Jean of the Lazy A

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"I've tied my rope, Lite," Jean drawled, with a
little laugh at what might happen.

Lite turned his face toward her. "You better not,"
be warned. "Things are liable to start a-popping
when that engine wakes up."

"Well, then I'll want both hands for Pard. I've
taken a couple of half-hitches, anyway."

"You folks want to be ready at the wheels," Lite
directed, waiving the argument. "When we start, you
all want to heave-ho together. Good team-work will
do it.

"All set?" he called to Jean, when Pete Lowry bent
his back to start the engine. "Business'll be pickin'
up, directly!"

"All set," replied Jean cheerfully.

It seemed then that everything began to start at once,
and to start in different directions. The engine snorted
and pounded so that the whole machine shook with ague.
When Pete jumped in and threw in the clutch, there
was a backfire that sounded like the crack of doom. The
two horses went wild, as their riders had half expected
them to do. They lunged away from the horror behind
them, and the slack ropes tightened with a jerk.
Both were good rope horses, and the strain of the ropes
almost recalled them to sanity and their training; at
least they held the ropes tight for a few seconds, so that
the machine jumped ahead and veered toward the
firmer soil beside the trail, in response to Pete's turn
of the wheel.

Then Pard looked back and saw the thing coming
after him, and tried to bolt. When he found that he
could not, because of the rope, he bucked as he had not
done since he was a half-broken broncho. That started
Lite Avery's horse to pitching; and Pete, absorbed in
watching what would have made a great picture, forgot
to shut off the gas.

Robert Grant Burns picked himself out of the sand
where he had sprawled at the first wild lunge of the
machine, and saw Pete Lowry, humped over the wheel like
any speed demon, go lurching off across the hollow in
the wake of two fear-crazed animals, that threatened at
any instant to bolt off at an angle that would overturn
the car.

Then Lite let his rope slip from the saddle-horn and
spurred his horse to one side, out of the danger zone of
the other, while he felt frantically in his pockets for his
knife.

"Don't you cut my rope," Jean warned, when she
saw him come plunging toward her, knife in hand.
"This is--fine training--for Pard!"

Pete came to himself, then, and killed the engine
before he landed in the bottom of a yawning, water-
washed hole, and Lite rode close and slashed Jean's
rope, in spite of her protest; whereupon Pard went off
up the, slope as though witches were riding him
hard.

At long rifle range, he circled and faced the thing that
had scared him so, and after a little Jean persuaded
him to go back as far as the trail. Nearer he would not
stir, so she waited there for Lite.

"Never even thanked us," Lite grumbled when he
came up, his mouth stretched in a wide smile. "That
girl with the kalsomine on her face made remarks about
folks butting in. And the fat man talked into his
double chin; dunno what all he was saying. Here's
what's left of your rope. I'll get you another one,
Jean. I was afraid that gazabo was going to run over
you, is why I cut it."

"What's the matter over there? Aren't they glad
they're out of the sand?" Jean held her horse quiet
while she studied the buzzing group.

"Something busted. I guess we done some damage."
Lite grinned and watched them over his shoulder.

"You needn't go any further with me, Lite. That
fat man's the one that had the cattle. I am going over
to the ranch for awhile, but don't tell Aunt Ella." She
turned to ride on up the hill toward the Lazy A, but
stopped for another look at the perturbed motorists.
"Well anyway, we snaked them out of the sand, didn't
we, Lite?"

"We sure did," Lite chuckled. "They don't seem
thankful, but I guess they ain't any worse off than they
was before. Anyway, it serves them right. They've
no business here acting fresh."

Lite said that because he was not given the power
to peer into the future, and so could not know that
Fate herself had sent Robert Grant Burns into their
lives; and that, by a somewhat roundabout method, she
was going to use the Great Western Film Company and
Jean and himself for her servants in doing a work
which Fate had set herself to do.

CHAPTER VIII

JEAN SPOILS SOMETHING

Jean found the padlock key where she had hidden
it under a rock ten feet from the door, and let
herself into her room. The peaceful familiarity of
its four walls, and the cheerful patch of sunlight lying
warm upon the faded rag carpet, gave her the feeling
of security and of comfort which she seldom felt elsewhere.

She wandered aimlessly around the room, brushing
the dust from her books and straightening a tiny fold
in the cradle quilt. She ran an investigative forefinger
along the seat of her father's saddle, brought the finger
away dusty, pulled one of the stockings from the
overflowing basket and used it for a dust cloth. She
wiped and polished the stamped leather with a painstaking
tenderness that had in it a good deal of yearning,
and finally left it with a gesture of hopelessness.

She went next to her desk and fumbled the quirt that
lay there still. Then she pulled out the old ledger,
picked up a pencil, and began to write, sitting on the
arm of an old, cane-seated chair while she did so. As
I told you before, Jean never wrote anything in that
book except when her moods demanded expression of
some sort; when she did write, she said exactly what
she thought and felt at the time. So if you are
permitted to know what she wrote at this time, you will
have had a peep into Jean's hidden, inner life that
none of her world save Lite knew anything about. She
wrote rapidly, and she did not always take the trouble
to finish her sentences properly,--as if she never could
quite keep pace with her thoughts. So this is what
that page held when finally she slammed the book shut
and slid it back into the desk:

I don't know what's the matter with me lately. I feel
as if I wanted to shoot somebody, or rob a bank or run
away--I guess it's the old trouble nagging at me. I KNOW
dad never did it. I don't know why, but I know it just the
same--and I know Uncle Carl knows it too. I'd like to
take out his brain and put it into some scientific machine
that would squeeze out his thoughts--hope it wouldn't hurt
him--I'd give him ether, maybe. What I want is money
--enough to buy back this place and the stock. I don't
believe Uncle Carl spent as much defending dad as he claims
he did--not enough to take the whole ranch anyway. If
I had money I'd find Art Osgood if I had to hunt from
Alaska to Africa--don't believe he went to Alaska at all.
Uncle Carl thinks so. . . . I'd like the price of that machine I
helped drag out of the sand--some people can
have anything they want but all I want is dad back, and this
place the way it was before. . . .

If I had any brains I could write something wonderful
and be rich and famous and do the things I want to do--
but there's no profit in just feeling wonderful things; if I
could make the world see and feel what I see and feel--
when I'm here, or riding alone. . . .

If I could find Art Osgood I believe I could make him
tell--I know he knows something, even if he didn't do it
himself. I believe he did--But what can you do when
you're a woman and haven't any money and must stay where
you're put and can't even get out and do the little you might
do, because somebody must have you around to lean on and
tell their troubles to. . . . I don't blame Aunt Ella so much
--but thank goodness, I can do without a shoulder to weep
on, anyway. What's life for if you've got to spend your
days hopping round and round in a cage. It wouldn't be
a cage if I could have dad back--I'd be doing things for
him all the time and that would make life worth while.
Poor dad--four more years is--I can't think about it. I'll
go crazy if I do--

It was there that she stopped and slammed the book
shut, and pushed it back out of sight in the desk. She
picked up her hat and gloves, and went out with
blurred eyes, and began to climb the bluff above the
little spring, where a faint, little-used trail led to the
benchland above. By following a rock ledge to where
it was broken, and climbing through the crevice to
where the trail marked faintly the way to the top, one
could in a few minutes leave the Lazy A coulee out of
sight below, and stand on a high level where the winds
blew free from the mountains in the west to the mountains
in the east.

Some day, it was predicted, the benchland would be
cut into squares and farmed,--some day when the government
brought to reality a long-talked-of irrigation
project. But in the meantime, the land lay unfenced
and free. One could look far away to the north, and
at certain times see the smoke of passing trains through
the valley off there. One could look south to the
distant river bluffs, and east and west to the mountains.
Jean often climbed the bluff just for the wide outlook
she gained. The cage did not seem so small when she
could stand up there and tire her eyes with looking.
Life did not seem quite so purposeless, and she could
nearly always find little whispers of hope in the winds
that blew there.

She walked aimlessly and yet with a subconscious
purpose for ten minutes or so, and her face was turned
directly toward the eastern hills. She stopped on the
edge of the bluff that broke abruptly there, and sat
down and stared at the soft purple of the hills and the
soft green of the nearer slopes, and at the peaceful blue
of the sky arched over it all. Her eyes cleared of their
troubled look and grew dreamy. Her mouth lost its
tenseness and softened to a half smile. She was not
looking now into the past that was so full of heartbreak,
but into the future as hope pictured it for her.

She was seeing the Lazy A alive again and all astir
with the business of life; and her father saddling Sioux
and riding out to look after the stock. She was seeing
herself riding with him,--or else cooking the things
he liked best for his dinner when he came back hungry.
She sat there for a long, long while and never moved.

A sparrow hawk swooped down quite close to Jean
and then shot upward with a little brown bird in its
claws, and startled her out of her castle building. She
felt a hot anger against the hawk, which was like the
sudden grasp of misfortune; and a quick sympathy
with the bird, which was like herself and dad, caught
unawares and held helpless. But she did not move,
and the hawk circled and came back on his way to the
nesting-place in the trees along the creek below. He
came quite close, and Jean shot him as he lifted his
wings for a higher flight. The hawk dropped head
foremost to the grass and lay there crumpled and quiet.

Jean put back her gun in its holster and went over
to where the hawk lay. The little brown bird fluttered
terrifiedly and gave a piteous, small chirp when
her hand closed over it, and then lay quite still in her
cupped palms and blinked up at her.

Jean cuddled it up against her cheek, and talked to
it and pitied it and promised it much in the way of
fat little bugs and a warm nest and her tender regard.
For the hawk she had no pity, nor a thought beyond
the one investigative glance she gave its body to make
sure that she had hit it where she meant to hit it. Lite
had taught her to shoot like that,--straight and quick.
Lite was a man who trimmed life down to the essentials,
and he had long ago impressed it upon her that
if she could not shoot quickly, and hit where she aimed,
there was not much use in her attempting to shoot at
all. Jean proved by her scant interest in the hawk
how well she had learned the lesson, and how sure she
was of hitting where she aimed.

The little brown bird had been gashed in the breast
by a sharp talon. Jean was much concerned over the
wound, even though it did not reach any vital organ.
She was afraid of septic poisoning, she told the bird;
but added comfortingly: "There--you needn't
worry one minute over that. I'm almost sure there's
a bottle of peroxide down at the house, that isn't spoiled.
We'll go and put some on it right away; and then we'll
go bug-hunting. I believe I know where there's the
fattest, juiciest bugs!" She cuddled the bird against
her cheek, and started back across the wide point of
the benchland to where the trail led down the bluff to
the house.

She was wholly absorbed in the trouble of the little
brown bird; and the trail, following a crevice through
the rocks and later winding along behind some scant
bushes, partially concealed the buildings and the house
yard from view until one was well down into the coulee.
So it was not until she was at the spring, looking at the
moist earth there for fat bugs for the bird, that she had
any inkling of visitors. Then she heard voices and
went quickly around the corner of the house toward the
sound.

It seemed to her that she was lately fated to come
plump into the middle of that fat Mr. Burns' unauthorized
picture-making. The first thing she saw when
she rounded the corner was the camera perched high
upon its tripod and staring at her with its one round
eye; and the humorous-eyed Pete Lowry turning a
crank at the side and counting in a whisper. Close
beside her the two women were standing in animated
argument which they carried on in undertones with
many gestures to point their meaning.

"Hey, you're in the scene!" called Pete Lowry, and
abruptly stopped counting and turning the crank.

"You're in the scene, sister. Step over here to one
side, will you?" The fat director waved his pink-
cameoed hand impatiently.

An old bench had been placed beside the house,
under a window. Jean backed a step and sat down upon
the bench, and looked from one to the other. The two
women glanced at her wide-eyed and moved away with
mutual embracings. Jean lifted her hands and looked
at the soft little crest and beady eyes of the bird, to make
sure that it was not disturbed by these strangers, before
she gave her attention to the expostulating Mr.
Burns.

"Did I spoil something?" she inquired casually,
and watched curiously the pulling of many feet of narrow
film from the camera.

"About fifteen feet of good scene," Pete Lowry told
her dryly, but with that queer, half smile twisting his
lips.

Jean looked at him and decided that, save for the
company he kept, which made of him a latent enemy,
she might like that lean man in the red sweater who
wore a pencil over one ear and was always smiling to
himself about something. But what she did was to
cross her feet and murmur a sympathetic sentence to
the little brown bird. Inwardly she resented deeply
this bold trespass of Robert Grant Burns; but she
meant to guard against making herself ridiculous again.
She meant to be sure of her ground before she ordered
them off. The memory of her humiliation before the
supposed rustlers was too vivid to risk a repetition of
the experience.

"When you're thoroughly rested," said Robert
Grant Burns, in the tone that would have shriveled the
soul of one of his actors, "we'd like to make that scene
over."

"Thank you. I am pretty tired," she said in that
soft, drawly voice that could hide so effectually her
meaning. She leaned her head against the wall and
gave a luxurious sigh, and crossed her feet the other
way. She believed that she knew why Robert Grant
Burns was growing so red in the face and stepping about
so uneasily, and why the women were looking at her
like that. Very likely they expected her to prove
herself crude and uncivilized, but she meant to disappoint
them even while she made them all the trouble she
could.

She pushed back her hat until its crown rested
against the rough boards, and cuddled the little brown
bird against her cheek again, and talked to it
caressingly. Though she seemed unconscious of his
presence, she heard every word that Robert Grant Burns
was muttering to himself. Some of the words were
plain, man-sized swearing, if she were any judge of
language. It occurred to her that she really ought to
go and find that peroxide, but she could not forego the
pleasure of irritating this man.

"I always supposed that fat men were essentially;
sweet-tempered," she observed to the world in general,
when the mutterings ceased for a moment.

"Gee! I'd like to make that," Pete Lowry said in an
undertone to his assistant.

Jean did not know that he referred to herself and
the unstudied picture she made, sitting there with her
hat pushed back, and the little bird blinking at her
from between her cupped palms. But she looked at
him curiously, with an impulse to ask questions about
what he was doing with that queer-looking camera, and
how he could inject motion into photography. While
she watched, he drew out a narrow, gray strip of film
and made mysterious markings upon it with the pencil,
which he afterwards thrust absent-mindedly behind his
ear. He closed a small door in the side of the camera,
placed his palm over the lens and turned the little
crank several times around. Then he looked at Jean,
and from her to the director.

Robert Grant Burns gave a sweeping, downward
gesture with both hands,--a gesture which his company
knew well,--and came toward Jean.

"You may not know it," he began in a repressed
tone, "but we're in a hurry. We've got work to do.
We ain't here on any pleasure excursion, and you'll be
doing me a favor by getting out of the scene so we can
go on with our work."

Jean sat still upon the bench and looked at him.
"I suppose so; but why should I be doing you favors?
You haven't seemed to appreciate them, so far. Of
course, I dislike to seem disobliging, or anything like
that, but your tone and manner would not make any
one very enthusiastic about pleasing you, Mr. Burns.
In fact, I don't see why you aren't apologizing for being
here, instead of ordering me about as if I worked for
you. This bench--is my bench. This ranch--is
where I have lived nearly all my life. I hate to seem
vain, Mr. Burns, but at the same time I think it is
perfectly lovely of me to explain that I have a right
here; and I consider myself an angel of patience and
graciousness and many other rare virtues, because I
have not even hinted that you are once more taking
liberties with other people's property." She looked at
him with a smile at the corners of her eyes and just
easing the firmness of her lips, as if the humor of the
situation was beginning to appeal to her.

"If you would stop dancing about, and let your
naturally sweet disposition have a chance, and would
explain just why you are here and what you want to do,
and would ask me nicely,--it might help you more
than to get apoplexy over it."

The two women exclaimed under their breaths to
each other and moved farther away, as if from an
impending explosion. The assistant camera man gurgled
and turned his back abruptly. Lee Milligan, wandering
up from the stables, stopped and stared. No one,
within the knowledge of those present, had ever spoken
so to Robert Grant Burns; no one had ever dreamed of
speaking thus to him. They had seen him when rage
had mastered him and for slighter cause; it was not an
experience that one would care to repeat.

Robert Grant Burns walked up to Jean as if he meant
to lift her from the bench and hurl her by sheer brute
force out of his way. He stopped so close to her that
his shadow covered her.

"Are you going to get out of the way so we can go
on?" he asked, in the tone of one who gives a last
merciful chance of escape from impending doom.

"Are you going to explain why you're here, and
apologize for your tone and manner, which are
extremely rude?" Jean did not pay his rage the
compliment of a glance at him. She was looking at the
dainty beak of the little brown bird, and was telling
herself that she could not be bullied into losing control
of herself. These two women should not have the satisfaction of
calling her a crude, ignorant, country girl;
and Robert Grant Burns should not have the triumph
of browbeating her into yielding one inch of ground.
She forced herself to observe the wonderfully delicate
feathers on the bird's head. It seemed more content
now in the little nest her two palms had made for it.
Its heart did not flutter so much, and she fancied that
the tiny, bead-like eyes were softer in their bright
regard of her.

Robert Grant Burns came to a pause. Jean sensed
that he was waiting for some reply, and she looked up
at him. His hand was just reaching out to her shoulder,
but it dropped instead to his coat pocket and fumbled
for his handkerchief. Her eyes strayed to Pete
Lowry. He was looking upward with that measuring
glance which belongs to his profession, estimating the
length of time the light would be suitable for the scene
he had focussed. She followed his glance to where the
shadow of the kitchen had crept closer to the bench.
Jean was not stupid, and she had passed through the
various stages of the kodak fever; she guessed what
was in the mind of the operator, and when she met his
eyes full, she smiled at him sympathetically.

"I should dearly love to watch you work," she said
to him frankly. "But you see how it is; Mr. Burns
hasn't got hold of himself yet. If he comes to his
senses before he has a stroke of apoplexy, will you show
me how you run that thing?"

"You bet I will," the red-sweatered one promised
her cheerfully.

"How much longer will it be before this bench is in
the shade?" she asked him next.

"Half an hour,--maybe a little longer." Pete
glanced again anxiously upward.

"And--how long do these spasms usually last?"
Jean's head tilted toward Robert Grant Burns as
impersonally as if she were indicating a horse with
colic.

But the camera man had gone as far as was wise,
if he cared to continue working for Burns, and he made
no reply whatever. So Jean turned her attention to
the man whose bulk shaded her from the sun, and
whose remarks would have been wholly unforgivable
had she not chosen to ignore them.

"If you really are anxious to go on making pictures,
why don't you stop all that ranting and be sensible
about it?" she asked him. "You can't bully me into
being afraid of you, you know. And really, you are
making an awful spectacle of yourself, going on like
that."

"Listen here! Are you going to get off that bench
and out of the scene?" By a tremendous effort Robert
Grant Burns spoke that sentence with a husky kind of
calm.

"That all depends upon yourself, Mr. Burns. First,
I want to know by what right you come here with your
picture-making. You haven't explained that yet, you
know."

The highest paid director of the Great Western Film
Company looked at her long. With her head tilted
back, Jean returned the look.

"Oh, all right--all right," he surrendered finally.
"Read that paper. That ought to satisfy you that we
ain't trespassing here or anywhere else. And if you'd
kindly,"--and Mr. Burns emphasized the word
"kindly,"--"remove yourself to some other spot that
is just as comfortable--"

Jean did not even hear him, once she had the paper
in her hands and had begun to read it. So Robert
Grant Burns folded his arms across his heaving chest
and watched her and studied her and measured her
with his mind while she read. He saw the pulling
together of her eyebrows, and the pinching of her under-
lip between her teeth. He saw how she unconsciously
sheltered the little brown bird under her left hand in
her lap because she must hold the paper with the other,
and he quite forgot his anger against her.

Sitting so, she made a picture that appealed to him.
Had you asked him why, he would have said that she
was the type that would photograph well, and that she
had a screen personality; which would have been high
praise indeed, coming from him.

Jean read the brief statement that in consideration
of a certain sum paid to him that day by Robert G.
Burns, her uncle, Carl Douglas, thereby gave the said
Robert G. Burns permission to use the Lazy A ranch
and anything upon it or in any manner pertaining to
it, for the purpose of making motion pictures. It was
plainly set forth that Robert G. Burns should be held
responsible for any destruction of or damage to the
property, and that he might, for the sum named, use
any cattle bearing the Lazy A or Bar O brands for the
making of pictures, so long as he did them no injury
and returned them in good condition to the range from
which he had gathered them.

Jean recognized her uncle's ostentatious attempt at
legal phraseology and knew, even without the evidence
of his angular writing, that the document was genuine.
She knew also that Robert Grant Burns was justified in
ordering her off that bench; she had no right there,
where he was making his pictures. She forced back
the bitterness that filled her because of her own
helplessness, and folded the paper carefully. The little
brown bird chirped shrilly and fluttered a feeble protest
when she took away her sheltering hand. Jean
returned the paper hastily to its owner and took up the
bird.

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