The next day being sunny, Luck finished the actual camera work on _The
Phantom Herd_. That night he and Bill Holmes developed every foot of
negative he had exposed since the storm began, and they finished just as
Rosemary rapped on the darkroom door and called that breakfast was
ready. Bill took it for granted that he could sleep, then, while the
negative was drying; but Luck was merciless; that Cattlemen's Convention
was only two days off,--counting that day which was already begun,--and
there was also a twelve-hour train trip, more or less, between his
picture and El Paso.
Bill Holmes had learned to join film in movie theaters, and Luck set him
to work at it as soon as he had finished his breakfast. When Bill
grumbled that there wasn't any film cement, Luck very calmly went to his
trunk and brought some, thereby winning from Rosemary the admiring
statement that she didn't believe Luck Lindsay ever forgot a single,
solitary thing in his life! So Bill Holmes assembled the film, scene by
scene, without even the comfort of cigarettes to keep awake. At his elbow
Luck also joined film until the negative in the garret was dry enough to
handle, when he began cutting it according to the continuity sheet, ready
for Bill to assemble.
Luck's mood was changeable that day. He would glow with the pride of
achievement when he held a yard or so of certain scenes to the light and
knew that he had done something which no other producer had ever done,
and that he had created a film story that would stand up like a lone peak
above the level of all other Western pictures. When those night scenes
were tinted--and that scene which had for its sub-title _Opening
Exercises_, and which showed the Happy Family mounting Applehead's
snakiest bronks and riding away from camp into what would be an orange
sunrise after the positive had been through its dye bath--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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