of the sun, and with one foot swinging free of the stirrup in
that absolute unconsciousness of pose that had first caught the
attention of Robert Grant Burns and his camera man. Jean in the loge
heard the ripple of applause among the audience and responded to it
with a perfectly human thrill.

Presently she was back at the Lazy A, living again the scenes which she
herself had created. This was the fourth or fifth picture,--she did
not at the moment remember just which. At any rate, it had in it that
incident when she had first met the picture-people in the hills and
mistaken Gil Huntley and the other boys for real rustlers stealing her
uncle's cattle. You will remember that Robert Grant Burns had told
Pete to take all of that encounter, and he had later told Jean to write
her scenario so as to include that incident.

Jean blushed when she saw herself ride up to those three and "throw
down on them" with her gun. She had been terribly chagrined over that
performance! But now it looked awfully real, she told herself with a
little glow of pride. Poor old Gil! They hadn't caught her roping
him, anyway, and she was glad of that. He would have looked absurd,
and those people would have laughed at him. She watched how she had
driven the cattle back up the coulee, with little rushes up the bank to
head off an unruly cow that had ideas of her own about the direction in
which she would travel. She loved Pard, for the way he tossed his head
and whirled the cricket in his bit with his tongue, and obeyed the
slightest touch on the rein. The audience applauded that cattle drive;
and Jean was almost betrayed into applauding it herself.

Later there was a scene where she had helped Lite Avery and Lee
Milligan round up a bunch of cattle and cut out three or four, which
were to be sold to a butcher for money to take her mother to the
doctor. Lite rode close to the camera and looked straight at her, and
Jean bit her lips sharply as tears stung her lashes for some
inexplicable reason. Dear old Lite! Every line in his face she knew,
every varying, vagrant expression, every little twitch of his lips and
eyelids that meant so much to those who knew him well enough to read
his face. Jean's eyes softened, cleared, and while she looked, her lips
parted a little, and she did not know that she was smiling.

She was thinking of the day, not long ago, when she had seen a bird fly
into the loft over the store-house, and she had climbed