The Phantom Herd | Page 6

work was in the past; why he had looked upon
real range-men as a substitute only for those lean-bodied bucks and
those fat, stupid-eyed squaws and dirty papooses.
With the spell of his vision deep upon his soul, Luck sat humiliated
before his blindness. The picture he saw as he stared out across the
moonlit plain was so clean-cut, so vivid, that he marvelled because he
had never seen it until this night. Perhaps, if the dried little man had not
talked of the old range--
Luck took a long breath and flung his cigar out over the platform rail.
The dried little man? Why, just as he stood he was a type! He was the
Old Man who owned this herd that should trail north and on through
scene after scene of the picture! No make-up needed there to stamp the
sense of reality upon the screen. Luck looked with the eye of his
imagination and saw the dried little man climbing, with a stiffness that
could not hide his accustomedness, into the saddle. He saw him ride out
with his men, scattering his riders for the round-up; the old cowman
making sharper the contrast of the younger men, fixing indelibly upon
the consciousness of those who watched that this same dried little man
had grown old in the saddle; fixing indelibly the fact that not in a day
did the free ranging of cattle grow to be one of the nation's great
industries.
Of a sudden Luck got up and stood swaying easily to the motion of the
car while he took a long, last look at the moon-bathed plain where had
been born his great, beautiful picture. He stretched his arms as does one
who has slept heavily, and went inside and down to the beginning of
the narrow aisle where were kept telegraph forms in their
wooden-barred niches in the wall. He went into the smoking
compartment and wrote, with a sureness that knew no crossed-out
words, a night letter to the dried little man who had sat on the baggage
truck and talked of the range. And this is what went speeding back
presently to the dried little man who slept in a cabin near the track and
dreamed, perhaps, of following the big herds:
Baggage man, Sioux, N.D.

Report at once to me at Dry Lake. Can offer you good position Acme
Film Company, good salary working in big Western picture. Small part,
some riding among real boys who know range life. Want you bad as
type of cowman owning cattle in picture. Salary and expenses begin
when you show up. For references see Indian Agent.
LUCK LINDSAY, Dry Lake, Mont.
If you count, you will see that he ran eight words over the limit of the
flat rate on night letters, but he would have over-run the limit by eighty
words just as quickly if he had wanted to say so much. That was Luck's
way. Be it a telegram, instructions to his company, or a quarrel with
some one who crossed him, Luck said what he wanted to say--and paid
the price without blinking.
I don't know what the dried little man thought when the operator
handed him that message the next morning; but I can tell you in a few
words what he did: He arrived in Dry Lake just two trains behind Luck.
Luck did not sleep that night. He lay in his berth with the shade pushed
up as high as it would go, and stared out at the tamed plain, and
perfected the details of his Big Picture. Into the spell of the range he
wove a story of human love and human hate and danger and trouble. So
it must be, to carry his message to the world who would look and
marvel at what he would show them in the drama of silence. He had not
named his picture yet. The name would come in its own good time, just
as the picture had come when the time for its making was ripe.
The next day he did not talk with the men whose elbows he touched in
the passing intimacy of travel; though Luck was a companionable soul
who was much given to talking and to seeing his listeners grow to an
audience,--an appreciative audience that laughed much while they
listened and frowned upon interruption. Instead, he sat silent in his seat,
since on this train there was no observation car, and he stared out of the
window without seeing much of what passed before his eyes, and made
notes now and then, and covered all the margins of his time-table with
figures that had to do with film. Once, I know, he blackened his two
front teeth with pencil tappings while he visualized a stampede