_The Phantom Herd_, if Luck would let his
wife and boy see the picture, and would pay the slight operating
expenses. So that was settled very easily.

At five minutes to eight that evening all of the cattlemen and a few
favored, influential citizens of El Paso whom Luck had invited personally
sat waiting before the blank screen. Up in the operator's cramped
quarters Luck was having a nervous chill and trying his best not to show
it, and he was telling the operator to give it time enough, for the
Lord's sake, and to be sure he had everything ready before he started in,
and so forth, until the operator was almost as nervous as Luck himself.

"Now, look here," he cried exasperatedly at last. "You know your
business, and I know mine. You're going to have me named in your
write-ups as the movie-man that run this show for the convention, ain't
you? And I'm going to open up a picture house next week in this town,
ain't I? And I ain't going to advertise myself as a bum operator, am I?
Now you _vamos_ outa here and get down there in the audience, if you
don't want me to get the fidgets and spoil something. Go on--beat it!"

Luck must have been in a strange condition, for he beat it promptly and
without any retort, and slid furtively into a chair between two old
range-men just as the operator's boy-usher switched off the lights.
Luck's heart began to pound so that he half expected his neighbors to
tell him to close his muffler,--only they were of the saddle-horse
fraternity and would not have known what the phrase meant.

_The Phantom Herd_ flashed suddenly upon the screen and joggled there
dizzily, away over to one side. Luck clapped his hand to his perspiring
forehead and murmured "Oh, my Gawd!" like a prayer, and shut his eyes to
hide from them the desecration. He opened them to find that the caste was
just flicking off and the first scene dissolving in.

The man at his left gave a long sigh and crossed his knees, and leaned
back and began to chew tobacco rapidly between his worn old molars.

_"Oh, a ten dollar hoss and a forty dollar saddle,
I'm goin' to punchin' Texas cattle."_

The sub-title dissolved slowly into a scene showing a cow-puncher (who
was Weary) swinging on to his rangy cow-Horse and galloping away after
the chuck-wagon just disappearing in the wake of the dust-flinging
_remuda_. Back somewhere in the dusk of the audience, a man began to hum
the tune that went with the words, and the heart of Luck Lindsay