any questions and to make a few notes; and Luck,
wise to the value of publicity, answered the questions and saw to it that
the notes recorded interesting facts.

That evening Luck, feeling that he had reached the last mile-post on the
road to success, hunted up a few old-timers who appealed to him most as
true types of the range, and gave them a dinner in a certain place which
he knew was run by an old round-up cook. There was nothing about that
dinner which would have appealed to a cabaret crowd. They talked of the
old days when Luck was a lad, those old-timers; they talked of
trail-herds and of droughts and of floods and blizzards and range wars
and the market prices of beef "on the hoof." They called in the old
round-up cook and cursed him companionably as one of themselves, and
remembered that more than one of them had run when he pounded the bottom
of a frying pan and hollered "Come and get it!" They ate and they smoked
and they talked and talked and talked, until Luck had to indulge himself
in a taxi if he would not miss the eleven o'clock train north. His only
regret, in spite of the fact that he was practically and familiarly broke
again, was that circumstances did not permit the Happy Family to sit with
him at that table. Especially did he regret not having old Applehead and
the dried little man with him that night to make his gathering complete.

CHAPTER TWENTY

"SHE'S SHAPING UP LIKE A BANK ROLL"

"Well," said Luck to the Happy Family, "we've come this far along the
trail, and now I'm stuck again. Bank won't loan any more on the camera,
and I've got a dollar and six bits to market _The Phantom Herd_ with!
Everything's fine so far; she's advertised,--or will be when the
magazines come out,--and she's got some good press notices to back her
up; but she ain't outa the woods yet. I've got to raise some money
somehow. I hate to ask poor old Applehead--"

"Pore old Applehead, my granny!" bawled Big Medicine, laughing his big
_haw-haw._ "Pore ole Applehead's sure steppin' high these days. He'd
mortgage his ranch and feel like a millionaire, by cripes! His ole
Come-Paddy cat jest natcherally walloped the tar outa Shunky Cheestely,
and Applehead seen him doin' it. Come-Paddy, he's hangin' out in the
house now, by cripes, 'cept when he takes a sashay down to the stable
lookin' fer more. And Shunky, he's bedded down under the Ketch-all, when
he ain't hittin' fer the tall timber with his tail clamped down bet