le to make it,
he was thinking.

"Think we'll be through in time?"

"Certainly, we'll be through in time." Luck held up another strip to see
where to cut it. "We've got to be through!"

"I'm liable to be joining this junk by the sides instead of the ends,
before long," Bill hinted.

"No, you won't do anything like that." Luck's voice had a disturbing note
of absolute finality.

Bill looked at him sidelong. "A fellow can't work forever without sleep.
My head's splitting right now. I can hardly see--"

"Yes, you can see well enough to do your work--and do it right!
Get that?"

Bill grunted. Evidently he got it, for he said no more about his head, or
about sleep. He did glance frequently out of the tail of his eye at
Luck's absorbed face with his jaw set at a determined angle and his great
mop of iron-gray hair looking like a heavy field of grain after a
thunderstorm, standing out as it did in every direction. Now and then
Luck pushed it back impatiently with the flat of his palm, but he showed
no other sign of being conscious of anything at all save the picture;
though he could have told you offhand just how many times Bill turned
his eyes upon him.

At noon they were not through, and to Bill the attempt to finish that day
seemed hopeless, not to say insane. But by four o'clock they were done
with the cutting and joining, and had their film carefully packed and in
the mountain wagon, and were ready to drive through the slushy mud which
was the aftermath of the blizzard to the little house in Albuquerque
which the boys had turned into a crude but efficient laboratory.

There Luck continued to be merciless in his driving energy. He canvassed
the moving-picture theaters of the town and borrowed reels on which to
wind his film when it was once ready for winding. He went back to the
little house and set every one within it to work and kept them at it. He
printed his positive, dissolved his aniline dye, which was to be
firelight effect, in the bathtub,--and I should like to know what the
landlord thought when next he viewed that tub! He made an orange bath for
sunrise effects in one of the stationary tubs, and his light blue for
night tints in the other. He buzzed around in that little house like a
disturbed blue-bottle fly that cannot find an open window. He had his
sleeves rolled to his shoulders and his hair more tousled than ever; he
had blue circles under his eyes and dabs of dye distributed here and
there on h