“But, I—Well, you see——”
“Yes, I know, but I’ve seen some of your shots,” John broke in. “They’re good. Good enough for me. You wait. We’re a full half hour ahead of the other papers. It will be a scoop. You’ll see one of your pictures on the front page under a screaming head-line.”
And he did.
That was not all there was to it either. Jimmie had just finished reading a book called, “Mysteries of Real Life.” The part cameras have played in solving death mysteries had been told in this book in detail. After making the shots of the dead man required by the reporter, he took a number of others on his own. These pictures, when developed and enlarged, were presented to the coroner’s jury and went far toward helping to prove that this was a case of suicide and not of murder.
After that, on many a summer afternoon Jimmie did not answer to the call of “Boy!”, for he was not there, but was off with his good pal, John, shooting a story.
Needless to say, Jimmie went in stronger than ever for candid cameras. He haunted a shop window where telescopic lenses were displayed, spent many hours studying methods of taking pictures in the dark with the aid of infra-red rays and dreamed strange dreams of thrilling photographic adventures.
Needless to say, none of those dreams had been more fantastic than the thing that had just happened to him there on the bridge in the fog.
It had begun with a book he had read on his day off. For once he had abandoned camera craft and had lost himself in a western story of wild adventure. The hero of this story shot from the hips and always got his man.
“Why not?” Jimmie whispered, thinking of his camera. “A shot from the belt, a touch of the button, a click, a flash, and there you have it, a picture.”
He tried it and with good results. By training his eye to measure distances accurately he could set his camera for eight, ten, or fifteen feet and get a fairly sharp picture three times out of four.