“He won’t,” said Luck suddenly, with a brightening of his eyes.  “He won’t.  I hope they do wobble.  You go ahead, Bud, and foam at the mouth.  You—­you look at Tracy Gray Joyce.  Not in the rehearsing, understand; leave out the foam and the gloating till we turn the camera on the scene.  Sabe?  On the quiet, boys.”

“Sure,” came the guarded chorus.  It was remarkable what a complete understanding there was between Luck and the Happy Family.  It was that complete understanding which had kept Luck’s spirits up during his unloved task of producing Bently Brown stuff in film.

“Well, say!” Big Medicine leaned close and throttled his voice down to a hoarse whisper.  “What kinda hee-ro will your Tracy Gray Joyce look like, when I start up foamin’ and gloatin’ at him?”

Luck smiled.  “That,” he said calmly, “is for the camera to find out.”  He was going to say something more on the subject, but some one called to him anxiously from over toward the office.  So he told them adios hurriedly and went his busy way, and left the Happy Family discussing him gravely among themselves.

The Happy Family were so interested in this new work that they were ready to see the bright side even of these weird performances which purported to be Western drama.  If you did not take it seriously, all this violence of dress and behavior was fun.  The Happy Family was slipping into a rivalry of violence; and the strange part of it was that Luck Lindsay, stickler for realism, self-confessed enthusiast on the uplifting of motion pictures to a fine art, permitted their violence,—­which was not as the violence of other, better trained Western actors.  The Happy Family, after their first self-conscious tendency to duck behind something or somebody, had come to forget the merciless, recording eye of the camera.  They had come to look upon their work as a game, played for the amusement of Luck Lindsay, who watched them always, and for the open ridicule of Bently Brown, writer of these tales of blood and heroics.

And Luck not only permitted but encouraged them in this exaggeration,—­to the amazement of the camera man who had turned the crank on more Western dramas than he could remember.  Scenes of violence—­such as the saloon row in which Big Medicine had forgotten that Pink was to be left alive, and so had killed him twice—­made the camera man and the assistant laugh when they should have shuddered; and to wonder why Luck Lindsay, wholly biased though he was in favor of the Happy Family, did not seem to realize that they were not getting the right punch into the pictures.

Luck was not behaving at all in his usual manner with his company.  Evenings, instead of holding himself aloof from his subordinates, he would head straight for the furnished bungalow which the Flying U boys had taken possession of, with Rosemary Green to give the home atmosphere which saved the place from becoming a mere bunk-house de luxe.  If he could possibly manage it, Luck would reach headquarters in time for dinner—­the Happy Family blandly called it supper, of course—­and would proceed to forget the day’s irritations while he ate what he ambiguously called “real cookin’.”