What's it all about? What's the matter? Which way did he go?' Say anything you want to, but keep shouting--anything at all. Say 'Thar's gold in them hills!' if you can't think of anything else. Go on, now, boys, do it again and pep it, see. Turn the juice on, open up the old mufflers."The men went back through the rear doors. The late caller would here have left, being fed up with this sort of stuff, but at that moment he descried the Montague girl back behind a light-standard. She had not noted him, but was in close talk with a man he recognized as Jeff Baird, arch perpetrator of the infamous Buckeye comedies. They came toward him, still talking, as he looked.
"We'll finish here to-morrow afternoon, anyway," the girl was saying.
"Fine," said Baird. "That makes everything jake. Get over on the set whenever you're through. Come over tonight if they don't shoot here, just to give us a look-in.""Can't," said the girl. "Soon as I get out o' this dump I got to eat on the lot and everything and be over to Baxter's layout--she'll be doing tank stuff till all hours--shipwreck and murder and all like that. Gosh, I hope it ain't cold. I don't mind the water, but Icertainly hate to get out and wait in wet clothes while Sig Rosenblatt is thinking about a retake.""Well"--Baird turned to go--"take care of yourself--don't dive and forget to come up. Come over when you're ready.""Sure! S'long!" Here the girl, turning from Baird, noted Merton Gill beside her. "Well, well, as I live, the actin' kid once more! Say, you're getting to be a regular studio hound, ain't you?"For the moment he had forgotten his troubles. He was burning to ask her if Beulah Baxter would really work in a shipwreck scene that night at the place where he had watched the carpenters and the men on the sailboat; but as he tried to word this he saw that the girl was again scanning him with keen eyes. He knew she would read the collar, the beard, perhaps even a look of mere hunger that he thought must now be showing.
"Say, see here, Trouper, what's the shootin' all about, anyway? You up against it--yes." There was again in her eye the look of warm concern, and she was no longer trying to be funny. He might now have admitted a few little things about his screen career, but again the director interrupted.
"Miss Montague--where are you? Oh! Well, remember you're behind the piano during that gun play just now, and you stay hid till after the boys get out. We'll shoot this time, so get set."She sped off, with a last backward glance of questioning. He waited but a moment before leaving. He was almost forgetting his hunger in the pretty certain knowledge that in a few hours he would actually behold his wonder-woman in at least one of her daring exploits.
Shipwreck! Perhaps she would be all but drowned. He hastened back to the pool that had now acquired this high significance. The carpenters were still puttering about on the scaffold. He saw that platforms for the cameras had been built out from its side.
He noted, too, and was puzzled by an aeroplane propeller that had been stationed close to one corner of the pool, just beyond the stern of the little sailing-craft. Perhaps there would be an aeroplane wreck in addition to a shipwreck. Now he had something besides food to think of. And he wondered what the Montague girl could be doing in the company of a really serious artist like Beulah Baxter. From her own story she was going to get wet, but from what he knew of her she would be some character not greatly missed from the cast if she should, as Baird had suggested, dive and forget to come up. He supposed that Baird had meant this to be humorous, the humour typical of a man who could profane a great art with the atrocious Buckeye comedies, so called.
He put in the hours until nightfall in aimless wandering and idle gazing, and was early at the pool-side where his heroine would do her sensational acting. It was now a scene of thrilling activity.
Immense lights, both from the scaffolding and from a tower back of the sailing-craft, flooded its deck and rigging from time to time as adjustments were made. The rigging was slack and the deck was still littered, intentionally so, he now perceived. The gallant little boat had been cruelly buffeted by a gale. Two sailors in piratical dress could be seen to emerge at intervals from the cabin.
Suddenly the gale was on with terrific force, the sea rose in great waves, and the tiny ship rocked in a perilous manner. Great billows of water swept its decks. Merton Gill stared in amazement at these phenomena so dissonant with the quiet starlit night. Then he traced them without difficulty to their various sources. The gale issued from the swift revolutions of that aeroplane propeller he had noticed a while ago. The flooding billows were spilled from the big tank at the top of the scaffold and the boat rocked in obedience to the tugging of a rope--tugged from the shore by a crew of helpers--that ran to the top of its mast. Thus had the storm been produced.
A spidery, youngish man from one of the platforms built out from the scaffold, now became sharply vocal through a megaphone to assistants who were bending the elements to the need of this particular hazard of Hortense. He called directions to the men who tugged the rope, to the men in control of the lights, and to another who seemed to create the billows. Among other items he wished more action for the boat and more water for the billows. "See that your tank gets full-up this time," he called, whereupon an engine under the scaffold, by means of a large rubber hose reaching into the pool, began to suck water into the tank above.
The speaker must be Miss Baxter's director, the enviable personage who saw her safely through her perils. When one of the turning reflectors illumined him Merton saw his face of a keen Semitic type.
