“Well, I’m darned if you ain’t as nutty as dad was!  Of course, he was old and sick, and there was plenty of excuse for him to slop down along towards the last.  Now, listen!  My idea is to get a nifty bungalow out there handy to the studios, and both of us to go into pictures.  We can get a car; what I want is a speedy, sassy little boat that can travel.  Well, and listen.  We’ll have plenty to live on till we both land in stock.  I’ve got a good chance right now to work into a comedy company; they say my grin screens like a million dollars, and when it comes to making a comedy getaway I’m just geared right, somehow, to pull a laugh.  That college picture we made got me a lot of notice in the projection room, and I was only doing mob stuff, at that.  But I stood out.  And Walt’s promised me a fat little bit in this five-reeler.  I’ll land in stock before the summer’s half over!

“And you can land with some good company if you just make a stab at it.  Your eyes and that trick of looking up under your eyebrows are just the type for these sob leads, and you’ve got a good photographic face:  a good face for it,” he emphasized generously.  “And your figure couldn’t be beat.  Believe me, I know.  You ought to see some of them Janes—­and at that, they manage to get by with their stuff.  A little camera experience, under a good director that would bring out your good points—­I was going to spring the idea before, but I knew dad wouldn’t stand for it.”

“But we’ve got to go and live on that claim.  We’ve got to.”

Vic’s face purpled.  “Say, are you plumb bugs?  Why—­” Vic gulped and stuttered.  “Say, where do you get that stuff?  You better tie a can to it, sis; it don’t get over with me.  I’m for screen fame, and I’m going to get it too.  Why, by the time I’m twenty, I’ll betcha I can pull down a salary that’ll make Charlie Chaplin look like an extra!  Why, my grin—­”

“Your grin you can use on the goats,” Helen May quelled unfeelingly.  “I only hope it won’t scare the poor things to death.  You needn’t argue about it—­as if I was crazy to go!  Do you think I want to leave Los Angeles, and everybody I know, and everything I care about, and go to New Mexico and live like a savage, and raise goats?  I’d rather go to jail, if you ask me.  I hate the very thought of a ranch, Vic Stevenson, and you know I do.  But that doesn’t matter a particle.  Dad—­”

“I told you dad was crazy!” Vic’s tone was too violent for grief.  His young ambitions were in jeopardy, and even his dad’s death must look unimportant alongside the greater catastrophe that threatened.  “Do you think, for gosh sake, the whole family’s got to be nutty just because he was sick and got a queer streak?”

“You’ve no right to say that.  Dad—­knew what he was doing.”

“Aw, where do you get that dope?” Vic eyed her disgustedly, and with a good deal of condescension.  “If you had any sense, you’d knew he was queer for days before it happened. I noticed it, all right, and if you didn’t—­”