“We-ell, she’s showin’ some signs uh clearin’ up to-night,” Applehead stated with careful judgment, because he felt that Luck’s question had much to do with Luck’s plans, and was not a mere conversational bait.  “Wind, she’s shiftin’, er was, when I come in to supper.  She shore come down like all git-out ever since she started, and I calc’late she’s about stormed out.  I look fer sun all day to-morrer, boy.”  This last in a tone of such manifest encouragement that Luck snorted. (Back by the table in the kitchen, Annie-Many-Ponies paused in her piling of plates and listened breathlessly.  She knew that particular sound.  Wagalexa Conka would presently reveal what was bad in his heart.)

“That would be my luck, all right,” her chief stated pessimistically.

“What’s the matter with the sun, now?” Big Medicine boomed reprovingly.  “Comin’ in, you said you had your blizzard stuff, and now if the sun’d jest come out, by cripes, you’d be singin’ songs uh thanksgivin’—­er words to that effect.  Honest to gran’ma, there’s folks that’d kick if—­”

“But I haven’t got my blizzard stuff,” Luck stated, harshly because of the effort to speak at all.  “All that negative I took to-day is chuck full of ‘static.’”

Annie-Many-Ponies, out in the kitchen, dropped a granite-iron plate, but the others merely stared at Luck uncomprehendingly.

“Well, say, by cripes!  What’s statics?” demanded Big Medicine pugnaciously, as though he meant to ward off from his mind the realization of some new misfortune.

Luck’s lips twitched in the faint impulse toward a smile that would not come.  “Statics,” he explained, “is that branch of mechanics that relates to bodies held at rest by the forces acting on them.  In other words, it is electricity in a stationary charge, the condition being produced by friction, or induction.  In other words—­”

“In other words,” Big Medicine supplied glumly, “I can shut up and mind my own business.  I get yuh, all right!”

“Nothing like that, Bud,” Luck corrected more amiably, warmed a little by the sympathy he knew would follow close upon the heels of understanding.  “Static is a technical word used a good deal in motion-picture photography.  In this case it was caused, I think, by the difference of temperature in the metal parts of the camera and negative, and the weather outside the camera box.  I’ve been keeping it here in the house where it’s warm, and I took it out into the cold and started work—­sabe?  And the grinding of the bearings, and the action of the film on the race plate, generated static electricity in tiny flashes which lighted up the interior of the camera and light-exposed the negative, as it was passing from one magazine to another.  When it’s developed, these flashes show up in contrasty lights, like tiny grape vines; I can show you that part; I’ve got about a mile of it, more or less, there in the dark room.”

“Plumb spoiled, d’ yuh mean?” Big Medicine asked, his voice hushed before the catastrophe.