Three days later, Peter Pellet entered the Tickfall bank and found Colonel Tom Gaitskill and Sheriff John Flournoy sitting beside a desk smoking and chatting.
“Good!” Peter exclaimed. “I am sent to find both of you gentlemen. Mr. Shirley Rouke invites you down to the theater to watch a try-out of our new picture. It’s local stuff, you know, and he wants home criticism.”
“We’ll come!” Gaitskill exclaimed.
Sitting within the little theater, the two men witnessed upon the screen one of the rarest exhibitions in the world of the skill and ingenuity of a motion picture director and producer—an exhibition which caused the Gitagraft Company to make an amazing increase in Shirley Rouke’s salary and which caused the world to add an astounding laudation to his already great fame as an artist.
The picture was perfect in plot and execution, full of love, fighting, tragedy, humor, and the two great scenes were the episodes we have described at the fish camp and the wedding at the Shoofly church.
Through the picture there ran rare scenes of the Louisiana jungle with the bear and deer in their native haunts, the wild hogs of the Gaitskill hog-camp, the deep, still forests with their wide, cool lanes, the sluggish bayous winding amid rank vegetation.
Two characters moved through the story, holding the thread of the plot—Lalla Cordona and Sour Sudds, and their acting was perfect.
When the picture ended, the men were voluble in their expressions of approbation.
Mr. Shirley Rouke walked over and shook hands with Colonel Tom Gaitskill.
“Colonel,” he said earnestly, “if it had not been for your help I could never have gotten that picture. I thank you ten thousand times. Your suggestion that I take the picture without the negroes knowing it by having some one in the know to lead ’em in their stunts was the real, right dope! By George! Pete and I stalked those darkies through the swamp just like we stalked the wild animals in the African jungle. We followed them everywhere!”