Bill grunted.  Evidently he got it, for he said no more about his head, or about sleep.  He did glance frequently out of the tail of his eye at Luck’s absorbed face with his jaw set at a determined angle and his great mop of iron-gray hair looking like a heavy field of grain after a thunderstorm, standing out as it did in every direction.  Now and then Luck pushed it back impatiently with the flat of his palm, but he showed no other sign of being conscious of anything at all save the picture; though he could have told you offhand just how many times Bill turned his eyes upon him.

At noon they were not through, and to Bill the attempt to finish that day seemed hopeless, not to say insane.  But by four o’clock they were done with the cutting and joining, and had their film carefully packed and in the mountain wagon, and were ready to drive through the slushy mud which was the aftermath of the blizzard to the little house in Albuquerque which the boys had turned into a crude but efficient laboratory.

There Luck continued to be merciless in his driving energy.  He canvassed the moving-picture theaters of the town and borrowed reels on which to wind his film when it was once ready for winding.  He went back to the little house and set every one within it to work and kept them at it.  He printed his positive, dissolved his aniline dye, which was to be firelight effect, in the bathtub,—­and I should like to know what the landlord thought when next he viewed that tub!  He made an orange bath for sunrise effects in one of the stationary tubs, and his light blue for night tints in the other.  He buzzed around in that little house like a disturbed blue-bottle fly that cannot find an open window.  He had his sleeves rolled to his shoulders and his hair more tousled than ever; he had blue circles under his eyes and dabs of dye distributed here and there on his face and his arms; he had in his eyes the glitter of a man who means to be obeyed instantly and implicitly, whatever his command may be,—­and if you want to know, he was obeyed in just that manner.

Happy Jack and Big Medicine took turns at the crank of the big drying drum, around which Andy and Weary had carefully wound the wet film.  Being a crude, home-made affair, the crank that kept that drum turning over and over did not work with the ease of ball-bearings.  But Happy Jack, rolling his eyes up at Luck when he hurried past to attend to something somewhere, did not venture his opinion of the task.  Nor did Big Medicine bellow any facetious remarks whatever, but turned and sweated, and used the other hand awhile, and turned and turned, and goggled at Luck whenever Luck came within his range of vision, and changed off to the other hand and turned and turned, and still said nothing at all.

Bill Holmes went to sleep about midnight and came near ruining a batch of firelight scenes in the analine bath, and after that Luck did all the technical part of the work himself.  The Happy Family did what they could and wished they were not so ignorant and could do more.  They could not, for instance, help Luck in the final assembling of the polished film and the putting in of the sub-titles and inserts.  But they could polish that film, after he showed them how; so Pink and Weary did that.  And at daylight Luck shook Bill Holmes awake and set him to work again.