"Oh, cheer up, Mr. Sneed. The worst is yet to come, Sir Knight of the Doleful Countenance!" exclaimed a fresh-faced young man who carried under his arm a small box, from which projected a handle and a small tube. The initiated would have known it at once as a camera for taking moving pictures. "It will be jolly out there at Oak Farm, I'm sure."
"That's right, Russ! Don't let Mr. Sneed get gloomy on such a fine day!" whispered Alice DeVere. "But when is our train coming?"
"It will be made up soon," Russ Dalwood answered. "Perhaps it is ready now. I'll go and inquire."
The two girls, before spoken of as being too well aware of their own good looks, were talking together at one side of the big concrete platform beneath the train shed. As they strolled about and talked, one of them, from time to time, applied a chamois to her already well-powdered nose, and took occasional glimpses of herself in the tiny mirror imbedded in the top of the box that contained her "beautifier." Occasionally the two would glance at Alice and Ruth, and make remarks.
"Train will soon be ready for us," announced Russ Dalwood, coming back to join the rest of the theatrical troupe which, instead of presenting plays in a theater, posed for them before the clicking eye of the camera, the films later to be shown to thousands in the chain of moving picture playhouses which took the Comet Company's service. "We can go aboard in five minutes!" Russ added.
"That's good," sighed Ruth. "There's is nothing so tiresome as waiting. Which track will it be on, Russ?"
"Number thirteen!"
"What! Great Scott! Track thirteen! I'm not going!" cried Pepper Sneed, who had come to be known as the "grouch" of the company.
"Not going! Why not, I'd like to know?" demanded Mr. Pertell.
"Why—track thirteen—that's unlucky, you know. Something is sure to happen!"