e the train
carried him on and on through the night.

What a picture it all would make--the story of those old days as they
had been lived by men now growing old and bent. With all the cheap,
stagy melodrama thrown to one side to make room for the march of that
bigger drama, an epic of the range land that would be at once history,
poetry, realism!

Luck's cigar went out while he sat there and wove scene after scene of
that story which should breathe of the real range land as it once had
been. It could be done--that picture. Months it would take in the making,
for it would swing through summer and fall and winter and spring. With
the trail-herd going north that picture should open--the trail-herd
toiling over big, unpeopled plains, with the riders slouched in their
saddles, hat brims pulled low over eyes that ached with the glare of the
sun and the sweep of wind, their throats parched in the dust cloud flung
upward from the marching, cloven hoofs. Months it would take in the
making,--but sitting there with the green tail-lights switching through
cuts and around low hills and out over the level, Luck visioned it all,
scene by scene. Visioned the herd huddled together in the night while the
heavens were split with lightning, and the rain came down in
white-lighted streamers of water. Visioned the cattle humped in the snow,
tails to the biting wind, and the riders plodding with muffled heads bent
to the drive of the blizzard, the fine snow packing full the wrinkles in
their sourdough coats.

It could be done. He, Luck Lindsay, could do it; in his heart he knew
that he could. In his heart he felt that all of these months--yes, and
years--of picture-making had been but a preparation for this great
picture of the range. All these one-reel pioneer pictures had been merely
the feeble efforts of an apprentice learning to handle the tools of his
craft, the mental gropings of his mind while waiting for this, his big
idea. His work with the Indians was the mere testing and trying of
certain photographic effects, certain camera limitations. He felt like an
athlete taught and trained and tempered and just stepping out now for the
big physical achievement of his life.

He grew chilled as the night advanced, but he did not know that he was
cold. He was wondering, as a man always wonders in the face of an
intellectual birth, why this picture had not come to him before; why he
had gone on through these months and years of turning out