“We’ll put this thing through alone, if we do it at all,” Luck told him bluntly.  “Can’t afford to work with borrowed capital; the risk is too great.  Sure, I’ll sell the car.  I was thinking of it, anyway,” he testified falsely but reassuringly.  “We’ll need every cent I can raise.  There’s chemicals and Lord knows what all; and when we come to making our prints and marketing, why—­” he threw out both hands expressively.  “If we land in Albuquerque with five thousand dollars and our outfit, we won’t have a cent to throw away.  At that, we’ll have to squeeze every nickel till it hollers, before we’re through.  Believe me, boys, this is going to be some undertaking!”

“Nice, comfortable way you’ve got of painting things cheerful,” the Native Son drawled ironically.

“That’s all right.  I want you to realize what it’s going to be like before you get in so far you can’t back out.”

“Aw, who’s said anything about backing out?” Happy Jack grumbled.

“Let’s get right down to brass tacks and see how strong we can go on money,” Andy suggested, pulling a pencil out of an inner pocket.  “Here, girl, you do the bookkeeping while we call off the size of our pile.  Put ’er down in this book till you can get another one.  You can set me down for two seventy-five—­or make it three hundred.  I can scrape it up, all right.  How about you, Pink?  This is hard-boiled figures, now, and no guess work.”

Pink blew a mouthful of smoke while he did a little mental calculation.  Then he took his twisted-leather purse and emptied it into his saucer.  He investigated all his pockets and added eighty-five cents in small change.  Then he gravely began to count, not disdaining three pennies in the pile.  “I’ve got seventy-five dollars in the bank,” he said.  “Add ninety dollars salary, and you have a hundred and sixty-five.  Add six dollars and eighty-seven cents, and you have—­my pile.”

Rosemary twisted her lips and wrote the figures opposite Pink’s name.  Next came Weary, then Miguel and Big Medicine and the dried little man who chewed violently upon a wooden toothpick and said he was good for eight hundred, and mebby a little mite more.

They pushed their plates to the table’s center to make room for their gesticulating hands and uneasy elbows while they planned ways and means.  They argued over trivial points and left the big ones for Luck to settle.  They talked of light effects and wholesale grocery lists and ray filters and smoke pots and railroad fares and the problem of cutting down their baggage so as to avoid paying excess charges.  Luck, once he had taken the mental plunge into the deep waters of so hazardous an enterprise, began to exhibit a most amazing knowledge of the details of picture making.