Cowboy For Hire (3 page)

Martin glanced at Huxtable, too, and sighed.
“Of course you don’t. Believe me, I’ll see that nothing bad happens
to you. We even have matrons to assist our actresses on the
set.”

“What’s a set?”

He looked at her blankly for a moment. Amy
might have been embarrassed by her ignorance, except that she
perceived this opportunity as too serious to gloss over. She needed
to know everything in order to make an informed decision. Her
future might depend on her choice.

“The set is where the picture will be
shot.”

She squinted at him. “I’m afraid I still
don’t understand, Mr. Tafft. Don’t you just set up a camera
somewhere and paint a backdrop or something? As they do in the
theater?”

His expression held a little condescension.
Amy opted to overlook it for the moment in favor of gathering
information. “Not any longer, Miss Wilkes. Not for this picture.
The days of shooting moving pictures just any old where are gone
for good. The public is demanding realism nowadays, and Peerless is
going to give it to them with
One and Only
. That’s why
Peerless is setting up out here in California. Whoever heard of a
cowboy in New York?”

He chuckled, but Amy didn’t get the joke.

After clearing his throat, he went on. “One
of my jobs is to scout out suitable locations.
One and Only
will be filmed not too far from here in the desert outside a small
community called El Monte.”

She nodded. She knew El Monte; had even been
there once. It was way out in the country and was full of cows.
People grew an assortment of agricultural crops there as well. The
rest of it was, well, desert. It was, in her limited experience, at
the end of the earth.

Martin continued. “There are hundreds of
movies being made every year now, and opportunities are better than
ever for an ambitious young person to earn a good deal of money.
Ever since
The Great Train Robbery
, the industry has taken
off like a frightened rabbit.

An apt metaphor. Amy said with great reserve,
“Thus far, I haven’t found my association with moving picture folks
a particularly happy one, Mr. Tafft.”

She saw him heave another sigh. “Has Huxtable
been a trial for you?
“Yes.” Although Amy was generally the most polite and well-bred of
young women, she saw no need to mince matters at present. “He’s
been perfectly awful.”

“Well, but look here, Miss Wilkes, the rest
of the cast is nice. The man who’s been hired to play the love
triangle interest is a real cowboy, and he’s as polite and shy as
anything.”

“He is, is he?”

Martin nodded. “And think of the money. Where
else can you earn so much by doing so little? And remember, you
don’t need to stay in the pictures forever. You can save your money
and set yourself up anywhere. This is an opportunity that isn’t
offered to just anyone.”

Having been brought up by relatives with
strict ethical principles and old-fashioned ideals, Amy sniffed at
that. “Making money for doing very little is not what I think of as
suitable employment for an industrious, honest, hardworking young
woman, Mr. Tafft.”

He lifted his hands as if her starchy
attitude was getting the better of him. “So you can work harder on
the set if you want to. For heaven’s sake, Miss Wilkes, we
need
you!”

She didn’t like the turn this conversation
was taking. Any time a person said he needed her, her immediate
reaction was to leap in and help that person out. “Surely there
must be other young women available to act the role?”

He shook his head emphatically. “You’re the
one. You’re the only one. The one and only. You fit the description
of the heroine to a T.”

Amy remained unimpressed. “Well … I’ll have
to discuss the matter with my aunt and uncle.”
And Vernon
.
She didn’t mention him to Mr. Tafft. “They were kind enough to take
me in and give me a position here at the Orange Rest when my
parents passed on.”

“I see.” Martin paused to think for a minute.
“There’s another point right there,” he said. “If you—a young woman
alone in the world—have to make your own living, the movies are a
good place to do it. As I’ve said over and over again, there’s good
money in the pictures.”

“From all I’ve heard, there’s a lot more than
money in them,” she said acidly. She read the newspapers and the
magazines. She knew what shenanigans and scrapes some picture
people got themselves into. Although, she had to admit, it would be
pleasant to know she had money of her own tucked away in case of an
emergency.

Martin evidently deduced what she was
thinking because he repeated, “Believe me, Miss Wilkes, it’s only a
very small proportion of the motion picture community that
misbehaves. Most of them are fine, upstanding people.”

Amy’s glance slid over to Huxtable and back
to Martin, who shrugged helplessly. “He’s really not so bad.
Honestly. He overindulges sometimes, is all.

“Hmmm.”

Nevertheless, Amy talked to Vernon Catesby
about the opportunity when he paid a call upon her later in the
afternoon. Vernon frowned. The expression was not unfamiliar to
Amy, who heaved a silent internal sigh. She was fond of Vernon, in
a way, and she fully expected to marry him one day. He was
dependable, sensible, and could offer her more security than anyone
else in her present orbit. She could not, however, repress a tiny
twinge of boredom every time she was in his company.

“I don’t like it,” he said flatly. “Motion
pictures may be a way to make fast money, but you know very well
that the morals of those people are suspect. Why, actors have been
on the lowest echelon of society for hundreds of years.”

“Mr. Tafft seemed quite pleasant and not at
all immoral.” Amy said, feeling suddenly stifled by Vernon’s
attitude.

Vernon shook his head. “I fear I must forbid
you to do this thing, Amy. It’s ludicrous and completely
inappropriate.”

Amy squinted at him. She would never go so
far as to announce to Vernon that he had no right to forbid her to
do anything, but she didn’t care for his tone. Or his words. “We’ll
see,” she said in a voice that sounded more chilly than usual. “I
shall speak to Aunt Julia and Uncle Frank about it.”

Vernon’s bloodless lips compressed and his
thin, patrician features registered censure. Amy offered him orange
juice and lemon bars to sweeten him up, and he was smiling again by
the time he left.

When she spoke to her aunt and uncle later in
the day, both of them were more eager for her to have this chance
than she was.

“Just think, dear, your face will be up there
on the screen in a picture palace! My niece!” Her aunt Julia
clasped her hands to her bosom and beamed at her. “Oh, it’s so
exciting!”

“Sounds all right to me,” her uncle Frank
said with less enthusiasm, but no apparent misgivings. “You have to
admit the money’s swell.”

Swell
. Good heavens, Amy hadn’t even
started her career as an actress yet, and already her family’s
vocabulary was being corrupted. “Mr. Tafft says they’ll want to
change my name.”

Her aunt look puzzled. “Whatever for?”

She shrugged. “He says Amy might not be
sophisticated enough for the movies.”

“But,” her aunt said, “they don’t have the
names of the players printed anywhere on the screen, do they?”

Amy was prepared for this question, and was
pleased she’d asked Martin about it. “No, but interested members of
the public sometimes write to the studios or to
Motion Pictures
Story
magazine, and they give out the names.”

Both her aunt and uncle pondered this
information for a moment or two. Finally her uncle said, “That
actually might not be a bad idea. After all, you don’t want
everybody in the world to know your real name, do you?”

Gracious sakes. If even her easygoing uncle
was ashamed of her possible association with the moving pictures,
Amy didn’t want anything to do with them herself.

Her aunt spoke next. “That’s nonsense, Frank.
I think it’s a wonderful opportunity for Amy. It’s the best way I
can think of for her to gain some experience of the world—” She
stopped speaking suddenly and looked worriedly at her niece. “There
will
be some kind of protection for you, won’t there? I
mean, the ladies and gentlemen in the picture won’t mix socially,
will they?”

With a touch of irony, Amy said, “Mr. Tafft
said there are matrons and guards and so forth on all picture sets.
I guess they need them to keep curiosity seekers away. And to
protect the cast”

“Well, then,” her aunt said with renewed
enthusiasm. “I think you should do it.”

After several more moments of deep thought,
and after considering Vernon’s objections and her aunt’s
excitement, Amy gave up her arguments. As Mr. Tafft had said, if
she didn’t like it, she never had to do it again—and the money was
awfully good. “Very well. I’ll give it a try.”

Her aunt was ecstatic.

Her uncle was pleased.

Vernon was disgusted.

Martin was elated.

Huxtable immediately began plotting her
seduction.

Two

The train chugged to a stop in a small
station that looked as if it had been dropped there, in the middle
of nowhere, by some maniacal devil trying to hide it from the
world. As far as his eyes could see, Charlie Fox detected no other
sign of life but that one small, dusty building. Did folks actually
live there?

A native of Arizona Territory, Charlie wasn’t
unfamiliar with deserts, but this one looked a lot different from
the deserts he was used to near the beautiful rock formations
around Sedona. This California desert was ugly.

That was neither here nor there, however. He
clutched his one piece of luggage, a battered denim carpetbag his
older brother had used in ’98 when he went off to Cuba to fight in
the Spanish-American War, and headed toward the exit.

He nodded at the Pullman porter and handed
him a dime, thinking it a suitable tip. From the look on the
porter’s face, he disagreed. Charlie didn’t much care. He wasn’t
one to fling money around with abandon—mainly because he’d never
had much of it, and he respected it.

A horseless carriage—folks in the know called
them simply “machines” these days, or so Charlie had been
told—awaited him at the train depot. Charlie had seldom seen an
automobile, much less ridden in one, so this part of his adventure
was fun. The driver even pressed the rubber horn a couple of times
at Charlie’s request. What a noise! A fellow could turn a
stampeding herd with one of those things in no time flat.

It took them an hour of bumpy driving to get
to the location where
One and Only
was to be filmed. Charlie
snoozed most of the way since the scenery was so boring. The bumps
didn’t both him, as he was used to sleeping when and where he
could, including occasionally on horseback.

When the car rolled to a stop, he walked onto
the set of
One and Only
with tolerable misgivings. This
sissy movie-making stuff didn’t seem like a proper pursuit for a
man like him, no matter what that nice fellow, Mr. Tafft, had told
him.

On the other hand, he was sick to death of
punching ostriches on his brother’s ranch in Arizona Territory.
Ostriches were in no respect akin to cattle, and Charlie had been
born and bred into the cattle ranching business. In Charlie’s
opinion, those huge feathered monsters were a curse from above. He
rued the day Sam, his brother, had won that dig-busted bird farm in
a poker game.

He wasn’t altogether sure playacting in a
moving picture was the precise answer to ostriches, though. While
Charlie was as game for a lark as the next fellow, acting didn’t
seem like a manly pursuit to him. All that standing around,
strutting, waving your arms in the air, grimacing at the camera,
being dramatic and silly. Shoot, that sort of stuff was for kids
and saps.

But the money was good, and he wanted money
badly. For years he’d dreamed of owning his own spread—stocked with
cows, not ostriches. This nonsensical movie would pay him more
money in a month than he could earn in a year on his brother’s
ranch, and Mr. Tafft had told him there was more work available for
a good-looking cowboy like him. Charlie had blushed at the time,
but he appreciated the information.

“Mr. Fox!” a voice called out.

Turning, Charlie saw Martin Tafft, the man
who’d “discovered” him in Arizona. Tafft was a nice fellow and was
giving him a friendly wave, so Charlie smiled and waved back.
“How-de-do, Mr. Tafft. Right ugly place you got to shot this here
movie in.”

Tafft, hurrying over to him, laughed. “Yes, I
reckon El Monte is a little arid.”

Whatever that meant. Charlie nodded because
he figured it meant the place stank, which it did.

“It’ll look better on film,” Tafft assured
him.

Frankly, Charlie didn’t care how it looked on
film as long as he got the money he’d been promised. He’d never
even dreamed of having such a pile all at once.

Martin took his arm, a gesture Charlie
wouldn’t have tolerated in Arizona Territory, where you had to get
to know a man before you took liberties. He didn’t object,
understanding from things he’d read that picture people were a
peculiar and eccentric lot.

“Would you like to meet the rest of the
cast?”

Martin’s attitude was genial and outgoing,
and Charlie appreciated it. He was downright nervous about this
thing he was doing. Not, of course, that he believed he couldn’t do
it. After all, how hard could it be to strut around and look like a
cowboy? He was a cowboy to begin with. It was only that he’d never
stood in any sort of limelight before, and the notion of doing so
made him itchy. “Sure,” he said. “Glad to.”

“Horace Huxtable hasn’t arrived yet.”