“Well, it won’t hurt you to skip a lesson and have dinner with me,” Luck suggested in the offhand way that robbed the invitation of the sting of charity.  “I always did hate to eat alone.”

The upshot of the meeting was that, when Luck gathered up the lines, next day, and popped the short lash of Applehead’s home-made whip over the backs of the little bay team, and told them to “Get outa town!” in a tone that had in it a boyish note of exultation, the thin youth hung to the seat of the bouncing buckboard and wondered if Luck really could drive, or if he was half “stewed” and only imagined he could.  The thin youth had much to learn besides the science of photography and some of it he learned during that fifteen-mile drive.  For one thing, he learned that really Luck could drive.  Luck proved that by covering the fifteen miles in considerably less than an hour and a half without losing any of his precious load of boxed negative and coiled garden hose and assistant camera-man,—­since that was what he intended to make of the thin youth.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“I THINK YOU NEED INDIAN GIRL FOR PICTURE”

Still it did not snow, though the wind blew from the storm quarter, and Applehead sniffed it and made predictions, and Compadre went with his remnant of tail ruffed like a feather boa.  Immediately after supper Luck attached his new hose to the tank faucet and developed the corral scenes which he had taken, with the thin youth taking his first lesson in the dark room.  The thin youth, who said his name was Bill Holmes, did not have very much to say, but he seemed very quick to grasp all that Luck told him.  That kept Luck whistling softly between sentences, while they wound the negative around the roped half barrel that had not so much as a six penny nail in it this time, so thoroughly did Andy do his work.

The whistling ceased abruptly when Luck examined his film by the light of the ruby lamp, however, for every scene was over-exposed and worthless.  Luck realized when he looked at it that the light was much stronger than any he had ever before photographed by, and that he would have to “stop down” hereafter; the problem was, how much.  His light tests, he remembered, had been made rather late in the afternoon, when the light was getting yellow, and he had blundered in forgetting that the forenoon light was not the same.

He went ahead and put the film through the fixing bath and afterwards washed it carefully, more for the practice and to show Bill Holmes how to handle the negative than for any value the film would have.  He discovered that Andy had not unpacked the rewinding outfit, but since he would not need it until his negative was dry, he made no comment on the subject.  Bill Holmes kept at his heels, helping when he knew what to do, asking a question now and then, but silent for the most part.  Luck felt extremely optimistic about Bill Holmes, but for all that he was depressed by his second failure to produce good film.  A camera-man, he felt in his heart, might be the determining factor for success; but he was too stubborn to admit it openly or even to consider sending for one, even if he could have managed to pay the seventy-five dollars a week salary for the time it would take to produce the Big Picture.  He could easier afford to waste a few hundred feet of negative now, he argued to himself.