trange part of it was that Luck Lindsay,
stickler for realism, self-confessed enthusiast on the uplifting of
motion pictures to a fine art, permitted their violence,--which was not
as the violence of other, better trained Western actors. The Happy
Family, after their first self-conscious tendency to duck behind
something or somebody, had come to forget the merciless, recording eye of
the camera. They had come to look upon their work as a game, played for
the amusement of Luck Lindsay, who watched them always, and for the open
ridicule of Bently Brown, writer of these tales of blood and heroics.

And Luck not only permitted but encouraged them in this exaggeration,--to
the amazement of the camera man who had turned the crank on more Western
dramas than he could remember. Scenes of violence--such as the saloon row
in which Big Medicine had forgotten that Pink was to be left alive, and
so had killed him twice--made the camera man and the assistant laugh when
they should have shuddered; and to wonder why Luck Lindsay, wholly biased
though he was in favor of the Happy Family, did not seem to realize that
they were not getting the right punch into the pictures.

Luck was not behaving at all in his usual manner with his company.
Evenings, instead of holding himself aloof from his subordinates, he
would head straight for the furnished bungalow which the Flying U boys
had taken possession of, with Rosemary Green to give the home atmosphere
which saved the place from becoming a mere bunk-house de luxe. If he
could possibly manage it, Luck would reach headquarters in time for
dinner--the Happy Family blandly called it supper, of course--and would
proceed to forget the day's irritations while he ate what he ambiguously
called "real cookin'."

There was a fireplace in that bungalow, and a fairly large living-room
surrounding the fireplace. The Happy Family extravagantly indulged
themselves in wood, even at the unbelievable price they must pay for it;
and after supper they would light the fire and hunt up chairs enough, and
roll cigarettes, and talk themselves quite away from the present and into
the past of glowing memory.

The horses they rode--before that fireplace--would have made any
Frontier Day celebration famous enough to be mentioned in the next
encyclopedia published. The herds they took through hard winters and
summer droughts would have made them millionaires all, if they could
only have turned them into flesh-and-bloo