“It looks fine to be traveling around, and making moving pictures.  It is fine if you are cut out for that kind of work, and have got to be working for somebody else to get your start.  But remember, pard, I am working and scheming and planning to get just what you’ve got already.  You, a kid eight years old, stand right where I’d give all I’ve got to stand.  You’ll own your own ranch and your own home.  You’ve got folks that love you—­not because you hand out the pay envelope on a certain day of the week, but because you belong to them, and they belong to you.  Kid, I’m thirty-two years old—­and I’ve never known what that felt like.  I have never known what it was like to have some one plan for me and with me, unless they were paid for it.”

The Kid stood very still.  “You could live here,” he lifted his head to say gravely after a little silence that was full of thought.  “This can be your home.  You can be one of the Happy Family.  We’d like to have you.”

There was something queer in Luck’s voice when he murmured a reply.  There was something in his face which no one but the Kid had ever seen.  The Kid’s arm crept around Luck’s neck, and tightened there and stayed.  Luck’s hand went up to the curls and hovered there caressingly.  And they talked, in tones lowered to the cadence of deep-hidden hopes and longings revealed in sacred confidence.

The Little Doctor, shamelessly eavesdropping because she was a mother fighting for her fledgling, tiptoed away from the corner of the stack, and went back to the house, wiping her eyes frequently with the corner of her handkerchief that was not embroidered.  She went into her room and stayed there a long while, and before she came out she had recourse to rosewater and talcum and other first aids to swollen eyelids.

Whatever she may have thought, whatever she may have overheard beyond what has been recorded, her manner toward Luck was so unobtrusively tender that Chip looked at her once or twice with a puzzled, husbandly frown.  Also, the Kid felt something special in his Doctor Dell’s good-night kiss; something he did not understand at all, since he had not yet told her that he was going to be a good boy and stay at home and take care of her and the ranch.

CHAPTER FIVE

A BUNCH OF ONE-REELERS FROM BENTLY BROWN

The Manager of the Acme Film Company cleared his throat with a rasping noise that sounded very loud, coming as it did after fifteen minutes of complete silence.  Luck, smoking a cigarette absent-mindedly by the window while he stared out across two vacant lots to a tawdry apartment house,—­and saw a sage-covered plain instead of what was before his eyes,—­started from his daydream and glanced at Martinson inquiringly.  “Well, what do you think of it?” he asked.

Martinson cleared his throat again, and shuffled the typed sheets in his hands.  “Seems to lack action, don’t it?” he hazarded reluctantly.  “Of course, this is a rough draft; I realize that.  I suppose you’ll strengthen up the plot, later on.  Chance for some good cattle-stealing complications, I should think.  But I’d boil it down to two reels, Luck, if I were you.  There’s a lot of atmosphere you couldn’t get, anyway—­”