“That’s fine—now take your time, take your time—now, as the bow sags—you’re growing weaker—rouse yourself and chant your death song! That’s the stuff! Lift your head—turn it so your profile shows” (Gary swore without moving his lips “—hold that, while you raise your hand palm out—peace greeting to your ancestors you see in the clouds! Great! H-o-o-l-d it—one—two—three—now-go-slack-all-at-once——Cut!”
Gary picked himself up, took off his war bonnet and laid it on a rock, reached into his wampum belt and produced a sack of Bull Durham and a book of papers. The director came over and sat down beside him, accepting the cigarette Gary had just rolled.
“Great scene, Gary. By gosh, that ought to get over big. When you get back, call me up right away, will you? I ought to know something definite next week, at the latest. Try and be here when Cohen gets here; I want you to meet him. By gosh, it’s a crime not to give you a feature company. Well, have Mack drive you back in my car. You haven’t any too much time.”
That’s what it means to have the director for your friend. He can draw out your scenes and keep you working many an extra week if you are hard up, or he can kill you off on short notice and let you go, if you happen to have urgent business elsewhere; and must travel from Toponga Cañon to the studio, take off your make-up—an ungodly, messy make-up in this case—pack a suit case, buy a ticket and catch the eight o’clock train that evening.
Gary, having died with much dignity and a magnificent profile in full view of future weeping audiences, was free from further responsibility toward the company and could go where he did not please. Which, of course, was Tonopah.
He was just boyish enough in his anger, hurt enough in his man’s pride, to go without another word to Patricia. Flabby-souled, hunh? Painted eyebrows, painted lashes, painted lips—golly grandma! Pat surely could take the hide off a man, and smile while she did it!
He meant to take that Power of Attorney she had so naïvely placed in his hands, and work it for all there was in it. He meant to sell that gold brick of a “stock ranch” Waddell had worked off on her, and lick Waddell and the two men who had signed affidavits for him. He meant to go back, then, and give Pat her money, and tell her for the Lord’s sake to have a little sense, and put her five thousand dollars in a trust fund, where she couldn’t get hold of it for the first faker that came along and held out his hand. After that—Gary was not sure what he would do. He was still very angry with Patricia; but after he had asserted his masculine authority and proved to her that the female of our species is less intelligent than the male, it is barely possible that he might forgive the girl.
CHAPTER FIVE
GARY DOES A LITTLE SLEUTHING
Tonopah as a mining town appealed strongly to Gary’s love of the picturesque. Tonopah is a hilly little town, with a mine in its very middle, and with narrow, crooked streets that slope steeply and take sharp turnings. Houses perched on knobs of barren, red earth, or clung precariously to steep hillsides. The courthouse, a modern, cement building with broad steps flanked by pillars, stood with aloof dignity upon a hill that made Gary puff a little in the climbing.
On the courthouse steps he finished his cigarette before going inside, and stood gazing at the town below him and at the barren buttes beyond. As far as he could see, the world was a forbidding, sterile world; unfriendly, inhospitable—a miserly world guarding jealously the riches deep-hidden within its hills. When he tried to visualize range cattle roaming over those hills, Gary’s lips twisted contemptuously.