en made into a coward and a paltry villain; they were
all desperadoes upon the screen. Never in his life had Bently Brown been
made to suffer such an affront. Never had he dreamed that his work would
be made a thing to laugh at--

"They certainly did laugh," Luck lazily interrupted. "And believe me, Mr.
Brown, it takes real stuff to collect a laugh out of that bunch. It will
be a riot with the public; you can bank on that. By the time I get a few
more made and released, you can expect to see your name in the papers
without paying advertising rates." Whatever possessed Luck to talk that
way to Bently Brown, I cannot say. He surely must have seen that the
little, over-costumed author was choking with spleen.

"It was a farce!" The small, yellow mustache of Bently Brown was
twitching comically with the tremble of his lips beneath. "A bald,
unmitigated farce!"

"Surest thing you know," Luck agreed, with that little chuckle of his.
"At first I was afraid the crowd wouldn't get it; I didn't know but they
might try to take it seriously. Now, I know for certain that it will get
over. It will be the cleanest, funniest, farce-comedy series that has
ever been filmed." Luck sat up straight and pulled a cigar from his
pocket and looked at it absent-mindedly. "Say, those boys of mine are
certainly real ones! I wouldn't trade that bunch for the highest-salaried
actors you could hand me. Do you know what made that picture such a
scream? It was because there wasn't a bit of made-to-order comedy
business in the whole film. Those boys didn't think about acting funny
just to make folks laugh. They were so doggoned busy having fun with the
story and showing up its weak points that they forgot to be
self-conscious. If I'd had a regular comedy company working on it,
believe me, Mr. Brown, it might have turned out almost as rotten a farce
as it would be as a drama!"

Had Bently Brown owned under his pink skin any of the primitive instincts
which he was so fond of portraying in his characters, he would have
killed Luck without any further argument or delay.

Instead of that he spluttered and stormed like a scolding woman. He
lifted first one puttee and then the other, and he shook his fist, and
he nodded his head violently, and finally was constrained to lift the
leather-banded Stetson from his blond hair and wipe the perspiration
from his brow with a lavender initialed handkerchief. He said a great
deal in a very few minutes, but it was t