“Listen.  If you boys are game for this melodrama, I’d like to use you, all right.  You’ll get experience in the business, anyway, so maybe it won’t do you any harm.  And if the weather holds good, we’ll just make a long hard drive of this bunch of drivel; we’ll rush ’em through—­sabe?  And I’ll make it my business to see that Mart doesn’t unload any more of the same.  You may even get some fun out of it, seeing you’re not fed up on this said Western drama, the way I am.  Anyway, what’s the word?  Shall I hop into the machine and go down and buy you fellows a bunch of return tickets, or shall I assign you your parts and wade into this blood and bullets business?”

Weary folded his arms and grinned down at Luck.  “I’m all for the blood and bullets, myself,” he said promptly.  “I’m just crazy to come shooting and yelling down this little imitation street and do things that are bold and bad.”

“I should think,” interjected Rosemary Green, with a pretty viciousness, “that you’d be ashamed, Luck Lindsay!  Do you think we are a bunch of quitters?  Give me a part—­and a gun—­and I’ll stand on a ladder behind that hotel window and shoot ’em as fast as they can turn the corner down there.”  Her brown eyes twinkled hearteningly at him.  “I’ll pull my hair down, and yell and shoot and wring my hands—­Pink, you keep still!  I’m positive I can shoot and wring my hands at the same time in a Bently Brown story, can’t I, Luck?”

“You certainly can,” Luck told her grimly.  “You can do worse than that and get by.  Well, all right, folks.  You prowl around and kill time while I get ready to start.  There won’t be anything doing till after lunch, at the earliest, so make yourselves at home.  I’d introduce you to some of these folks if it was worth while, but it ain’t.  You’ll know them soon enough—­most of them to your sorrow, at that.”  He turned on his heel with a hasty “See yuh later,” and plunged into the work before him just as energetically as though his heart were in it.

CHAPTER SIX

VILLAINS ALL AND PROUD OF IT

“Day’s work, boys!” called Luck through his little megaphone at three o’clock one day, and doubled up his working script that was much crumpled and scribbled with hasty pencil marks.  “No use spoiling good film,” he remarked to his assistant, glancing up at the sweeping fog bank, off to the west.  “By the time we rehearse the next scene, she’ll be too dark to shoot.  You go and order these cavalry costumes, Beckitt; and, say!  You tell them down there that if they’re shy on the number, they better set down and make enough, because they won’t see a cent of our money if there’s so much as a canteen lacking.  And tell ’em to send army guns.  That last assortment of junk they sent out was pathetic.  I want equipment for fifty U.S.  Cavalry, time of the early eighties.  That don’t mean forty-nine—­get me?  You’re inclined to let those fellows have it their own way too much.  I want this cavalry—­”