But when, some time later, the door opened and Tish appeared, what shall I say? It was Tish, of course, but Tish in an old skirt and a blouse, with no transformation, and her own hair slicked into a hard knot on top of her head.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and she can never be utterly plain to us. But I must say she was not ornamental.
She did not speak, nor did we. She simply passed us, stalking across the lot to a large glassed-in building, and I went in to comfort Hannah.
V
The picture, The Sky Pirate, having made a great success, I need only briefly outline Tish’s story. As an elderly clerk in the secret service, she is appalled by the amount of rum smuggling going on, especially by dirigible from Mexico. She volunteers to stop it, and is refused permission. She then steals an airship from the Army, funds from the Treasury in Washington, an air pilot from the Marines, and starts West, unheralded and unsung, in pursuit of her laudable purpose.
The various incidents, as the great American public will recall, include her fastening a Mexican governor in a cave by exploding dynamite in the hillside above him; dropping from a bridge to a moving train below to search the express car for liquor; trapping the chief smuggler on top of the structural-iron framework of a building, and so on. In the end, by holding up the smugglers’ dirigible with her own aëroplane and a machine gun, Tish forces them to hand over the valise containing their ill-gotten gains, and with it descends by a parachute to the ground and safety. Later on, as you will recall, she finds the smugglers at an orgy, and with two revolvers arrests them all.
This simple outline only barely reveals the plan of the story. It says nothing of the pursuits on horseback, the shipwreck, the fire, and so on. But it shows clearly that the original story contained no love interest.
I lay stress on this at this point in the narration, because it was very early in the picture that we began to notice Mr. Macmanus.
Mr. Macmanus was a tall gentleman with a gray mustache, and with a vague resemblance to Mr. Ostermaier, but lacking the latter’s saintliness of expression. We paid little attention to him at first, but he was always around when Tish was being photographed—or shot, as the technical term is—and in his make-up.
Aggie rather admired him, and spoke to him one day while he was feeding peanuts to Katie, the tame studio elephant—of whom more anon.