The metropolitan managers’ office boys were decidedly cold to the advances of this gifted daughter of the Middle West. They treated her with that air of careless indifference so characteristic of their profession. With one accord all the big and little producers decided to take a big chance and neglect the opportunity which fate was offering them. They were unmoved by the clippings from the Democrat-Chronicle with which Lolita bombarded them through the mails and they were callous to the eulogistic outpourings of Miss Amanda Holliday, copies of which accompanied each written request for an interview. Lolita’s cash reserve grew perilously low and disaster threatened. Then, on a morning when disillusionment and despair moved in and took lodgings in her soul, she saw an advertisement in a newspaper which was like a life buoy tossed to a drowning man.
“Ambitious Young Women Wanted for Stage Work,” it read. “Opportunity Afforded Ambitious Amateurs to Perfect Themselves in Dramatic Technique—Apply Immediately at Manager’s Office, ‘Jollyland.’”
Lolita, filled with high hopes, took a trolley to the great playground by the sea. There destiny handed her one of those cold douches that are sometimes held in reserve for those whose ambitions o’erleap themselves. The dramatic opportunity promised in the advertisement proved to be what might be vulgarly termed a “job.”
A great free open-air spectacle was in process of preparation at Jollyland under the supervision of a famous moving picture director who specialized in that form of animated art technically known as “serials.” He had personally conducted a gazelle-eyed cinema celebrity known as June Delight through four fifteen reel affairs of this sort in which she had been threatened with mayhem, aggravated assault and battery, felonious wounding, and total and complete annihilation at the hands of numerous bands of cut-throats, bandits, thieves and white slavers. In the course of these proceedings she had performed every breath-catching feat that the festive imagination of the director had been capable of conjuring up and had succeeded, by a miracle, in keeping out of both the hospital and the obituary columns of the daily press.
Now it was proposed to let the public have a close-up view of this death-defying marvel in the flesh in the act of performing one of her most famous exploits “before your very eyes and for your attention,” as the circus announcer would put it. To permit of this the director had evolved something which he called a “dramatic spectacle” and had persuaded the management of Jollyland to arrange for its production in a huge, specially constructed open-air auditorium as a “special added attraction” intended to put a final quietus on the presumptuous efforts of a rival group of showmen who were endeavoring to arouse interest in a new park just opened that summer.
Lolita found herself in a long line of applicants, many of whom were pathetically peaked and undernourished looking, and when her turn came to meet the director she made up her mind to pocket her pride and accept whatever fate offered rather than run the risk of finding herself in like straits. Ambition still fired her soul and she was determined not to return to the little old home town until she could enter it in something at least closely akin to a spirit of triumph. To be sure the opportunity offered her was not particularly roseate. It did not hold forth much promise of either pecuniary reward or even of passing fame, but it meant that Lolita would not have to telegraph home for funds and there was a faint glimmer of hope in a remark made by the director.
“You can mingle in the front ranks of the crowd,” he said. “We’ll pay you eighteen a week. There’ll only be two shows a day.” Then he had looked at her critically. “You’re almost a ringer for Miss Delight,” he continued. “Maybe, if you’re a good little girl I might take a notion to try you out as understudy.”
So Lolita Murphy, the pride of Cedar Rapids, became a small and almost infinitesimal part of the great out-door spectacle entitled “Secret Service Sallie” which was the big sensation of the Jollyland season.
In the role of an agent of the United States secret service the charming and fascinating June Delight was swept through a series of thrilling adventures set against spectacular backgrounds depicting scenes in Berlin, Tokio, Rio de Janeiro and other world capitals and as a culminating feature she was pursued to the roof of a building in London by a howling mob which suspected her of being a spy in the employ of the Central Powers. She was saved from its hands, in the proverbial nick of time, by her fiancé, dashing Lieutenant Thurston Turner, Commander of the U.S. Dirigible N-24, who happened to be cruising about the neighborhood at the moment and who effected a rescue by circling his ship around the roof and deftly lifting the young woman into the shelter of the gondola which hung from the great gas balloon just as she was about to be beaten to death by the infuriated crowd.
Inasmuch as the spectacle was given in the open air, it was possible to use for the purposes of this scene a real dirigible which was manned by a crew commanded by one Bobby Wilkins, a personable young gentleman from Chicago who had come back from France with a major’s commission, a reputation for dare-deviltry as an aviator surpassed by no other ace in the American service and a collection of a half dozen assorted war medals bestowed by three grateful nations. Bobby had left a snug berth as “assistant to the president” of a big varnish company to go into the army, the said president being a somewhat indulgent parent who had sanguine expectations concerning his son’s commercial and industrial future and who was even now sending him daily wires to the Ritz urging him to “cut the carabets and get down to a solid rock foundation.” Father labored under the delusion that Bobby was simply vacationing in New York. Had he had an inkling of just what his son was doing he would have (to use the young major’s own expression) “tried for a new altitude record himself.” He could hardly be expected to know that dictating fool business letters and checking up the new efficiency expert’s monthly report of economies effected at the Dayton plant wouldn’t exactly appeal any more to an adventuresome young man who had been skyhooting through the upper reaches of the atmosphere for nearly two years and dodging German machine gun bullets.