t of the
cashier, whose craving for adventure was carefully guarded as a guilty
secret.

At three o'clock the next day, then--although Luck would have greatly
preferred an earlier hour--the cashier had the bank cleared of patrons
and superfluous clerks, and was watching, with his nerves all atingle
and the sun shining in upon him through a side window, while Pete Lowry
and Bill Holmes fussed outside with the camera, getting ready for the
arrival of those realistic bandits, Ramon Chavez and Luis Rojas. On
the street corner opposite, the Happy Family foregathered clannishly,
waiting until they were called into the street-fight scene which Luck
meant to make later.

The cashier's cheeks were quite pink with excitement when finally Ramon
and the Rojas villain walked past the window and looked in at him before
going on to the door. He was disappointed because they were not masked,
and because they did not wear bright sashes with fringe and striped
serapes draped across their shoulders, and the hilts of wicked knives
showing somewhere. They did not look like bandits at all--thanks to
Luck's sure knowledge and fine sense of realism. Still, they answered
the purpose, and when they opened the door and came in the cashier got
quite a start from the greedy look in their eyes when they saw the gold
he had stacked in profusion on the counter before him.

They made the scene twice--the walking past the window and coming in at
the door; and the second time Luck swore at them because they stopped
too abruptly at the window and lingered too long there, looking in at
the cashier and his gold, and exchanging meaning glances before they
went to the door.

Later, there was an interior scene with reflectors almost blinding the
cashier while he struggled self-consciously and ineffectually with Ramon
Chavez. The gold that Ramon scraped from the cashier's keeping into his
own was not, of course, the real gold which the bandits had seen through
the window. Luck, careful of his responsibilities, had waited while the
cashier locked the bank's money in the vault, and had replaced it with
brass coins that looked real--to the camera.

The cashier lived then the biggest moments of his life. He was forced
upon his back across a desk that had been carefully cleared of the
bank's papers and as carefully strewn with worthless ones which Luck
had brought. A realistically uncomfortable gag had been forced into the
mouth of the cashier--where it brough