out his work impervious to curious
onlookers, suddenly changed his method and ordered all interior sets
screened in, and all bystanders away from the immediate vicinity of his
exterior scenes, the Acme people began to call him "swell-headed"--when
they did not call him worse. Even his excuse that he was working with
boys new to the business and did not want them rattled failed to satisfy
most of them.

The Happy Family, in the tiny, bare dressing rooms which they called
box-stalls in merciless candor, were smearing their faces liberally with
cold cream and still arguing among themselves over the doubtful blessing
of owning as many lives as a cat, and bewailing the bruises they had
received while sacrificing a few of their lives to the blood-lust of Big
Medicine and Pink, the two official, Bently-Brown bad men. Outside their
two connecting "stalls" a fine drizzle was making the studio yard an
empty place of churchyard gloom and incidentally justifying Luck in
quitting so early. Big Medicine was swabbing paint from his eyebrows and
bellowing his opinion of a man that will keep a-comin', by cripes, after
he's shot the third time at close range, and then kick because he takes
so much killing off. This was aimed at the Native Son, who had evidently
died hard, and who meant to retaliate as soon as he got that dab of paint
out of his eye. But the door opened violently against his person and
startled him into forgetting his next observation.

This was Luck, and he had the look of a man who owns a guilty secret, and
is ready to be rather proud of his guilt,--providing society consents to
wink at it with him. He was not smiling, exactly; he had a wicked kind of
twinkle in his eyes.

"Hurry up, boys! My Lord, how you fellows do primp and jangle in here!
They're going to run our first picture, _The Soul of Littlefoot Law_.
Don't you fel--"

"The which?" Big Medicine whirled upon him, rubbing his left eye into a
terrifying, bloodshot condition while he glared with the other.

"_The Soul of Littlefoot Law_," Luck repeated distinctly with a perfect
neutrality of manner.

"'S that what you call all that ridin' and shootin' we done, that you
said was by moonlight?" Pink inquired pugnaciously--for a young man who
had died the death four different times that day.

"That's what it's called," Luck averred with firmness.

"Aw--where does Soul of Littlefoot Law come in at?" Happy Jack scoffed.

"It doesn't, so far as I know."

"Aw