“Come home t’ dinner with me. It’s th’ least I kin do for you, after all th’ trouble I put you to, an’ if your stomach is anything like mine it’s playin’ tag with your backbone, it’s that lonesome and empty.”
“That about describes my condition,” admitted the young reporter, with a laugh. “But I don’t want to trouble your wife. I can find some restaurant around here, I guess.”
“Nary a one. But shucks, that ain’t no trouble. My wife allers cooks enough for a whole fambily, when there’s only me and her. Come right along, or I’ll be more disappointed than I was when I found them fellers was actors instid of tramps with a kidnapped boy, though I’m glad he wasn’t after all.”
“So am I,” agreed Larry, with a laugh. He looked back, and saw the troupe of moving-picture players going through the scene where the boy makes another attempt to escape from the house of the tramps. The moving-picture camera was in full operation, and it was this machine which Mr. Meldron had mistaken for a cannon.
Later on Larry had the pleasure of seeing reproduced the moving pictures of the drama in which he played such a strange part. It gave him a queer sensation to see thrown on the screen the views of the pretended tramps, and the little boy running away from them.
“It isn’t everybody who tries to break up a photo-play drama,” mused the young reporter.
He had a good meal at the house of the farmer, and then, seeking the nearest telephone, he sent in to the Leader a humorous account of what had happened. Even though, in a way, it was a disappointment, Larry got a good story out of it, and, what is more, a “beat.” The account was copied in several papers.
“Say, there’s no use trying to get ahead of Larry Dexter,” lamented Peter Manton, when he saw the story in the Leader. “Even when he has a slip-up he manages to ‘scoop’ all the rest of us by it. I’ve a good notion to quit the game.”
“If you don’t turn in a good story pretty soon, you’ll quit whether you want to or not,” said the city editor of the Scorcher significantly.
Peter went out with a fierce determination to unearth new clews to the stolen boy and beat Larry, but his efforts amounted to nothing.