The Argosy, April 1916 — page 79: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE ‘Jam wants to know if the carpenter is to begin work on the church-set or the opium-joint.” “Tell Jim to step in here for a moment,” said Cal. At the door through which Mrs. Cal had just gone there appeared a stout man with* glasses on the end of his nose and a stubble on his chin. He was neither very well dressed nor strikingly clean. But he had the unruffled poise of a hippopotamus. He received his instructions without a word. “That’s Jim,” said Cal, when the appari- tion was gone. He resumed the story where he had left “Arnitz and I put our heads together, and Arnitz agreed with me. He would have agreed with anything, just then. It was a case of getting the Lollie Goodelle business straightened out or going out of business altogether. “‘We telegraphed a hurry-call to Jim. He was with us inside of a week, and we got ready to take up the work where the last director had left it off. “T had hopes at first that we could salve something of those ninety thousand feet which had already been taken with Lollie doing her Hortense right through the mid- dle of them. I went over most of those films myself with a magnifying glass. -“T never got so sick of a girl’s face in my life. Lollie simply would not register. Some faces are like that. It’s a matter of the eyes, principally, and a lot of other things. “Then IT went over the ’scripts that had been written for her. There was some fool clause in her contract which even regulated that. Lollie was not to appear in a pro- ‘duction unless she had approved the scenario, You can imagine what that meant. “They were all alike. You know—Cin- derella stuff! Girl starts out poor and sweet and innocent and winds up wearing diamonds! It was to groan! When Lollie was in calico she looked about as innocent as the Rube in a burlesque show. When she had her jewels on she looked like her- self, and that was even worse. “The best of the ’scripts—and they were all rotten—was entitled ‘The Maid from Afar.’ She told me so herself. This was her favorite. And do you know why? Be- cause she liked the sound of that darnfool “SMUGGLER’S DAUGHTER ”—FIVE REELS. _ turn and stare. her as if she were some new sort of mustang. 63 title when it was attached to her name? ‘Lollie Goodelle in The Maid from Afar.’ “T had Jim Welcher there to help me, at any rate. I didn’t mince matters with Jim, I had been stalling along with Lollie wait- ing for Jim to get there, and I told Jim so. “‘ *Jim,’ I said, “you’ve got to do it. Until we've put over at least one of these produc- tions,’ I said, ‘you’re the director and I’m your assistant—that is,’ I was careful to add, ‘whenever we’re working Lollie. You’re a two-handed man,’ I reminded him, ‘and you can handle a woman like that where she’d make me look like thirty cents.’ “Personally, I had discovered during those first few days before Jim came that I could never have been able to handle the job alone. I- was ‘sensitive. Women al. ways had frightened me. It must have been the cowboy in me. “Fellows who have ridden around on the plains a lot with nothing but steers and their memories to look at are apt to get that way—thinking women are supernatural, a little higher than the angels, a sort of cross between your own mother and the girl on the cover of a last year’s magazine. “But Jim had never been troubled with imagination—except once. And he had had a lot of experience with women, tow:— i always left it to him to tell a girl that she wouldn’t do, out there in Santa Barbara; when, as often as not, they had come.from Denver or Kansas City to get a job. “There was something final about Jim. No girl ever thought of crying to him, or pleading with him, or hoping he’d change his mind, any more than if he had been a thunderstorm or a chunk of beef. “Jim had been a horse wrangler in his early days. Even yet, down there in Broad- way, whenever a horse goes past those In- dian eyes of his light up, and if he cared to he could tell you all about that horse—its disposition, its likes and dislikes, whether it was happy or not, and the right way to handle it. “He doesn’t look the part, but he’s al- ways been like that with women, too. “He says it himself: ‘Wrangle horses, you can wrangle women.’ “T saw that same sort of a look in his eyes the first time that I pointed Lollie out to him. She was all powdered and painted up, and she was wearing clothes and things that made all the women within a block Jim himself was staring at cComiclboooks C@