第57章 A NEW KIND OF PICTURE(4)

Do you know what they did then?Jean changed a few scenes around at Lite's suggestion,and they went out into the hills in the teeth of the storm and pictured Jean lost in the blizzard,and coming by chance upon the outlaws at their camp,which she and Lite and Lee had been hunting through all the previous installments of the story.It was great stuff,--that ride Jean made in the blizzard,--and that scene where,with numbed fingers and snow matted in her dangling braid,she held up the rustlers and marched them out of the hills,and met Lite coming in search of her.

You will remember it,if you have been frequenting the silent drama and were fortunate enough to see the picture.You may have wondered at the realism of those blizzard scenes,and you may have been curious to know how the camera got the effect.It was wonderful photography,of course;but then,the blizzard was real,and that pinched,half frozen look on Jean's face in the close-up where she met Lite was real.Jean was so cold when she turned the rustlers over to Lite that when she started to dismount and fell in a heap,--you remember?

--she was not acting at all.Neither was Lite acting when he plunged through the drift and caught Jean in his arms and held her close against him just as that scene ended.In the name of realism they cut the scene,because Lite showed that he forgot all about the outlaws and the part he was playing.

So they finished the picture,and the whole company packed their trunks thankfully and turned their faces and all their thoughts westward.

Jean was not at all sure that she wanted to go.It seemed almost as though she were setting aside her great undertaking;as though she were weakly deserting her dad when she closed the door for the last time upon her room and turned her back upon Lazy A coulee.But there were certain things which comforted her;Lite was going along to look after the horses,he told her just the day before they started.For Robert Grant Burns,with an eye to the advertising value of the move,had decided that Pard must go with them.He would have to hire an express car,anyway,he said,for the automobile and the scenery sets they had used for interiors.And there would be plenty of room for Pard and Lite's horse and another which Robert Grant Burns had used to carry him to locations in rough country,where the automobile could not go.The car would run in passenger service,Burns said,--he'd fix that,--so Lite would be right with the company all the way out.

Jean appreciated all that as a personal favor,which merely proved how unsophisticated she really was.She did not know that Robert Grant Burns was thinking chiefly of furnishing material for the publicity man to use in news stories.She never once dreamed that the coming of "Jean,of the Lazy A"and Jean's pet horse Pard,and of Lite,who had done so many surprising things in the picture,would be heralded in all the Los Angeles papers before ever they left Montana.

Jean was concerned chiefly with attending to certain matters which seemed to her of vital importance.If she must go,there was something which she must do first,--something which for three years she had shrunk from doing.So she told Robert Grant Burns that she would meet him and his company in Helena,and without a word of explanation,she left two days in advance of them,just after she had had another maddening talk with her Uncle Carl,wherein she had repeated her intention of employing a lawyer.

When she boarded the train at Helena,she did not tell even Lite just where she had been or what she had been doing.She did not need to tell Lite.He looked into her face and saw there the shadow of the high,stone wall that shut her dad away from the world,and he did not ask a single question.