tory-trail.
She was almost at the point of admitting to herself that her story, as
far as she had gone with it, could never be taken seriously by any one
with any pretense of intelligence. It was too unreal, too fantastic.
It was almost funny, in the most tragic parts. She was ready now to
dismiss the book as she had dismissed her earlier ambitions to become a
poet.

But if she and Lite together could really act a story that had the
stamp of realism which she instinctively longed for, surely it would be
worth while. And if she herself could build the picture story they
would later enact before the camera,--that would be better, much better
than writing silly things about an impossible heroine in the hope of
later selling the stuff!

Automatically her thoughts swung over to the actual building of the
scenes that would make for continuity of her lately-conceived plot.
Because she knew every turn and every crook of that coulee and every
board in the buildings snuggled within it, she began to plan her scenes
to fit the Lazy A, and her action to fit the spirit of the country and
those countless small details of life which go to make what we call the
local color of the place.

There never had been an organized gang of outlaws just here in this
part of the country, but--there might have been. Her dad could
remember when Sid Cummings and his bunch hung out in the Bad Lands
fifty miles to the east of there. Neither had she ever had a brother,
for that matter; and of her mother she had no more than the indistinct
memory of a time when there had been a long, black box in the middle of
the living-room, and a lot of people, and tears which fell upon her
face and tickled her nose when her father held her tightly in his arms.

But she had the country, and she had Lite Avery, and to her it was
very, very easy to visualize a story that had no foundation in fact.
It was what she had done ever since she could remember--the
day-dreaming that had protected her from the keen edge of her
loneliness.

CHAPTER XVIII

A NEW KIND OF PICTURE

"What you doing now?" Robert Grant Burns came around the corner of the
house looking for her, half an hour later, and found her sitting on the
doorstep with the old atlas on her knees and her hat far back on her
head, scribbling away for dear life.

Jean smiled abstractedly up at him. "Why, I'm--why-y, I'm becoming a
famous scenario writer! Do you want me to go and plaster my face with