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The Virginian.
From the Photoplay by JESSE L. LASKY Feature Play Co. By Courtesy of J. D. Walker World^s Films, Ltd.
Adapted by Edna Reichenbach.
This film— a triumph of the camera— contains some wonderful scenes and coloured views. The Virginian (a free lance cowboy) makes hosts of friends and is engaged in rounding up cattle thieves. The story shows how Trampas, the local bully and bad man, is made to back down, afterwards meeting his deserts in a duel with Molly's lover.
Cast :
The Virginian Molly ... Steve
DUSTIN FARNUM WINIFRED KINGSTON J. W. JOHNSTON
ILLUSTRATIONS FROM THE FILM.
Ch.\pter I.
HEEE are — or there were — cowboys and cowboys. We are to see the Virginian, a super-cowboy, perhaps— so he might have been called by one of those Englishmen who travel through the States," seeing the country from a Pullman observation platform and returning, hurriedly, to write a book about Americans. And with the Virginian others are to be shown — Trampas and Steve — Shorty, the misguided — all the strangely mixed elements that go to make up the life of the range. There is the present tense again ! That made up the life of the Wyoming range, I should say. For the old days in Wyoming are no more. There are cowboys still : Frontier Day at Cheyenne still calls them.
It is a peaceable community. It keeps the law. A man who steals a horse has a margin of safety, before landing in jail, little greater than that of the thief who climbs a porch in the suburbs of New York. No longer are the sworn officers of the law elected by rustlers, who understand that the sherifl[" and his posse will ignore the appeals of the good citizens, and so force them to take the law into their own hands for the protection of property. No longer is there
pel il of Indian attacks. Those days are past. In these pages, perhaps, they will live again, those vanished days, and the men who made them what they were — as men, in the last analysis, make every passing phase of life what it is. One thing is sure — the men of those days were men. And in these days the men who ride the range are still men — though they are men of a different sort.
Consider the Virginian, then, in the beginning of this chronicle. A man, first of all. A man a little slow, perhaps, in his movements, until the need for speed arose — and swift, then, and lithe as a cat, or a panther. A man usually with a smile lurking near his lips, but near only, and not obtruding itself until the need for it was plain. We meet him, then, at Medicine Bow.
Medicine Bow, in those days, was a cattle town. That is, it had a station, first of all, on the transcontinental railroad, which was its main reason for being. It had a post office and a general store, and it had many saloons and one hotel. Other things, lamentably, it had, too; but of these there shall be no mention here. Men who are at grips with nature do things, require things, of which account need not be taken, and which, in their later years, they prefer to forget.
But the Virginian neither re(iuired nor was interested in these baser things. Town