reel upon reel
of Western pictures, with never once a glimmering of this great epic of
the range land; why he had clung to his Indians and his one-reel Indian
pictures with now and then a three-reel feature to give him the elation
of having achieved something; why he had left them feeling depressedly
that his best work was in the past; why he had looked upon real range-men
as a substitute only for those lean-bodied bucks and those fat,
stupid-eyed squaws and dirty papooses.

With the spell of his vision deep upon his soul, Luck sat humiliated
before his blindness. The picture he saw as he stared out across the
moonlit plain was so clean-cut, so vivid, that he marvelled because he
had never seen it until this night. Perhaps, if the dried little man had
not talked of the old range--

Luck took a long breath and flung his cigar out over the platform rail.
The dried little man? Why, just as he stood he was a type! He was the Old
Man who owned this herd that should trail north and on through scene
after scene of the picture! No make-up needed there to stamp the sense of
reality upon the screen. Luck looked with the eye of his imagination and
saw the dried little man climbing, with a stiffness that could not hide
his accustomedness, into the saddle. He saw him ride out with his men,
scattering his riders for the round-up; the old cowman making sharper the
contrast of the younger men, fixing indelibly upon the consciousness of
those who watched that this same dried little man had grown old in the
saddle; fixing indelibly the fact that not in a day did the free ranging
of cattle grow to be one of the nation's great industries.

Of a sudden Luck got up and stood swaying easily to the motion of the car
while he took a long, last look at the moon-bathed plain where had been
born his great, beautiful picture. He stretched his arms as does one who
has slept heavily, and went inside and down to the beginning of the
narrow aisle where were kept telegraph forms in their wooden-barred
niches in the wall. He went into the smoking compartment and wrote, with
a sureness that knew no crossed-out words, a night letter to the dried
little man who had sat on the baggage truck and talked of the range. And
this is what went speeding back presently to the dried little man who
slept in a cabin near the track and dreamed, perhaps, of following the
big herds:

Baggage man,
Sioux, N.D.

Report at once to me at Dry Lake. Can offer you good pos