CHAPTER XXVII
THE METTLE OF A HERO
An explosion shook the town, then came the fire engines. Everybody ran and of course we ran too. We saw a big, Colonial house in a blaze, then a second explosion! And a thick black mass of smoke blew off the roof. People ran hither and thither in wild excitement; a fireman dashed into the flames and carried out a dying girl; her face was bleeding and her clothes were in burnt shreds. More dying people were miraculously saved, then suddenly like a huge screen the whole house fell flat. It had no behind and no inside and the whole scene was only the “movies.” The injured face of the heroine was only red paint and the house a property one built for the purpose.
“This is nothing,” said a member of the company to me, “if you want to see something exciting, go to the chalk cliffs just on the road to Santa Maria tomorrow morning. We’re going to work on the ‘Diamond From the Sky.’ That’s our star over there! You don’t want to miss any pictures when he is in it.”
I saw a young man leaning against a telegraph pole chewing a straw. He looked almost too lazy to be alive.
“He’s always like that!” said the member of the company. “You wouldn’t think there was an ounce of go in him! He’s always whittling a stick, or chewing a straw, and if he was to be killed, he’d never move a muscle!”
“He looks kind of comatose, doesn’t he?” said the manager, who overheard. “Well, you go out to the chalk cliffs at about eleven tomorrow if you think he’s comatose, and see him come to.”
Naturally we went. We found the place easily by the number of people gathered at the spot. A shelf road was cut on the face of the high chalk cliffs, above a seventy-foot sheer drop into the water. We saw the comatose one, looking just as indifferent as ever, get into a car and start for the narrow road up on the edge of the cliff. Then another followed him. At a word from the director, they raced across the high narrow shelf, the comatose one swerved to the very edge, toppled and plunged over the abyss! No stopping the picture at the brink and putting a dummy in his place. A feeling of such nausea caught me I could not look to see him land. How he escaped with his life he alone knew. The car struck the rocks and smashed to pieces, but they say he threw himself like an eel clear of the wheel and safely into the water. They then fished him out, he got into another car just as he was, and started home as though nothing had happened. When we reached a railroad track where they were going to take another picture, the same actor was this time to drive so near the track that the locomotive might in the picture seem to hit the car. The camera man was ready to turn the crank of his camera, the locomotive was almost at the crossing, when dash! went the devil-driver toward the track. Stop? Nothing of the sort! He met it as a ram meets an enemy, head on. The locomotive carried his mangled self and wrecked machine up the track. The engineer, shaking as with the palsy, almost fell out of his cab. The company and we, too, rushed up to where the wrecked machine and injured man lay. Blood was streaming from his head, his arm distortedly twisted under him, and he was writhing in pain, but when the camera man reached him all he said was:
“This’ll be great stuff! Make a close-up quick!” They made the pictures and then he lost consciousness.
Although decorated with many bandages, he is up and about, looking as comatose as ever.