His work with the Indians was the mere testing and trying of certain photographic effects, certain camera limitations.

He felt like an athlete taught and trained and tempered and just stepping out now for the big physical achievement of his life.
He grew chilled as the night advanced, but he did not know that he was cold.

He was wondering, as a man always wonders in the face of an intellectual birth, why this picture had not come to him before; why he had gone on through these months and years of turning out reel upon reel of Western pictures, with never once a glimmering of this great epic of the range land; why he had clung to his Indians and his one-reel Indian pictures with now and then a three-reel feature to give him the elation of having achieved something; why he had left them feeling depressedly that his best work was in the past; why he had looked upon real range-men as a substitute only for those lean-bodied bucks and those fat, stupid-eyed squaws and dirty papooses.
With the spell of his vision deep upon his soul, Luck sat humiliated before his blindness.

The picture he saw as he stared out across the moonlit plain was so clean-cut, so vivid, that he marvelled because he had never seen it until this night.

Perhaps, if the dried little man had not talked of the old range-- Luck took a long breath and flung his cigar out over the platform rail.
The dried little man?
Why, just as he stood he was a type! He was the Old Man who owned this herd that should trail north and on through scene after scene of the picture! No make-up needed there to stamp the sense of reality upon the screen.