stuff, and now if the sun'd
jest come out, by cripes, you'd be singin' songs uh thanksgivin'--er
words to that effect. Honest to gran'ma, there's folks that'd kick if--"

"But I haven't got my blizzard stuff," Luck stated, harshly because of
the effort to speak at all. "All that negative I took to-day is chuck
full of 'static.'"

Annie-Many-Ponies, out in the kitchen, dropped a granite-iron plate, but
the others merely stared at Luck uncomprehendingly.

"Well, say, by cripes! What's statics?" demanded Big Medicine
pugnaciously, as though he meant to ward off from his mind the
realization of some new misfortune.

Luck's lips twitched in the faint impulse toward a smile that would not
come. "Statics," he explained, "is that branch of mechanics that relates
to bodies held at rest by the forces acting on them. In other words, it
is electricity in a stationary charge, the condition being produced by
friction, or induction. In other words--"

"In other words," Big Medicine supplied glumly, "I can shut up and mind
my own business. I get yuh, all right!"

"Nothing like that, Bud," Luck corrected more amiably, warmed a little by
the sympathy he knew would follow close upon the heels of understanding.
"Static is a technical word used a good deal in motion-picture
photography. In this case it was caused, I think, by the difference of
temperature in the metal parts of the camera and negative, and the
weather outside the camera box. I've been keeping it here in the house
where it's warm, and I took it out into the cold and started
work--_sabe_? And the grinding of the bearings, and the action of the
film on the race plate, generated static electricity in tiny flashes
which lighted up the interior of the camera and light-exposed the
negative, as it was passing from one magazine to another. When it's
developed, these flashes show up in contrasty lights, like tiny grape
vines; I can show you that part; I've got about a mile of it, more or
less, there in the dark room."

"Plumb spoiled, d' yuh mean?" Big Medicine asked, his voice hushed before
the catastrophe.

"Plumb spoiled." Luck threw his cigarette stub viciously into the
blaze. "All that drifting herd, all that panoram of Andy and
Miguel--all--everything I took to-day, with the exception of those last
scenes with the cow and calf. The one where the cow is down and the snow
drifting over her, and the calf huddled there by the carcass,--that's
dandy. Camera and negative we