The Happy Family laughed together over the picture Applehead had crudely painted for them.  But Luck, although he had started the story, already was slipping away from the present and was trying to peer into the future.  He did not even hear what Applehead was saying to keep the boys in a roar of mirth.  He was mentally reckoning the number of days since he had wired his order for a C.O.D. shipment of negative to be rushed to Albuquerque.  Two days in Los Angeles, getting ready for the venture; two days on the way to Applehead’s ranch, one day here,—­five days altogether.  He had told them to rush the order.  If they did, there was a chance that it might have arrived.  He decided suddenly to make the trip and see; but first he would develop the exposed negative of the forenoon’s work.  He got up with that businesslike air which the Happy Family had already begun to recognize as a signal for quick action, and took off his coat.

“Happy, I wish you and Bud would carry me some water,” he said.  “I’ll show you where to put it; I’m going to need a lot.  Will you help me wind the film on my patent rack, Andy?  And I’ll want that little team hitched to the buckboard so I can go to town after I’m through.  I’ve got some hopes of my negative being there.”

“Want the rest of us to work on that stage, don’t you, boss?” Weary asked, pausing in the doorway to roll a smoke.  “And please may I wipe off my eyebrows?”

“Why, sure!—­to both questions,” answered Luck, going over to his camera.  “I can’t do much more till I get more negative, even with the light right, which it isn’t.  You go ahead and finish the stage this afternoon.  And be sure the uprights are guyed for a high wind; she sure can blow, in this man’s country.”

“You’re danged right, she can blow!” Applehead testified emphatically.  “She can blow, and she’s goin’ to blow.  You want to take your overshoes and mittens, boy, when you start out fer town.  You know how cold she can get on that mesa.  Chances are you’ll come back facin’ a blizzard.  And, say!  I wisht you’d take that there dog back with yuh, Luck, ’cause if yuh don’t, him and me’s shore goin’ to tangle, now I’m tellin’ yuh!  Mighty funny note when a cat dassent walk acrost his own dooryard in broad daylight, no more!  Poor ole Compadre was shakin’ like a leaf when I clumb up and got him down of’n the windmill.  Way the wind was whistlin’ up there, the chances are he’s done ketched cold in ’is tail, and if he has, yuh better see to it that thar dog ain’t within gunshot uh me, now I’m tellin’ yuh!”

Luck did not hear half the tirade.  He had gone into the dark room and was dissolving hypo for the fixing bath, while the boys tramped in with full water buckets and began to fill the barrels he had placed in a row along the wall.  He was impatient to see how his work of the forenoon would come out of the developer, and he was quite as impatient to be on his way to town.  Whether he admitted it or not, he had a good deal of faith in Applehead’s weather forecasts; he remembered how often the old fellow had predicted storms in the past when Luck spent a long winter with him here in this same adobe dwelling.  If it did snow, he must have plenty of negative for his winter scenes; for snow never laid long on the level here, and he had a full reel of winter stuff to make.