“You know, Pat, you got me all wrong that night. What made me so doggoned sore was to think how you’d handed over five thousand dollars to a gink, just on the strength of his say-so. It showed on the face of it that it was no investment for you to make. It wasn’t that I am so stuck on the movies. Heck knows I’m not. But I sure am stuck on the job that will pay me the money I can get from working in the movies. I’ll rent my profile any time--for a hundred dollars a day, and as much more as I can get. That’s what the contract would have paid me the first year, Pat, and double that the second if I made good. So I was dead willing to put paint on my eyebrows and paint on my lips, and let my profile--if you insist that’s all I got over on the screen--earn a little home for my Princess Pat and me. “But if I could find a mine to match that chunk of rock, the studios would never see Handsome Gary--never no more. I’d kiss my own girl on the lips--for love. Honest, Pat, those kisses, that looked so real on the screen and made you so sore, were awfully faked. I never told you. I guess I’m a mean cuss. But I never touched a girl’s lips, Lady, after I met you. I had one alibi guaranteed never to slip. I told ’em, one and all, confidentially before we went into the scene, that they could trust me. I swore I’d remember and not smear their lips all over their cheeks. I said I knew girls hated that, and I’d be careful. Then it was up to me to do some plain and fancy faking. And when my Lady Patricia put up her chin and registered supreme indifference, it always tickled me to see how well I’d put it over. I always meant to tell you some time, girlie. “I had a wild idea when I left the city that I’d maybe write down a story I’d been framing in my mind when I was on location and waiting between scenes. I told Mills just enough of it to get him curious to hear the rest. He told me to write it out in scenario form and if it was good he’d see that the company bought it. That would have been a couple of hundred more toward our home, kid. The point is, I laid in a lot of paper. Now that darn story’s gone stale on me and I’m using up the paper writing letters to you that you’ll never read. As a little blond jane in our company was always saying, ‘Isn’t life a perfect _scream_?’ I’ll say it is. “Your Grouchy Gary.” CHAPTER TWELVE MONTY APPEARS Monty Girard, mounted on a lean-flanked sorrel, came jogging up the trail into Johnnywater Cañon. His eyes, that managed to see everything within their range of vision, roved questingly here and there through the grove, seeking some sign of the fastidiously tailored young man he had left there two weeks before. His horse went single-footing up to the cabin and stopped when Monty lifted his rein hand as a signal.