“By gracious, I believe the son-of-a-gun is about froze,” he snapped out then; Luck grinned mirthlessly and called to Annie for the precious thermos bottle, and poured a cup of strong black coffee, added a generous dash of the apricot brandy which he spoke of familiarly as his “cure-all,” and had the Native Son very much alive and tramping around to restore the circulation to his chilled limbs before Bill Holmes had carried the camera to the location of the next scene.

“By rights I should have left you the way you were till I got this last death scene where Andy buries you under the rock ledge so he can get home alive himself,” Luck told Miguel heartlessly, when they were ready for work again.  “You were in proper condition, brother.  But I’m human.  So you’ll have to do a little more acting, from now on.”

With his mats placed with careful precision, he took his dissolve “vision stuff” of the blizzard and the death of Miguel,—­scenes which were to torment the conscience of Andy the rustler into full repentance and confession to his father.  While the boys huddled around Annie’s camp fire and guzzled hot coffee and ate chilled sandwiches, Luck took some fine scenes of the phantom herd marching eerily along the skyline of a little slope.

He “shot” every effective blizzard scene he had dreamed of so despairingly when the weather was fine.  Some scenes of especial importance to his picture he took twice, so as to have the “choice-of-action” so much prized by producers.  This, you must know, was a luxury in which Luck had not often permitted himself to indulge.  With raw negative at nearly four cents a foot, he had made it a point to shoot only such scenes as gave every promise of being exactly what he wanted.  But with this precious blizzard that numbed his fingers most realistically while he worked, but never once worried him for fear the sun was going to shine before he had finished, he was as lavish of negative as though he had a million-dollar corporation at his back.

That evening, when they were luxuriating before the fireplace heaped with dry wood which the flames were licking greedily, Luck became, for the first time in months, the old Luck Lindsay who had fascinated them at the Flying U. He told them stories of his days with the “Bill show,” and called upon the giggling Annie-Many-Ponies for proof of their truth; whereat Annie-Many-Ponies would nod her head vigorously and declare that it was “No lie.  I see him plenty times do them thing.  I know.”  He disputed energetically with Big Medicine over the hardships of the day’s work; and as a demonstration of the fact that he was perfectly able to go out right then and shoot another seven hundred feet of film, he seized upon the tom-tom which Annie-Many-Ponies had made from a green calf hide and an old cheese box, and in his moccasins he danced the Sioux Buffalo Dance and several other dances in which Annie-Many-Ponies finally joined and teetered around in the circle which the Happy Family enthusiastically widened for the performers.