after scene of
that story which should breathe of the real range land as it once had
been. It could be done--that picture. Months it would take in the
making, for it would swing through summer and fall and winter and
spring. With the trail-herd going north that picture should open--the
trail-herd toiling over big, unpeopled plains, with the riders slouched in
their saddles, hat brims pulled low over eyes that ached with the glare
of the sun and the sweep of wind, their throats parched in the dust
cloud flung upward from the marching, cloven hoofs. Months it would
take in the making,--but sitting there with the green tail-lights
switching through cuts and around low hills and out over the level,
Luck visioned it all, scene by scene. Visioned the herd huddled
together in the night while the heavens were split with lightning, and
the rain came down in white-lighted streamers of water. Visioned the
cattle humped in the snow, tails to the biting wind, and the riders
plodding with muffled heads bent to the drive of the blizzard, the fine
snow packing full the wrinkles in their sourdough coats.
It could be done. He, Luck Lindsay, could do it; in his heart he knew
that he could. In his heart he felt that all of these months--yes, and
years--of picture-making had been but a preparation for this great
picture of the range. All these one-reel pioneer pictures had been
merely the feeble efforts of an apprentice learning to handle the tools of
his craft, the mental gropings of his mind while waiting for this, his big
idea. His work with the Indians was the mere testing and trying of
certain photographic effects, certain camera limitations. He felt like an
athlete taught and trained and tempered and just stepping out now for
the big physical achievement of his life.
He grew chilled as the night advanced, but he did not know that he was
cold. He was wondering, as a man always wonders in the face of an
intellectual birth, why this picture had not come to him before; why he
had gone on through these months and years of turning out reel upon
reel of Western pictures, with never once a glimmering of this great
epic of the range land; why he had clung to his Indians and his one-reel
Indian pictures with now and then a three-reel feature to give him the
elation of having achieved something; why he had left them feeling

depressedly that his best