And when Luck, who had always gone about his work impervious to curious onlookers, suddenly changed his method and ordered all interior sets screened in, and all bystanders away from the immediate vicinity of his exterior scenes, the Acme people began to call him “swell-headed”—­when they did not call him worse.  Even his excuse that he was working with boys new to the business and did not want them rattled failed to satisfy most of them.

The Happy Family, in the tiny, bare dressing rooms which they called box-stalls in merciless candor, were smearing their faces liberally with cold cream and still arguing among themselves over the doubtful blessing of owning as many lives as a cat, and bewailing the bruises they had received while sacrificing a few of their lives to the blood-lust of Big Medicine and Pink, the two official, Bently-Brown bad men.  Outside their two connecting “stalls” a fine drizzle was making the studio yard an empty place of churchyard gloom and incidentally justifying Luck in quitting so early.  Big Medicine was swabbing paint from his eyebrows and bellowing his opinion of a man that will keep a-comin’, by cripes, after he’s shot the third time at close range, and then kick because he takes so much killing off.  This was aimed at the Native Son, who had evidently died hard, and who meant to retaliate as soon as he got that dab of paint out of his eye.  But the door opened violently against his person and startled him into forgetting his next observation.

This was Luck, and he had the look of a man who owns a guilty secret, and is ready to be rather proud of his guilt,—­providing society consents to wink at it with him.  He was not smiling, exactly; he had a wicked kind of twinkle in his eyes.

“Hurry up, boys!  My Lord, how you fellows do primp and jangle in here!  They’re going to run our first picture, The Soul of Littlefoot Law.  Don’t you fel—­”

“The which?” Big Medicine whirled upon him, rubbing his left eye into a terrifying, bloodshot condition while he glared with the other.

“The Soul of Littlefoot Law,” Luck repeated distinctly with a perfect neutrality of manner.

“‘S that what you call all that ridin’ and shootin’ we done, that you said was by moonlight?” Pink inquired pugnaciously—­for a young man who had died the death four different times that day.

“That’s what it’s called,” Luck averred with firmness.

“Aw—­where does Soul of Littlefoot Law come in at?” Happy Jack scoffed.

“It doesn’t, so far as I know.”

“Aw, there ain’t no sense in such a name as that.  Is that where I got shot off’n my horse, and Bud, here, done his best to run over me?”

“That’s the one.  My Lord, boys, how long does it take you fellows to get your make-up off?  They’ll have the film run and passed and released and out on the five-cent circuit on its fifteenth round before you—­” Luck, director though he was, found it wise to pass out quickly and hold the door shut behind him for a minute.  “Honest, boys, you want to hurry,” he called through the closed door.  He waited until the sounds within indicated that they were hurrying quite violently, and then he went his way; and he still had the look in his eyes of one who bears in his soul a secret guilt of which he is inclined to be proud.