heir booty, he saw the
dissolute brother, after the treasure was divided, winning it back to
the family coffers with his dice. He saw the stricken father playing
golf on his bicycle in grotesque imitation of a polo player.

And still, so incredible the revealment, he had not in the first shock
of it seemed to consider Baird in any way to blame. Baird had somehow
been deceived by his actors. Yet a startling suspicion was forming amid
his mental flurries, a suspicion that bloomed to certainty when he saw
himself the ever-patient victim of the genuine hidalgo spurs.

Baird had said he wanted the close-ups merely for use in determining how
the spurs could be mastered, yet here they were. Merton Gill caught the
spurs in undergrowth and caught them in his own chaps, arising from each
fall with a look of gentle determination that appealed strongly to the
throng of lackwits. They shrieked at each of his failures, even when he
ran to greet his pictured sweetheart and fell headlong. They found the
comedy almost unbearable when at Baird's direction he had begun to toe
in as he walked. And he had fallen clumsily again when he flew to
that last glad rendezvous where the pair were irised out in a love
triumphant, while the old mother mopped a large rock in the background.
An intervening close-up of this rock revealed her tearful face as she
cleansed the granite surface. Above her loomed a painted exhortation to
"Use Wizard Spine Pills." And of this pathetic old creature he was made
to say, even as he clasped the beloved in his arms--"Remember, she is my
mother. I will not desert her now just because I am rich and grand!"

At last he was free. Amid applause that was long and sincere he gained
his feet and pushed a way out. His hoarse neighbour was saying, "Who is
the kid, anyway? Ain't he a wonder!"

He pulled his hat down, dreading he might be recognized and shamed
before these shallow fools. He froze with the horror of what he had
been unable to look away from. The ignominy of it! And now, after those
spurs, he knew full well that Baird had betrayed him. As the words
shaped in his mind, a monstrous echo of them reverberated through its
caverns--the Montague girl had betrayed him!

He understood her now, and burned with memories of her uneasiness the
night before. She had been suffering acutely from remorse; she had
sought to cover it with pleas of physical illness. At the moment he was
conscious of no feeling toward her save won