“What in the name of mischief have you been doing now?” the director demanded on a day when Fairbanks’s wardrobe was almost a total loss.

“Trappin’,” chirped the star.

Beating about the woods, Bret Harte in hand, he had managed to discover an old woodsman who still held to the ancient industries of his youth.  The trapper’s specialty was “bob cats,” and the bleeding hands and torn clothes came from “Doug’s” earnest efforts to handle the “varmints” just as his venerable preceptor handled them.  Out of the experience, at least, he brought an intimate knowledge of field, forest, and stream, for over the fire and in their walks he had pumped the old man dry.

In the same way he made “The Good Bad Man” hand him over everything of value that frontier life contained.  The picture was taken out in the Mohave desert; for the making of it the director had scoured the West for riders and ropers and cowboys of the old school.  “He men”—­every one of them, and for a time they looked with dislike and suspicion upon the “star,” but when they saw that Fairbanks did not ask for any “double,” and took the hardest tumble with a grin, they received him into their fellowship with a heartfelt yell.

Dull in the Mohave desert?  Why, he had to sit up nights to keep even with his engagements.  From one man he learned bronco-busting, from another fancy roping, and from others all that there is to know about horses, cattle, mountain, and plain.  And around the camp-fires he got stories of the winning of the West such as never found their way into histories.

When one picture called for jiu-jitsu work, he didn’t rest satisfied with learning just enough to “get by.”  Every spare moment found him in a clinch with the Japanese expert, mastering every secret, perfecting himself in every hold.  Same way with boxing.  When no pugilists came handy, he put on the gloves with anyone willing to take chances on a black eye, keeping at it until today they have to hire professionals when he figures in a movie fight.

When they made a “water” picture he never stopped until he could duplicate every trick known to the “professor” who drilled the extra men.  He took advantage of a biplane flight to make friends with the aeronaut, and by the time the picture was done, he was as good a driver as the expert.

No matter where he is, or what the job, he finds something of interest because he goes upon the theory that every minute is meant to be lived.  Maroon him at a cross-roads, with five hours until train time, and he’d have the operator’s first name in ten minutes and be learning the Morse alphabet, after which he would rush up to his new friend’s house to see the babies or to pass judgment on a Holstein calf or a Black Minorca brood.

It is the tremendously human quality, more than anything else, that gets him across.  People like him because he likes them.  He attracts interest because he takes interest.  Talk with any of the big men in the motion-picture industry, that is, those with brains and education, and they will tell you that personality counts more in pictures than it does on the stage.