Foster crumpled the paper craftily. Woodart was about ready to start banking checks in six or seven figures, and—
Harry Foster left the restaurant and headed back toward Hollywood.
The locomotive thundered across the stage at a forty-five degree angle, filling the theater with a wave of heat and a puff of smoke and steam. Then it was past and gone, and its string of cars rumbled out of "offstage" to the right rear to the "offstage" at the left-front corner. It slowed and stopped, and the porter and passengers emerged; the principal players of the scene appeared and went through their action.
"Now that," said Hammer, pleased, "is a right good scene."
"Y'know," smiled Jenny Foster, "people are going to be so surprised to see the real thing come roaring across the stage that they're going to forget a couple of rather irrelevant items like having their heroine's head nineteen feet in diameter."
"Yeah," drawled Hammer, "and tell the crook to shave closer. A close-up of Jack Vanders looks like a pincushion with telephone poles shoved in. Didn't know hair could be so big!"
"What bothers me," smiled Martha Evers, "is where I drink that Manhattan in the close-up. Darned drink must be all of twenty-three gallons."
"That isn't the main trouble with that scene," objected Vanders cheerfully. His saturnine face was only for selling purposes; a more pleasant villain was seldom to be found. "What bothers everybody is that you can smell the odor of that drink, it's so big. Half of the would-be sots in the audience are going to be as dry as the Sahara by the time Evers gets it down."
Martha laughed, "Hammer is a great one for realism," she said, "but I hope he doesn't insist on a real slug of cyanide in the poisoning scene. I hate to think of twenty gallons of cyanide!"