The Argosy, April 1916 — page 83: what you’re looking at

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

THE stopped turning that crank or let the girl down there get out of the picture, I’d maim him for life. I think I told him something like that. Anyway, he did what I told him. ‘“‘He was winding off the stuff as if his arm was part of a clock, and I could tell by the way his big, fat muscles tightened up that he was on the job for keeps. _ “T was thinking of a whole lot of things— of how Arnitz looked that first night we met in the actors’ boarding-house, of how all of us had been brought to the edge of ruination by Lollie Goodelle. And I was thinking a lot of old Jim Welcher, too, who was saving all our lives, and how I had cussed poor old Jim out while I should have been buying him flowers. “The scene was going great. It was go- ing even greater than I could have hoped. The girl down on the shore was putting in a lot of business that we had never talked about. I was telling myself that Jim had hypnotized her. She had cast a look about her, as if to see that the coast was quite clear. ‘“‘She did a sort of dance—Greek stuff, like Isadora Duncan—her arms up and her head down. Her loose hair was fluttering in the breeze and the sunshine. Then she stood still for a while with her hands out, as if she were calling some one, and I'll be switched if a flock of gulls didn’t come circling around her, closer and closer, look- ing for something to eat. “T wondered where Lollie had ever learned that trick, and I was thinking of Jim again. There are some mighty queer things in human nature—none of them queerer than what some men can do with some women. “* ‘Get it,’ I kept telling Connie. “Suddenly, those gulls began to squeak and back-water, and they were gone. I saw the reason for it. A.big, husky man came running up. “‘«That’s Jim,’ I said, and I was so crazy- mad at him for dashing into the picture like that that I forgot all about the nice things I had just been telling myself about him. I was so mad that I couldn’t say a word. “T couldn’t shout to him. I couldn’t tell Connie to cut it. I just stood there as if I’d got a blow on the head. “But it wasn’t very long before I noticed something else. Jim also was in make- up. That’s the way I figured it out—that in that silent, meditative way of his he had “SMUGGLER’S DAUGHTER ”—FIVE REELS. 73 doped out a lot of stuff not in the scenario. Whatever it was, it was great. “It was Connie Luft that brought me to life. He hadn’t stopped turning the crank, not even when he worked his head out of the black cloth. “But that ain’t Lollie,’ he said; ‘it can’t be. That ain’t Lollie. This girl i is pretty, and she knows how to act. ‘ We’re takin’ somebody else’s stuff,’ said Connie. “T believe that if he hadn’t been follow- ing orders in the matter of keeping the crank of his camera going around I would have carried out that threat of mine and brained him or something. He saw the way I looked, and he ducked back under the camera-cloth like a fat ostrich looking for cover. “But from then on right to the end I could hear him sort of sobbing, every now and then: ‘It ain’t in the ‘script! It ain’t in the ’script!’ “T’m not like some directors, who never let any but their own fair eyes see the manuscript of a scenario. I had talked so much with Connie about ‘The Maid from Afar,’ and we had been working on it so long that Connie knew that cursed ’script as well I did myself. “T didn’t need him to tell me, though, that what was going on down there on the beach was not according to the ’script. ‘“Lollie had seen to that. A lot of pos- ing, some emotional stuff with the eyes, no action—that was her ideal of a scenario. She wasn’t altogether a fool. She must have known, down deep in her heart, that she couldn’t act. And she must have been surer yet that she didn’t care for any rough action with a big husky man to play op- posite. ‘But there was action enough for any one in what was going on under the cliff, and we were getting all of it. “The big man who might have been Jim —who must be Jim—had come running forward until he was well within the loca- tion marks. “The girl registered perfect dismay. She started to run. She thought better of it. She turned around and faced him. He halted a moment. He was on his guard— great acting, too. “Both of them were keeping right in the centre of the location-mark. I could see that some sort of a fight was coming off. There was. “The girl picked up a piece of rock; cComicloooks C©