To her it seemed wonderful, the way Luck was pushing his picture to completion against long odds sometimes, fighting some difficulty always.  Much as she secretly resented certain Indian traits in Annie-Many-Ponies, and pleased as she would secretly have been if the girl had been recalled to the reservation, she was generously relieved because Luck could now go ahead with his round-up and trail-herd scenes while the weather was mild and sunny, and need not hurry the Indian-girl scenes at all.

In the ten days since the blizzard, Luck had worked hard.  Some night scenes in a cow-town he had already taken, driving late in the afternoon into Albuquerque with his radium flares and his full company.  Rosemary’s memory cherished those nights as rare and precious experiences.  First there were the old-time scenes, half Mexican in their atmosphere, when the dried little man was young, and the trail-herd started north.  For these scenes Luck himself played the part of Dave Wiswell, turning the camera work over to Bill Holmes.  Then there were the scenes of a later period,—­scenes of carousal which depicted her beloved Andy as a very wild young man who spent his nights riotously.  One full day of sunshine had also been spent at the stockyards there, taking shipping scenes.

On this day the two women had stayed at home, and Rosemary had nearly quarreled with Annie-Many-Ponies because Annie would not mend her stockings, but had spent the whole afternoon teaching Shunka Chistala to chase prairie dogs, the game being to try and frighten them away from their holes and then catch them.  Annie-Many-Ponies attended to the strategic direction of the enterprise and let Shunka Chistala do most of the running.  The high, clear laughter of the girl and her unintelligible cries to the little black dog had irritated Rosemary to the point of tears.

There had been no more days wasted because of spoiled film,—­Luck was carefully guarding against that,—­and it seemed to Rosemary that there were miles of it developed and dried and pigeon-holed, ready for assembling.  That part of the work she was especially interested in, because it was done in the house.

To her it might seem that miles of film had been made, but to Luck it seemed as though the work crawled with maddening deliberation.  Delays fretted him.  The mounting expense account worried him, though as a matter of fact it mounted slowly, considering the work he was doing and the size of the company he was maintaining.  When he took film clippings to a town photographer to have enlargements made for “stills,”—­the pictures which must accompany each set of prints as advertising matter,—­the cost of the work gave him the blues for the rest of that day.  Then there were the Chavez boys, whom he had found it expedient to use occasionally in his big range scenes and in his “cow-town stuff.”  They had no conception of regular rates as extras, but Luck had a conscience, and he had also established a precedent.  Whenever he used them in pictures, he gave Tomas five dollars and left it to Tomas to divide with Ramone.  And five dollars, added to other fives and tens and twenty-fives, soon amounts to an amazing whole when anxiety holds the pencil.