Jean of the Lazy A

by B. M. Bower

Jean looked at him and decided that, save for the company he kept, which made of him a latent enemy, she might like that lean man in the red sweater who wore a pencil over one ear and was always smiling to himself about something. But what she did was to cross her feet and murmur a sympathetic sentence to the little brown bird. Inwardly she resented deeply this bold trespass of Robert Grant Burns; but she meant to guard against making herself ridiculous again. She meant to be sure of her ground before she ordered them off. The memory of her humiliation before the supposed rustlers was too vivid to risk a repetition of the experience.

"When you're thoroughly rested," said Robert Grant Burns, in the tone that would have shriveled the soul of one of his actors, "we'd like to make that scene over."

"Thank you. I am pretty tired," she said in that soft, drawly voice that could hide so effectually her meaning. She leaned her head against the wall and gave a luxurious sigh, and crossed her feet the other way. She believed that she knew why Robert Grant Burns was growing so red in the face and stepping about so uneasily, and why the women were looking at her like that. Very likely they expected her to prove herself crude and uncivilized, but she meant to disappoint them even while she made them all the trouble she could.

She pushed back her hat until its crown rested against the rough boards, and cuddled the little brown bird against her cheek again, and talked to it caressingly. Though she seemed unconscious of his presence, she heard every word that Robert Grant Burns was muttering to himself. Some of the words were plain, man-sized swearing, if she were any judge of language. It occurred to her that she really ought to go and find that peroxide, but she could not forego the pleasure of irritating this man.

"I always supposed that fat men were essentially; sweet-tempered," she observed to the world in general, when the mutterings ceased for a moment.

"Gee! I'd like to make that," Pete Lowry said in an undertone to his assistant.

Jean did not know that he referred to herself and the unstudied picture she made, sitting there with her hat pushed back, and the little bird blinking at her from between her cupped palms. But she looked at him curiously, with an impulse to ask questions about what he was doing with that queer-looking camera, and how he could inject motion into photography. While she watched, he drew out a narrow, gray strip of film and made mysterious markings upon it with the pencil, which he afterwards thrust absent-mindedly behind his ear. He closed a small door in the side of the camera, placed his palm over the lens and turned the little crank several times around. Then he looked at Jean, and from her to the director.

Robert Grant Burns gave a sweeping, downward gesture with both hands,—a gesture which his company knew well,—and came toward Jean.

"You may not know it," he began in a repressed tone, "but we're in a hurry. We've got work to do. We ain't here on any pleasure excursion, and you'll be doing me a favor by getting out of the scene so we can go on with our work."

Jean sat still upon the bench and looked at him. "I suppose so; but why should I be doing you favors? You haven't seemed to appreciate them, so far. Of course, I dislike to seem disobliging, or anything like that, but your tone and manner would not make any one very enthusiastic about pleasing you, Mr. Burns. In fact, I don't see why you aren't apologizing for being here, instead of ordering me about as if I worked for you. This bench—is my bench. This ranch—is where I have lived nearly all my life. I hate to seem vain, Mr. Burns, but at the same time I think it is perfectly lovely of me to explain that I have a right here; and I consider myself an angel of patience and graciousness and many other rare virtues, because I have not even hinted that you are once more taking liberties with other people's property." She looked at him with a smile at the corners of her eyes and just easing the firmness of her lips, as if the humor of the situation was beginning to appeal to her.