“Cows come!” she called out, because Luck had his back to her at the moment and did not see the wave of hand she had been told to give him.

Luck, squinting into the view-finder, caught the swaying vanguard of the herd and swore.  He had meant to “pan. bleak mesa” for half a minute before those swaying heads and horns appeared over the brow of the ridge.  Now, even though he began to turn the crank the instant he glimpsed them, he would not have quite the effect which he had meant to have.  He would be compelled to make two scenes of it, and pan. his bleak mesa afterwards and trust to a “cut-in scene” to cover the break.  He did not trust Bill Holmes to turn the crank on that slow, plodding march of misery.  With his diaphragm of the camera wide open to get all the light possible, because the air was filled with falling snow, he followed the herd, as it wound snakelike down the easiest descents, making for the more sheltered small canyons that opened out upon the flat.  “Cattle drifting before the wind,” read the script; and now Luck saw them coming, their snow-whitened backs humped to the driving storm, heads lowered and swaying weakly from side to side with the shambling motion of their feet.  They were drifting before the wind, just as he had planned that they should do.  That they shuffled wearily down that hill with poor cows and unweaned calves straggling miserably behind the main body in “the drag herd,” proved how well the boys had done the work which he had sent them out at daylight to do.

The boys had gone out, under the leadership of Applehead, who knew that range as he knew his own dooryard, just when daylight began to break coldly upon the storm that had come with the sunset.  Luck had already ridden out with them and had chosen his location for the blizzard scenes.

He had gone with them over every foot of that drive, and had told them just where the main body of riders was to fall back behind the ridge that would hide them from the camera, leaving Andy Green and the Native Son—­since these were the two whom he always visualized in the scene—­to come on alone in the wake of the herd.  Under the leadership of old Applehead, they had combed every draw that sheltered so much as a lone cow and calf.

Luck had told them to bring in every hoof they could spot and get over that ridge by ten o’clock.  He had a nervous dread of the storm breaking before noon, and his heart was set on getting that never-to-be-successfully-faked blizzard scene.  Realism ruled him absolutely, now that he was actually producing some of the big scenes of this picture.  He had told them just where to watch for Annie-Many-Ponies and the flag she would wave,—­a black flag, so that the boys could not fail to see it in the vague whiteness of the storm.  He had located the jutting ledge behind which Happy Jack was to sneak, that he might watch for the signal as an extra precaution against an unseasonable appearance of the two riders over the ridge.