CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“PAM.  BLEAK MESA—­CATTLE DRIFTING BEFORE WIND—­”

“Pam. bleak mesa—­snow—­cattle drifting before wind.  Dale and Johnny dis. riding to foreground.  Reg. cold—­horses leg-weary—­boys all in—­”

Out toward Bear Canyon, where the land to the north rose brokenly to the mountains, Luck found the bleak stretches of which he had dreamed that night on the observation platform of a train speeding through the night in North Dakota,—­a great white wilderness unsheltered by friendly forests, uninhabited save by wild things that moved stealthily across its windswept ridges.  Beyond, the mountains rose barrenly, more bleak than the land that lay at their feet.

“Pam. bleak mesa—­snow—­” With the camera set halfway up a gentle slope commanding a steeper hill beyond, down which the boys would send the cattle in a slow, uneasy march before the storm, Luck focused his telephoto lens upon bleakness enough to satisfy even his voracious appetite for realism.  Bill Holmes, his tan pumps wrapped in gunny sacks for protection against the snow that was a foot deep on the level and still falling, thrashed his body with his arms, like a windmill whose paddles have suddenly gone limp in a high wind.  When he was ready, Luck stopped long enough to blow on his fingers and to turn and watch for the signal from Annie-Many-Ponies, stationed on a higher ridge to the right of him,—­the signal that the cattle were coming.

Through the drive of the snowstorm he saw her tall, straight figure as through a thin, shifting, white veil.  The little black dog, for whom she had conceived a fierce affection in defiance of Rosemary’s tacit opposition, was lying with its tail curled tight around its feet and its nose, hunting warmth in the shelter of her flapping garments.  Annie-Many-Ponies was staring away to the north, shielding her keen eyes from the snow with one slim, brown hand, while she watched for the coming of the herd.

Luck looked at her, silhouetted against the sky.  He had no scene written in his script to match the picture she made; he had no negative to waste.  But he swung his camera around and, using the telephoto lens he had adjusted for his cattle scenes, he called to her to hold that pose, and indulged his artistic sense in a ten-or-twelve foot scene which showed Annie-Many-Ponies wholly absorbed in gazing upon farther bleakness.

Annie-Many-Ponies was so keenly conscious of her duty to the camera that she dared not break her pose, even to give the signal, until he had yelled, “All right, Annie!” and swung the camera back with its recording eye fixed upon that narrow depression between two blunt ears of hilltop, through which the herd was to be sent down to the ridge and on past the camera to the flat, where other scenes were to be taken later on, when the cattle were hungry enough to browse miserably upon the bosquet of young cotton woods.