e
openly pleased at the predicament of their director. "It never occurred
to me that--"

"That the cattle were not as free as the hills?" The quiet voice of
Jean searched out the tenderest places in the self-esteem of Robert
Grant Burns. She tossed the blank-loaded gun back upon the ground and
turned to her horse. "It does seem hard to impress it upon city people
that we savages do have a few rights in this country. We should have
policemen stationed on every hilltop, I suppose, and 'No Trespassing'
signs planted along every cow-trail. Even then I doubt whether we
could convince some people that we are perfectly human and that we
actually do own property here."

While she drawled the last biting sentences, she stuck her toe in the
stirrup and went up into the saddle as easily as any cowpuncher in the
country could have done. Robert Grant Burns stood with his hands at
his hips and watched her with the critical eye of the expert who sees
in every gesture a picture, effective or ineffective, good, bad, or
merely so--so. Robert Grant Burns had never, in all his experience in
directing Western pictures, seen a girl mount a horse with such
unconscious ease of every movement.

Jean twitched the reins and turned towards him, looking down at the
little group with unfriendly eyes. "I don't want to seem inhospitable
or unaccommodating, Mr. Burns," she told him, "but I fear that I must
take these cattle back home with me. You probably will not want to use
them any longer."

Mr. Burns did not say whether she was right or wrong in her conjecture.
As a matter of fact, he did want to use them for several more scenes;
but he stood silent while Jean, with a chilly bow to the four of them,
sent Pard up the rough bank of the little gulley. Rather, he made no
reply to Jean, but he waved his three rustlers back, retreating himself
to where the bank stopped them. And he turned toward the bushes that
had at first hidden him from Jean, waved his hand in an imperative
gesture, and called guardedly through cupped palms. "Take that! All
you can get of it!" Which goes far to show why he was considered one of
the best directors the Great Western Film Company had in its employ.

So Jean unconsciously made a picture which caused the eyes of Robert
Grant Burns to glisten while he watched. She ignored the men who had
so fooled her, and took down her rope that she might swing the loop of
it toward the cattle and drive them back across t