in a spirit of
idle curiosity to see what the bird wanted there. She had found Lite's
bed neatly smoothed for the day, the pillow placed so that, lying
there, he could look out through the opening and see the house and the
path that led to it. There was the faint aroma of tobacco about the
place. Jean had known at once just why that bed was there, and almost
she knew how long it had been there. She had never once hinted that
she knew; and Lite would never tell her, by look or word, that he was
watching her welfare.

Here came Gil, dashing up to the brow of the hill, dismounting and
creeping behind a rock, that he might watch them working with the
cattle in the valley below. Jean met his pictured approach with a
little smile of welcome. That was the scene where she told him he got
off the horse like a sack of oats, and had shown him how to swing down
lightly and with a perfect balance, instead of coming to the earth with
a thud of his feet. Gil had taken it all in good faith; the camera
proved now how well he had followed her instructions. And afterwards,
while the assistant camera-man (with whom Jean never had felt
acquainted) shouldered the camera and tripod, and they all tramped down
the hill to another location, there had been a little scene in the
shade of that rock, between Jean and the star villain. She blushed a
little and wondered if Gil remembered that tentative love-making scene
which Burns had unconsciously cut short with a bellowing order to
rehearse the next scene.

It was wonderful, it was fascinating to sit there and see those days of
hard, absorbing work relived in the story she had created. Jean lost
herself in watching how Jean of the Lazy A came and went and lived her
life bravely in the midst of so much that was hard. Jean in the loge
remembered how Burns had yelled, "Smile when you come up; look
light-hearted! And then let your face change gradually, while you
listen to your mother crying in there. There'll be a cut-back to show
her down on her knees crying before Bob's chair. Let that tired,
worried look come into your face,--the load's dropping on to your
shoulders again,--that kind of dope. Get me?" Jean in the loge
remembered how she had been told to do this deliberately, just out of
her imagination. And then she saw how Jean on the screen came
whistling up to the house, swinging her quirt by its loop and with a
spring in her walk, and making you feel that it was a beautiful day