The Greatest Works of B. M. Bower - 51 Titles in One Volume (Illustrated Edition). B. M. Bower
whirlwind, and as for dramatic work, she can put it over half the leading women in the business—that is, in her line of Pocohontas stuff.”
“Well, why don’t you let her stay?” Weary demanded. “She will anyway—mama! We’re not what you can call over-run with women on this job.”
“Why don’t you make a squaw-man outa Dave?” Pink suggested boldly, “and let her be his daughter instead of Rosemary?”
“Say, what does that there walka-some-darn-thing mean, that she calls yuh?” Big Medicine wanted to know. “By cripes, I hate talk I don’t savey.”
“Wagalexa Conka?” Luck smiled shamefacedly. “Oh, that’s just a name the Indians gave me. Means Big Turkey, in plain English. Her father, old Chief Big Turkey, adopted me into the tribe, and they call me by his name. Annie-Many-Ponies has heard it used ever since she was a kid. By tribal law I’m her brother. Well, what’s the word, boys? Shall we let her stay or not? We could use her, all right, and put a dash of old-plains’ color in the picture that I haven’t got, as it stands. It’s up to you to decide.”
“You’re wrong,” Pink grinned. “She’s decided that, herself. Gee, she’s pretty!”
“Certainly she is; but get this, boys: She isn’t going to stay just because she’s pretty, and if I had a different bunch than you fellows, she’d have to go for that reason. I’m responsible for her—sabe? Bill Holmes, you get this; I saw you eyeing her pretty strong. That girl is the daughter of an influential chief, and she comes pretty near being the pride of the reservation. There can’t be any romantic stuff, if they let her stay. Her father and the Agent will consent, if they do consent, on the strength of the confidence they have in me. They’re going to keep that confidence. Get that, and get it strong, because I sure mean what I’m telling you.” He eased the tenseness with a laugh. “I don’t mean to offend anybody,” he said, “and that’s why I’m putting it straight before the play comes up. Annie-Many-Ponies has got a heart-twisting smile, but she’s a squaw just the same. She’s got the ways of the Injun to the marrow of her bones, and I’ll bet right now if you were to shake her hard enough, you’d jingle a knife out of her clothes.” He stopped and lighted the cigarette he had been carefully rolling. “Well,” he finished after the pause, “does she stay or go?”
The Happy Family answered him with, various phrases, the meaning of which was that he could suit himself about that; as far as they were concerned, she could stay and welcome.
So she stayed, and Rosemary hung up a calico curtain across the one bedroom, so that Annie-Many-Ponies might have a corner to call her own. She stayed; and Luck rewrote two reels of his scenario so that there should be a place in it for a beautiful Indian girl who rode like a whirlwind and did not know the meaning of fear, and who had a mind of her own, and who was just exactly as harmless in that camp as half a quart of nitroglycerine, and added thereby a good bit to the load of responsibility which Luck was shouldering.
Chapter Thirteen. “Pam. Bleak Mesa—Cattle Drifting Before Wind—”
“Pam. bleak mesa—snow—cattle drifting before wind. Dale and Johnny dis. riding to foreground. Reg. cold—horses leg-weary—boys all in—”
Out toward Bear Canyon, where the land to the north rose brokenly to the mountains, Luck found the bleak stretches of which he had dreamed that night on the observation platform of a train speeding through the night in North Dakota,—a great white wilderness unsheltered by friendly forests, uninhabited save by wild things that moved stealthily across its windswept ridges. Beyond, the mountains rose barrenly, more bleak than the land that lay at their feet.
“Pam. bleak mesa—snow—” With the camera set halfway up a gentle slope commanding a steeper hill beyond, down which the boys would send the cattle in a slow, uneasy march before the storm, Luck focused his telephoto lens upon bleakness enough to satisfy even his voracious appetite for realism. Bill Holmes, his tan pumps wrapped in gunny sacks for protection against the snow that was a foot deep on the level and still falling, thrashed his body with his arms, like a windmill whose paddles have suddenly gone limp in a high wind. When he was ready, Luck stopped long enough to blow on his fingers and to turn and watch for the signal from Annie-Many-Ponies, stationed on a higher ridge to the right of him,—the signal that the cattle were coming.
Through the drive of the snowstorm he saw her tall, straight figure as through a thin, shifting, white veil. The little black dog, for whom she had conceived a fierce affection in defiance of Rosemary’s tacit opposition, was lying with its tail curled tight around its feet and its nose, hunting warmth in the shelter of her flapping garments. Annie-Many-Ponies was staring away to the north, shielding her keen eyes from the snow with one slim, brown hand, while she watched for the coming of the herd.
Luck looked at her, silhouetted against the sky. He had no scene written in his script to match the picture she made; he had no negative to waste. But he swung his camera around and, using the telephoto lens he had adjusted for his cattle scenes, he called to her to hold that pose, and indulged his artistic sense in a ten-or-twelve foot scene which showed Annie-Many-Ponies wholly absorbed in gazing upon farther bleakness.
Annie-Many-Ponies was so keenly conscious of her duty to the camera that she dared not break her pose, even to give the signal, until he had yelled, “All right, Annie!” and swung the camera back with its recording eye fixed upon that narrow depression between two blunt ears of hilltop, through which the herd was to be sent down to the ridge and on past the camera to the flat, where other scenes were to be taken later on, when the cattle were hungry enough to browse miserably upon the bosquet of young cotton woods.
“Cows come!” she called out, because Luck had his back to her at the moment and did not see the wave of hand she had been told to give him.
Luck, squinting into the view-finder, caught the swaying vanguard of the herd and swore. He had meant to “pan. bleak mesa” for half a minute before those swaying heads and horns appeared over the brow of the ridge. Now, even though he began to turn the crank the instant he glimpsed them, he would not have quite the effect which he had meant to have. He would be compelled to make two scenes of it, and pan. his bleak mesa afterwards and trust to a “cut-in scene” to cover the break. He did not trust Bill Holmes to turn the crank on that slow, plodding march of misery. With his diaphragm of the camera wide open to get all the light possible, because the air was filled with falling snow, he followed the herd, as it wound snakelike down the easiest descents, making for the more sheltered small canyons that opened out upon the flat. “Cattle drifting before the wind,” read the script; and now Luck saw them coming, their snow-whitened backs humped to the driving storm, heads lowered and swaying weakly from side to side with the shambling motion of their feet. They were drifting before the wind, just as he had planned that they should do. That they shuffled wearily down that hill with poor cows and unweaned calves straggling miserably behind the main body in “the drag herd,” proved how well the boys had done the work which he had sent them out at daylight to do.
The boys had gone out, under the leadership of Applehead, who knew that range as he knew his own dooryard, just when daylight began to break coldly upon the storm that had come with the sunset. Luck had already ridden out with them and had chosen his location for the blizzard scenes.
He had gone with them over every foot of that drive, and had told them just where the main body of riders was to fall back behind the ridge that would hide them from the camera, leaving Andy Green and the Native Son—since these were the two whom he always visualized in the scene—to come on alone in the wake of the herd. Under the leadership of old Applehead, they had combed every draw that sheltered so much as a lone cow and calf.
Luck had told them to bring in every hoof they could spot and get over that ridge by ten o’clock. He had a nervous dread of the storm breaking before noon, and his heart was set on getting that never-to-be-successfully-faked blizzard scene. Realism ruled him absolutely, now that he was actually producing some of the big scenes of this picture. He had