Jean of the Lazy A

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Gil came closer and closer, and there was a look in his
eyes that almost frightened Jean, accustomed as she had
become to his acting a part; there was an intensity of
purpose which she instinctively felt was real. She did
not know what it was he had in mind, but whatever it
was, she knew what it meant. He was almost within
reach, so close that one saw Jean shrink a little from his
nearness. He stopped and gathered himself for a quick,
forward lunge--

The two women screamed, though they had been
expecting that swift drawing of Jean's gun and the shot
that seemed to sound the instant her hand dropped.
Gil stiffened, and his hand flew up to his temple. His
eyes became two staring questions that bored into the
soul of Jean. His hand dropped to his side, and his
head sagged forward. He lurched, tried to steady himself
and then went down limply.

Jean dropped her gun and darted toward him, her
face like chalk, as she turned it for one horrified instant
toward Burns. She went down on her knees and lifted
Gil's head, looking at the red blotch on his temple and
the trickle that ran down his cheek. She laid his head
down with a gentleness wholly unconscious, and looked
again at Burns. "I've killed him," she said in a small,
dry, flat voice. She put out her hands gropingly and
fell forward across Gil's inert body. It was the first
time in her life that Jean had ever fainted.

"Stop the camera!" Burns croaked tardily, and Pete
stopped turning. Pete had that little, twisted grin
on his face, and he was perfectly calm and self-possessed.

"You sure got the punch that time, Burns," he
remarked unfeelingly, while he held his palm over the lens
and gave the crank another turn or two to divide that
scene from the next.

"She's fainted! She's hit him!" cried Burns, and
waddled over to where the two of them lay. The two
women drew farther away, clinging to each other with
excited exclamations.

And then Gil Huntley lifted himself carefully so as
not to push Jean upon the ground, and when he was
sitting up, he took her in his arms with some remorse
and a good deal of tenderness.

"How was that for a punch?" he inquired of his
director. "I didn't tell her I was going to furnish the
blood-sponge; I thought it might rattle her. I never
thought she'd take it so hard--"

Robert Grant Burns stopped and looked at him in
heavy silence. "Good Lord!" he snapped out at last.
"I dunno whether to fire you off the job--or raise
your salary! You got the punch, all right. And
the chances are you've ruined her nerve for shooting,
into the bargain." He stood looking down perturbedly
at Gil, who was smoothing Jean's hair back from
her forehead after the manner of men who feel
tenderly toward the woman who cries or faints in their
presence. "I'm after the punch every time," Burns
went on ruefully, "but there's no use being a hog about
it. Where's that water-bag, Lee? Go get it out of
the machine. Say! Can't you women do something
besides stand there and howl? Nobody's hurt, or going
to be."

While Muriel and Gil Huntley did what they could
to bring Jean back to consciousness and composure,
Robert Grant Burns paced up and down and debated within
himself a subject which might have been called "punch
versus prestige." Should he let that scene stand, or
should he order a "re-take" because Jean had, after all,
done the dramatic part, the "remorse stuff"? Of
course, when Pete sent the film in, the trimmers could
cut the scene; they probably would cut the scene just
where Gil went down in a decidedly realistic heap. But
it hurt the professional soul of Robert Grant Burns to
retake a scene so compellingly dramatic, because it had
been so absolutely real.

Jean was sitting up with her back against the ledge
looking rather pale and feeling exceedingly foolish, while
Gil Huntley explained to her about the "blood-sponge"
and how he had held it concealed in his hand until the
right moment, and had used it in the interest of realism
and not to frighten her, as she might have reason to
suspect. Gil Huntley was showing a marked tendency to
repeat himself. He had three times assured her
earnestly that he did not mean to scare her so, when
the voice of the chief reminded him that this was merely
an episode in the day's work. He jumped up and gave
his attention to Burns.

"Gil, take that same position you had when you fell.
Put a little more blood on your face; you wiped most
of it off. That right leg is sprawled out too far. Draw
it up a little. Throw out your left arm a little more.
Whoa-- Enough is plenty. Now, Gay, you take
Jean's gun and hold it down by your side, where her
hand dropped right after she fired. You stand right
about here, where her tracks are. Get INTO her tracks!
We're picking up the scene right where Gil fell. She
looked straight into the camera and spoiled the rest,
or I'd let it go in. Some acting, if you ask me,
seeing it wasn't acting at all." He sent one of his
slant-eyed glances toward Jean, who bit her lips and
looked away.

"Lean forward a little, and hold that gun like you
knew what it was made for, anyway!" He regarded
Muriel glumly. "Say! that ain't a stick of candy
you're trying to hide in your skirt," he pointed out,
with an exasperated, rising inflection at the end of the
sentence. "John Jimpson! If I could take you two
girls to pieces and make one out of the two of you, I'd
have an actress that could play Western leads, maybe!

"Oh, well--thunder! All you can do is put over
the action so they'll forget the gun. Say, you drop it
the second the camera starts. You pick up the action
where Jean dropped the gun and started for Gil. See
if you can put it over the way she did. She really
thought she'd killed him, remember. You saw the real,
honest-to-John, horror-dope that time. Now see how
close you can copy it.

"All ready? START your ACTION!" he barked.
"Camera!"

Brutally absorbed in his work he might be; callous
to the tragedy in Jean's eyes at what might have
happened; unfeeling in his greedy seizure of her horror
as good "stuff" for Muriel Gay to mimic. Yet the
man's energy was dynamic; his callousness was born of
his passion for the making of good pictures. He swept
even Jean out of the emotional whirlpool and into the
calm, steady current of the work they had to do.

He instructed Pete to count as spoiled those fifteen
feet of film which recorded Jean's swift horror. But
Pete Lowry did not always follow slavishly his
instructions. He sent the film in as it was, without
comment. Then he and Gil Huntley counted on their fingers
the number of days that would probably elapse before they
might hope to hear the result, and exchanged knowing
glances now and then when Robert Grant Burns seemed
especially careful that Jean's face should not be seen
by the recording eye of the camera. And they waited;
and after awhile they began to show a marked interest
in the mail from the west.

CHAPTER XV

A LEADING LADY THEY WOULD MAKE OF JEAN

Sometimes events follow docilely the plans that
would lead them out of the future of possibilities
and into the present of actualities, and sometimes they
bring with them other events which no man may foresee
unless he is indeed a prophet. You would never think,
for instance, that Gil Huntley and his blood sponge
would pull from the future a chain of incidents that
would eventually--well, never mind what. Just follow
the chain of incidents and see what lies at the end.

Pete Lowry and Gil had planned cunningly for a
certain readjustment of Jean's standing in the company,
for no deeper reasons than their genuine liking for the
girl and a common human impulse to have a hand in
the ordering of their little world. In ten days Robert
Grant Burns received a letter from Dewitt, president
of the Great Western Film Company, which amply fulfilled
those plans, and, as I said, opened the way for
other events quite unforeseen.

There were certain orders from the higher-ups which
Robert Grant Burns must heed. They were, briefly, the
immediate transfer of Muriel Gay to the position of
leading woman in a new company which was being sent
to Santa Barbara to make light comedy-dramas. Robert
Grant Burns grunted when he read that, though it
was a step up the ladder for Muriel which she would be
glad to take. The next paragraph instructed him to
place the young woman who had been doubling for Miss
Gay in the position which Miss Gay would leave
vacant. It was politely suggested that he adapt the
leading woman's parts to the ability of this young woman;
which meant that he must write his scenarios especially
with her in mind. He was informed that he should
feature the young woman in her remarkable horsemanship,
etc. It was pointed out that her work was being
noticed in the Western features which Robert Grant
Burns had been sending in, and that other film
companies would no doubt make overtures shortly, in the
hope of securing her services. Under separate cover
they were mailing a contract which would effectually
forestall such overtures, and they were relying upon him
to see that she signed up with the Great Western as per
contract. Finally, it was suggested, since Mr. Dewitt
chose always to suggest rather than to command, that
Robert Grant Burns consider the matter of writing a
series of short stories having some connecting thread
of plot and featuring this Miss Douglas. (This, by the
way, was the beginning of the serial form of motion-
picture plays which has since become so popular.)

Robert Grant Burns read that letter through slowly,
and then sat down heavily in an old arm-chair in the
hotel office, lighted one of his favorite fat, black cigars,
and mouthed it absently, while he read the letter through
again. He said "John Jimpson!" just above a whisper.
He held the letter in his two hands and regarded
it strangely. Then he looked up, caught the quizzical,
inquiring glance of Pete Lowry, and beckoned that
secret-smiling individual over to him. "Read that!"
he grunted. "Read it and tell me what you think
of it."

Pete Lowry read it carefully, and grinned when he
handed it back. He did not, however, tell Robert Grant
Burns just exactly what he thought of it. He merely
said that it had to come sometime, he guessed.

"She can't put over the dramatic stuff," objected
Robert Grant Burns. "She's got the face for it, all
right, and when she registers real emotions, it gets over
big. The bottled-up kind of people always do. But
she's never acted an emotion she didn't feel--"

"How about that all-in stuff, and the listening-and--
waiting business she put across before she took a shot at
Gil that time she fainted?" Pete reminded him. "If
you ask me, that little girl can act."

"Well, whether she can or not, she's got to try it,"
said Burns with some foreboding. "She's been going
big, with Gay to do all the close-up, dramatic work.
The trouble is, Pete, that girl always does as she darn
pleases! If I put her opposite Lee in a scene and tell
her to act like she is in love with him, and that he's to
kiss her and she's to kiss back,--" he flung out his
hands expressively. "You must know the rest, as well
as I do. She'd turn around and give me a call-down,
and get on her horse and ride off; and I and my picture
could go to thunder, for all of her. That's the point;
she ain't been through the mill. She don't know
anything about taking orders--from me or anybody else."
It is a pity that Lite did not hear that! He might have
amended the statement a little. Jean had been taking
orders enough; she knew a great deal about receiving
ultimatums. The trouble was that she seldom paid any
attention to them. Lite was accustomed to that, but
Robert Grant Burns was not, and it irked him sore.

"Well, she's sure got the screen personality," Pete
defended. "I've said it all along. That girl don't
have to act. Put her in the part, and she is the part!
She's got something better than technique, Burns. She's
got imagination. She puts herself in a character and
lives it."

"Put her on a horse and she does," Burns conceded
gloomily. "But will you tell me what kind of work
she'll make of interior scenes, and love scenes, and all
that? You've got to have it, to pad out your story.
You can't let your leading character do a whole two--
or three-reel picture on horseback. There wouldn't be
any contrast. Dewitt don't know that girl the way I
do. If he'd had to side-step and scheme and give in
the way I've done to keep her working, he wouldn't put
her playing straight leads, not until she'd had a year or
two of training--"

"Taming is a better word," Pete suggested drily.
"There'll be fun when she gets to playing love scenes
opposite Lee. You better let him take the heavies, and
put Gil in for leads, Burns."

Robert Grant Burns was so cast down by the prospect
that he made no attempt to reply, beyond grunting
something about preferring to drive a team of balky
mules to making Jean do something she did not want to
do. But, such is the mind trained to a profession,
insensibly he drifted away into the world of his
imagination, and began to draw therefrom the first tenuous
threads of a plot wherein Jean's peculiar accomplishments
were to be featured. Robert Grant Burns had
long ago learned to adjust himself to circumstances
which in themselves were not to his liking. He adjusted
himself now to the idea of making Jean the
Western star his employers seemed to think was inevitable.

That night before he went to bed he wrote a play
which had in it fifty-two scenes. Thirty-five of them
were what is known technically as exteriors. In most
of them Jean was to ride on horseback through wild
places. The rest were dramatic close-ups. Robert
Grant Burns went over it carefully when it was finished,
and groaning inwardly he cut out two love scenes which
were tense, and which Muriel Gay and Lee Milligan
would have "eaten up," as he mentally expressed it.
The love interest, he realized bitterly, must be touched
upon lightly in his scenarios from now on; which would
have lightened appreciably the heart of Lite Avery, if
he had only known it, and would have erased from his
mind a good many depressing visions of Jean as the
film sweetheart of those movie men whom he secretly
hated.

Jean did not hesitate five minutes before she signed
the contract which Burns presented to her the next
morning. She was human, and she had learned enough
about the business to see that, speaking from a purely
professional point of view, she was extremely fortunate.
Not every girl, surely, can hope to jump in a few weeks
from the lowly position of an inexperienced "extra"
to the supposedly exalted one of leading woman. And
to her that hundred dollars a week which the contract
insured her looked a fortune. It spelled home to her,
and the vindication of her beloved dad, of whom she
dared not think sometimes, it hurt her so.

Her book was not progressing as fast as she had
expected when she began it. She had been working at it
sporadically now for eight weeks, and she had only ten
chapters done,--and some of these were terribly short.
She had looked through all of the novels that she
owned, and had computed the average number of chapters
in each; thirty she decided would be a good,
conservative number to write. She had even divided those
thirty into three parts, and had impartially allotted ten
to adventure, ten to mystery and horror, and ten to love-
making. Such an arrangement should please everybody,
surely, and need only be worked out smoothly to
prove most satisfying.

But, as it happened, comedy would creep into the
mystery and horror, which she mentally lumped together
as agony. Adventure ran riot, and straight love-
making chapters made her sleepy, they bored her so.
She had tried one or two, and she had found it impossible
to concentrate her mind upon them. Instead, she
had sat and planned what she would do with the money
that was steadily accumulating in the bank; a pitiful
little sum, to be sure, to those who count by the thou-
sands, but cheering enough to Jean, who had never before
had any money of her own.

So she signed the contract and worked that day so
light-heartedly that Robert Grant Burns forgot his
pessimism. When the light began to fade and grow yellow,
and the big automobile went purring down the trail
to town, she rode on to the Bar Nothing to find Lite,
and tell him how fortune had come and tapped her on
the shoulder.

She did not see Lite anywhere about the ranch, and
so she did not put her hopes and her plans and her good
fortune into speech. She did see her Aunt Ella, who
straightway informed her that people were talking about
the way she rode here and there with those painted-up
people, and let the men put their arms around her and
make love to her. Her Aunt Ella made it perfectly
plain to Jean that she, for one, did not consider it
respectable. Her Aunt Ella said that Carl was going to
do something about it, if things weren't changed pretty
quick.

Jean did not appear to regard her aunt's disapproval
as of any importance whatever, but the words stung.
She had herself worried a little over the love-making
scenes which she knew she would now be called upon
to play. Jean, you will have observed, was not given
to sentimental adventurings; and she disliked the idea
of letting Lee Milligan make love to her the way he
had made love to Muriel Gay through picture after
picture. She would do it, she supposed, if she had to;
she wanted the salary. But she would hate it
intolerably. She made reply with sarcasm which she knew
would particularly irritate her Aunt Ella, and left the
house feeling that she never wanted to enter it again as
long as she lived.

The sight of her uncle standing beside Pard in an
attitude of disgusted appraisement of the new Navajo
blanket and the silver-trimmed bridle and tapideros
which Burns had persuaded her to add to her riding
outfit,--for photographic effect,--brought a hot flush
of resentment. She went up quietly enough, however.
Indeed, she went up so quietly that he started when
she appeared almost beside him and picked up Pard's
reins, and took the stirrup to mount and ride away.
She did not speak to him at all; she had not spoken to
him since that night when the little brown bird had
died! Though perhaps that was because she had managed
to keep out of his way.

"I see you've been staking yourself to a new bridle,"
Carl began in a tone quite as sour as his look. "You
must have bought out all the tin decorations they had in
stock, didn't you?"

Jean swung up into the saddle before she looked at
him. "If I did, it's my own affair," she retorted. "I
paid for the tin decorations with my own money."

"Oh, you did! Well, you might have been in better
business than paying for that kind of thing. You
might," he sneered up at her, "have been paying for
your keep these last three years, if you've got more
money of your own than you know what to do with."

Jean could not ride off under the sting of that
gratuitous insult. She held Pard quiet and looked
down at him with hate in her eyes. "I expect," she
said in a queer, quiet wrath, "to prove before long that
my own money has been paying for my `keep' these
last three years; for that and for other things that did
not benefit me in the least."

"I'd like to know what you mean by that!" Carl
caught Pard by the bridle-rein and looked up at her in a
white fury that startled even Jean, accustomed as she
was to his sudden rages that contrasted with his sullen
attitude toward the world.

"What do you think I would mean? Let go my
bridle. I don't want to quarrel with you."

"What did you mean by proving--what do you
expect to prove?" His hand was heavy on the rein,
so that Pard began to fret under the restraint. "You've
got to quit running around all over the country with
them show folks, and stay at home and behave yourself.
You've got to quit hanging out at the Lazy A. I've
stood as much as I'm going to stand of your performances.
You get down off that horse and go into the
house and behave yourself; that's what you'll do! If
you haven't got any shame or decency--"

Jean scarcely knew what she did, just then. She
must have dug Pard with her spurs, because the first
thing that she realized was the lunge he gave. Carl's
hold slipped from the rein, as he was jerked sidewise.
He made an ineffective grab at Jean's skirt, and he
called her a name she had never heard spoken before in
her life. A rod or so away she pulled up and turned
to face him, but the words she would have spoken stuck
in her throat. She had never seen Carl Douglas look
like that; she had seen him when he was furious, she
had seen him when he sulked, but she had never seen
him look like that.

He called her to come back. He made threats of
what he would do if she refused to obey him. He shook
his fist at her. He behaved like a man temporarily
robbed of his reason; his eyes, as he came up glaring at
her, were the eyes of a madman.

Jean felt a tremor of dread while she looked at him
and listened to him. He was almost within reach of
her again when she wheeled and went off up the trail at
a run. She looked back often, half fearing that he
would get a horse and follow her, but he stood just
where she had left him, and he seemed to be still
uttering threats and groundless accusations as long as she
was in sight.

CHAPTER XVI

FOR ONCE AT LEAST LITE HAD HIS WAY

Half a mile she galloped, and met Lite coming
home. She glanced over her shoulder before she
pulled Pard down to a walk, and Lite's greeting, as he
turned and rode alongside her, was a question. He
wanted to know what was the matter with her. He
listened with his old manner of repression while she
told him, and he made no comment whatever until she
had finished.

"You must have made him pretty sore," he said
dispassionately. "I don't think myself that you ought
to stay over to the ranch alone. Why don't you do as
he says?"

"And go back to the Bar Nothing?" Jean shivered
a little. "Nothing could make me go back there!
Lite, you don't understand. He acted like a crazy man;
and I hadn't said anything to stir him up like that.
He was--Lite, he scared me! I couldn't stay on the
ranch with him. I couldn't be in the same room with
him."

"You can't go on staying at the Lazy A," Lite told
her flatly.

"There's no other place where I'd stay."

"You could," Lite pointed out, "stay in town and
go back and forth with the rest of the bunch. It would
be a lot better, any way you look at it."

"It would be a lot worse. There's my book; I
wouldn't have any chance to write on that. And
there's the expense. I'm saving every nickel I possibly
can, Lite, and you know what for. And there's the
bunch--I see enough of them during working hours.
I'd go crazy if I had to live with them. Lite, they've
put me in playing leads! I'm to get a hundred dollars
a week! Just think of that! And Burns says that
I'll have to go back to Los Angeles with them when they
go this fall, because the contract I signed lasts for a
year."

She sighed. "I rode over to tell you about it. It
seemed to be good news, when I left home. But now,
it's just a part of the black tangle that life's made up
of. Aunt Ella started things off by telling me what
a disgrace it is for me to work in these pictures. And
Uncle Carl--" She shivered in spite of herself. "I
just can't understand Uncle Carl's going into such a
rage. It was--awful."

Lite rode for some distance before he lifted his head
or spoke. Then he looked at Jean, who was staring
straight ahead and seeing nothing save what her thoughts
pictured.

He did not say a word about her going to Los Angeles.

He was the bottled-up type; the things that hit him
hardest he seldom mentioned, so by that rule it might
be inferred that her going hit hard. But his voice was
normally calm, and his tone was the tone of authority,
which Jean knew very well, and which nearly always
amused her because she firmly believed it to be utterly
useless.

He said in the tone of an ultimatum: "If you're
bound to stay at the ranch, you've got to have somebody
with you. I'll ride in and get Hepsy Atwood in the
morning. You're getting thin. I don't believe you
take time to cook enough to eat. You can't work on
soda crackers and sardines. The old lady won't charge
much to come and stay with you. I'll come over after
I'm through work to-morrow and help her get things
looking a little more like living."

"You'll do nothing of the sort." Jean looked at
him mutinously. "I'm all right just as I am. I
won't have her, Lite. That's settled."

"Sure, it's settled," Lite agreed, with more than his
usual pertinacity. "I'll have her out here by noon,
and a supply of real grub. How are you fixed for bedding?"

"I won't have her, I tell you. You're always trying
to make me do things I won't do. Don't be
silly."

"Sure not." Lite shifted in the saddle with the air
of a man who rides at perfect ease with himself and
with the world. "She'll likely have plenty of bedding
of her own," he meditated, after a brief silence.

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