The Phantom Herd by B. M. Bower (best ebook reader ubuntu .txt) 📖

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