“Listen, Applehead! the public is going to get the idea that you sure hate yourself!” he remarked, standing with his hands on his hips while Applehead came strutting into the foreground.  “You’ll never make any one believe you were ever a real, honest-to-God sheriff.  They’ll put you down as an extra picked up through a free employment agency and feeling like you owned the plant because you’re earning a couple of dollars.  Go back down there to your horse and wait till some of that importance evaporates!”

Applehead went off swearing to himself, and Luck got a fifteen-foot scene of the departure of a very indignant sheriff who is with difficulty holding his anger subordinate to his official dignity.  Before he had time to recover his usual good humor, Luck with further disparaging comment called him back.  Applehead, smarting under the sarcasm, came ready for war, and Luck turned the crank until the sheriff was almost within reach of him.

“Gol darn you, Luck, I’ll take that there camery and bust it over your danged head!” he spluttered.  “I’ll show ye!  Call me a bum that’s wearin’ a shurf’s star fer the first time in his life, will ye!  Why, I’ll jest about wear ye out if—­”

“All right, pard; I was just aiming to make you come up looking mad.  You did fine.”  Luck stopped to roll a smoke as though nothing had occurred but tiresome routine.

Applehead looked down at him uncertainly.  He looked at the Happy Family, saw them grinning, and gave a mollified chuckle.  “We-ell, you was takin’ a danged long chance, now I’m tellin’ yuh, boy!” he warned.  “I was all set to tangle with yuh; and if I had, I reckon I’d a spiled something ’fore I got through.”

It was noon by the sun, and a film of haze was spreading across the sky.  Luck shot another scene or two and shouldered his precious camera reluctantly, when Rosemary, red-lidded but elaborately cheerful in her manner, called them in to dinner.

“She’s goin’ to storm, shore’s you live,” Applehead predicted, sniffing into the wind like a dog confronted by a strange scent.  A little later he looked up from his full plate with a worried air.  “How’s a storm goin’ to hit ye, Luck?” he asked.  “Kinda put a stop to the pitcher business, won’t it?”

“Not if it snows, it won’t,” Luck answered calmly, helping himself to the brown beans boiled with bacon.  “We’ll round up a bunch of cattle, and I’ll shoot my blizzard stuff.  I’ll need more negative, though, for that.  If I knew for sure it’s going to storm—­”

“I’m tellin’ yuh it is, ain’t I?” Applehead blew into his saucer of coffee,—­his table manners not being the nicest in the world.  “I kin smell snow two days off, and that there wind comin’ up the canyon has got snow behind it, now I’m tellin’ ye.  ’Nother thing, I kin tell by the way Compadre walks, liftin’ his feet high and bushin’ up what’s left of his tail.  That there cat’s smarter’n some humans, and he shore kin smell snow comin’, same’s I do.  He hates snow worse’n pizen.”  Applehead drank his coffee in great gulps.  “I’ll bet he’s huntin’ a warm corner somewheres, right now.”