"Well, say!" Big Medicine leaned close and throttled his voice down to a
hoarse whisper. "What kinda hee-ro will your Tracy Gray Joyce look like,
when I start up foamin' and gloatin' at him?"

Luck smiled. "That," he said calmly, "is for the camera to find out." He
was going to say something more on the subject, but some one called to
him anxiously from over toward the office. So he told them _adios_
hurriedly and went his busy way, and left the Happy Family discussing him
gravely among themselves.

The Happy Family were so interested in this new work that they were ready
to see the bright side even of these weird performances which purported
to be Western drama. If you did not take it seriously, all this violence
of dress and behavior was fun. The Happy Family was slipping into a
rivalry of violence; and the strange part of it was that Luck Lindsay,
stickler for realism, self-confessed enthusiast on the uplifting of
motion pictures to a fine art, permitted their violence,--which was not
as the violence of other, better trained Western actors. The Happy
Family, after their first self-conscious tendency to duck behind
something or somebody, had come to forget the merciless, recording eye of
the camera. They had come to look upon their work as a game, played for
the amusement of Luck Lindsay, who watched them always, and for the open
ridicule of Bently Brown, writer of these tales of blood and heroics.

And Luck not only permitted but encouraged them in this exaggeration,--to
the amazement of the camera man who had turned the crank on more Western
dramas than he could remember. Scenes of violence--such as the saloon row
in which Big Medicine had forgotten that Pink was to be left alive, and
so had killed him twice--made the camera man and the assistant laugh when