I spoil something?" she inquired casually, and watched curiously
the pulling of many feet of narrow film from the camera.

"About fifteen feet of good scene," Pete Lowry told her dryly, but with
that queer, half smile twisting his lips.

Jean looked at him and decided that, save for the company he kept,
which made of him a latent enemy, she might like that lean man in the
red sweater who wore a pencil over one ear and was always smiling to
himself about something. But what she did was to cross her feet and
murmur a sympathetic sentence to the little brown bird. Inwardly she
resented deeply this bold trespass of Robert Grant Burns; but she meant
to guard against making herself ridiculous again. She meant to be sure
of her ground before she ordered them off. The memory of her
humiliation before the supposed rustlers was too vivid to risk a
repetition of the experience.

"When you're thoroughly rested," said Robert Grant Burns, in the tone
that would have shriveled the soul of one of his actors, "we'd like to
make that scene over."

"Thank you. I am pretty tired," she said in that soft, drawly voice
that could hide so effectually her meaning. She leaned her head
against the wall and gave a luxurious sigh, and crossed her feet the
other way. She believed that she knew why Robert Grant Burns was
growing so red in the face and stepping about so uneasily, and why the
women were looking at her like that. Very likely they expected her to
prove herself crude and uncivilized, but she meant to disappoint them
even while she made them all the trouble she could.

She pushed back her hat until its crown rested against the rough
boards, and cuddled the little brown bird against her cheek again, and
talked to it caressingly. Though she seemed unconscious of his
presence, she heard every word that Robert Grant Burns was muttering to
himself. Some of the words were plain, man-sized swearing, if she were
any judge of language. It occurred to her that she really ought to go
and find that peroxide, but she could not forego the pleasure of
irritating this man.

"I always supposed that fat men were essentially; sweet-tempered," she
observed to the world in general, when the mutterings ceased for a
moment.

"Gee! I'd like to make that," Pete Lowry said in an undertone to his
assistant.

Jean did not know that he referred to herself and the unstudied picture
she made, sitting there with her hat pushed back, and the little bir