ctually given over to eating and sleeping. "If
you don't begin to smell snow pretty quick, Applehead, I can see where
_The Phantom Herd_ don't have any phantom herd." The corners of his
mouth quirked upward, though his smile was becoming almost a stranger
to his face.

"We-ell, I dunno's you can blame me because it don't snow. I can't make
it snow if it takes a notion not to snow--"

"Oh, come and eat, and never mind the snow," called Rosemary impatiently.

"We've got to mind the snow--or we don't eat much longer!" Luck laid
aside his papers with the tired gesture which betrays heavy anxiety. "The
whole punch of the picture depends on that blizzard and what it leads up
to. It's getting close to March,--this is the twentieth of February,--and
the Texas Cattleman's Convention meets the first of April. I've got to
have the picture done by then, so as to show it and get their endorsement
as a body, in order to boost the sales up where they belong."

"Mamma!" Weary looked up at him, open-eyed. "How long have you had that
notion in your head,--showing the picture to the Cattlemen's Convention?
I never heard of it."

"I might say quite a few things you haven't heard me say before," Luck
retorted, so harassed that he never knew how sharp a snub he had given.
"I've had that in mind from the start; ever since I read when and where
the convention would meet this spring. We've got to have that blizzard,
and we've got to have it before many more days."

"Oh, well, we'll have it," Rosemary soothed, as she would have comforted
a child. "I just know March will come in like a roaring lion! Have some
beans. They're different, to-night. I cooked them with plain salt pork
instead of bacon. You can't imagine what a difference it makes!"

Luck was on the point of snapping out something that would have hurt her
feelings. He did not want baby-soothing. It did not comfort him in the
least to have her assure him that it would snow, when he knew she had
absolutely no foundation for such an assurance. But just before he spoke,
he remembered how bravely she had been smiling at hardships that would
have broken the spirit of most women, so he took the beans and smiled at
her, and did not speak at all.

Trouble, that month, was riding Luck hard. The blizzard that was
absolutely vital to his picture-plot seemed as remote as in June. Other
storms had come to delay his work without giving him the benefit of any
spectacular effect. There had been