“They certainly did laugh,” Luck lazily interrupted.  “And believe me, Mr. Brown, it takes real stuff to collect a laugh out of that bunch.  It will be a riot with the public; you can bank on that.  By the time I get a few more made and released, you can expect to see your name in the papers without paying advertising rates.”  Whatever possessed Luck to talk that way to Bently Brown, I cannot say.  He surely must have seen that the little, over-costumed author was choking with spleen.

“It was a farce!” The small, yellow mustache of Bently Brown was twitching comically with the tremble of his lips beneath.  “A bald, unmitigated farce!”

“Surest thing you know,” Luck agreed, with that little chuckle of his.  “At first I was afraid the crowd wouldn’t get it; I didn’t know but they might try to take it seriously.  Now, I know for certain that it will get over.  It will be the cleanest, funniest, farce-comedy series that has ever been filmed.”  Luck sat up straight and pulled a cigar from his pocket and looked at it absent-mindedly.  “Say, those boys of mine are certainly real ones!  I wouldn’t trade that bunch for the highest-salaried actors you could hand me.  Do you know what made that picture such a scream?  It was because there wasn’t a bit of made-to-order comedy business in the whole film.  Those boys didn’t think about acting funny just to make folks laugh.  They were so doggoned busy having fun with the story and showing up its weak points that they forgot to be self-conscious.  If I’d had a regular comedy company working on it, believe me, Mr. Brown, it might have turned out almost as rotten a farce as it would be as a drama!”

Had Bently Brown owned under his pink skin any of the primitive instincts which he was so fond of portraying in his characters, he would have killed Luck without any further argument or delay.

Instead of that he spluttered and stormed like a scolding woman.  He lifted first one puttee and then the other, and he shook his fist, and he nodded his head violently, and finally was constrained to lift the leather-banded Stetson from his blond hair and wipe the perspiration from his brow with a lavender initialed handkerchief.  He said a great deal in a very few minutes, but it was too involved, too incoherent to be repeated here.  Luck gathered, however, that he meant to sue the Acme Company for about nine million dollars damages to his feelings and his reputation, if The Soul of Littlefoot Law was released in its present form.  He battered at Luck’s grinning composure with his full supply of invectives.  When he perceived that Luck’s eyes twinkled more and more while they watched him, and that Luck’s smile was threatening to explode into laughter, Bently Brown shook his fist at the two of them, shrilled something about seeing his lawyer at once, and went out and slammed the door.

“Lor-dee!  He’d make a hit in comedy, that fellow,” Luck observed placidly, and lighted the cigar he had been holding.  “What’s he mean—­’ sue the company’?”