A huge pipe organ was filling the theater with a vast undertone that was like the whispering surge of a great wind.Jean went into the soft twilight and sat down,feeling that she had shut herself away from the harsh,horrible world that held so much of suffering.
She sighed and leaned her head back against the curtained enclosure of the loges,and closed her eyes and listened to the big,sweeping harmonies that were yet so subdued.
Down next the river,in a sheltered little coulee,there was a group of great bull pines.Sometimes she had gone there and leaned against a tree trunk,and had shut her eyes and listened to the vast symphony which the wind and the water played together.She forgot that she had come to see a picture which she had helped to create.She held her eyes shut and listened;and that horror of high walls and iron bars that had haunted her for days,and the aged,broken man who was her father,dimmed and faded and was temporarily erased;the lightness of her lips eased a little;the tenseness relaxed from her face,as it does from one who sleeps.
But the music changed,and her mood changed with it.She did not know that this was because the story pictured upon the screen had changed,but she sat up straight and opened her eyes,and felt almost as though she had just awakened from a vivid dream.
A Mexican series of educational pictures were being shown.Jean looked,and leaned forward with a little gasp.But even as she fixed her eyes and startled attention upon it,that scene was gone,and she was reading mechanically of refugees fleeing to the border line.
She must have been asleep,she told herself,and had gotten things mixed up in her dreams.She shook herself mentally and remembered that she ought to take off her hat;and she tried to fix her mind upon the pictures.Perhaps she had been mistaken;perhaps she had not seen what she believed she had seen.But--what if it were true?What if she had really seen and not imagined it?It couldn't be true,she kept telling herself;of course,it couldn't be true!Still,her mind clung to that instant when she had first opened her eyes,and very little of what she saw afterwards reached her brain at all.
Then she had,for the first time in her life,the strange experience of seeing herself as others saw her.The screen announcement and expectant stir that greeted it caught her attention,and pulled her back from the whirl of conjecture into which she had been plunged.She watched,and she saw herself ride up to the foreground on Pard.She saw herself look straight out at the audience with that peculiar little easing of the lips and the lightening of the eyes which was just the infectious beginning of a smile.Involuntarily she smiled back at her pictured self,just as every one else was smiling back.For that,you must know,was what had first endeared her so to the public;the human quality that compelled instinctive response from those who looked at her.So Jean in the loge smiled at Jean on the screen.
Then Lite--dear,silent,long-legged Lite!--came loping up,and pushed back his hat with the gesture that she knew so well,and spoke to her and smiled;and a lump filled the throat of Jean in the loge,though she could not have told why.Then Jean on the screen turned and went riding with Lite back down the trail,with her hat tilted over one eye because of the sun,and with one foot swinging free of the stirrup in that absolute unconsciousness of pose that had first caught the attention of Robert Grant Burns and his camera man.
Jean in the loge heard the ripple of applause among the audience and responded to it with a perfectly human thrill.
Presently she was back at the Lazy A,living again the scenes which she herself had created.This was the fourth or fifth picture,--she did not at the moment remember just which.At any rate,it had in it that incident when she had first met the picture-people in the hills and mistaken Gil Huntley and the other boys for real rustlers stealing her uncle's cattle.You will remember that Robert Grant Burns had told Pete to take all of that encounter,and he had later told Jean to write her scenario so as to include that incident.
Jean blushed when she saw herself ride up to those three and "throw down on them"with her gun.She had been terribly chagrined over that performance!
But now it looked awfully real,she told herself with a little glow of pride.Poor old Gil!They hadn't caught her roping him,anyway,and she was glad of that.He would have looked absurd,and those people would have laughed at him.She watched how she had driven the cattle back up the coulee,with little rushes up the bank to head off an unruly cow that had ideas of her own about the direction in which she would travel.
She loved Pard,for the way he tossed his head and whirled the cricket in his bit with his tongue,and obeyed the slightest touch on the rein.The audience applauded that cattle drive;and Jean was almost betrayed into applauding it herself.
Later there was a scene where she had helped Lite Avery and Lee Milligan round up a bunch of cattle and cut out three or four,which were to be sold to a butcher for money to take her mother to the doctor.Lite rode close to the camera and looked straight at her,and Jean bit her lips sharply as tears stung her lashes for some inexplicable reason.Dear old Lite!Every line in his face she knew,every varying,vagrant expression,every little twitch of his lips and eyelids that meant so much to those who knew him well enough to read his face.
Jean's eyes softened,cleared,and while she looked,her lips parted a little,and she did not know that she was smiling.
