The proprietor of the Bulletin looked at him in astonishment. “You get busy? Why, what is there for you to do, old man! This’ll be a reporter’s task. Pictures, of course, will be quite out of the question.”
“Oh, will they, though?” chuckled Hawley. “I don’t agree with you there. The pictures will be the main feature of this exposé. Of course, we’ll have a story,[Pg 49] too—a couple of columns or so of reading matter to go with the snapshots—but, with all modesty, I think I can say that it will be my camera which will give the people of Oldham the most graphic idea of what the police force is doing while the town slumbers.”
“Nonsense!” Carroll expostulated. “This will be at night. How can you take pictures——”
“How can I?” Hawley interrupted. “What a peculiar question! Surely, my dear Fred, you must be forgetting all about the existence of a certain compound called magnesium powder.”
“What!” cried Carroll, almost rising in his chair. “Man alive! You don’t mean to say you’d be insane enough to attempt to take snapshots on the streets of Oldham by flash light?”
The Camera Chap grinned at his friend’s display of horrified amazement.
“Oh, yes, I’ll have to use that flash-light powder, of course,” he answered. “I don’t know of any other way of taking pictures at night; and we positively must have those snapshots.”
TO BE CONTINUED.