ring these essays, but the spurs
still proved treacherous.

"Just pick yourself up and go on," ordered Baird, and had the cameras
secure close shots of Merton picking himself up and going carefully on,
toeing in now, to embrace his weeping old mother and the breathless girl
who had awaited him with open arms.

He was tired that night, but the actual contusions he had suffered in
his falls where forgotten in the fear that he might fail to master the
hidalgos. Baird himself seemed confident that his pupil would yet excite
the jealousy of Buck Benson in this hazardous detail of the screen art.
He seemed, indeed, to be curiously satisfied with his afternoon's work.
He said that he would study the film carefully and try to discover just
how the spurs could be mastered.

"You'll show 'em yet how to take a joke," he declared when the puzzling
implements were at last doffed. The young actor felt repaid for his
earnest efforts. No one could put on a pair of genuine hidalgos for the
first time and expect to handle them correctly.

There were many days in the hills. Until this time the simple drama had
been fairly coherent in Merton Gill's mind. So consecutively were the
scenes shot that the story had not been hard to follow. But now came
rather a jumble of scenes, not only at times bewildering in themselves,
but apparently unrelated.

First it appeared that the Montague girl, as Miss Rebecca Hoffmeyer, had
tired of being a mere New York society butterfly, had come out into the
big open spaces to do something real, something worth while. The ruin
of her father, still unexplained, had seemed to call out unsuspected
reserves in the girl. She was stern and businesslike in such scenes as
Merton was permitted to observe. And she had not only brought her ruined
father out to the open spaces but the dissipated brother, who was still
seen to play at dice whenever opportunity offered. He played with the
jolly cowboys and invariably won.

Off in the hills there were many scenes which Merton did not overlook.
"I want you to have just your own part in mind," Baird told him. And,
although he was puzzled later, he knew that Baird was somehow making
it right in the drama when he became again the successful actor of that
first scene, which he had almost forgotten. He was no longer the Buck
Benson of the open spaces, but the foremost idol of the shadowed stage,
and in Harold Parmalee's best manner he informed the aspiring Montague
girl that