“I was pretty scared at the time,” confessed Janet, “but now that the picture’s safely completed, it’s all over.”
“What do you think about ‘Kings’?” Helen asked her father.
He leaned back in his chair and Janet thought she saw a touch of weariness in his face.
“I don’t know,” he said softly. “It should be a good picture, but whether it will be a great picture is something else again. We can only wait until it’s out of the cutting room.”
Janet, although in a comparatively minor rôle, had been a key figure in the making of “Kings of the Air,” for a rival company, attempting to hinder the progress of the picture, had hired an actress in the company, blonde Bertie Jackson, and two renegade airmen, to make every effort to slow up production. Janet had been kidnaped and held prisoner overnight while the ghost town, where the company was located, was burned and a big set on the desert bombed. But the resourcefulness of Curt Newsom, cowboy star who had a rôle in the picture, had helped expose the sabotage and Janet had been speedily released. As a result she had been promoted to Bertie Jackson’s rôle and had handled it like a veteran trouper.
Just then George, the cook, looked in to see if more bacon and eggs were needed, and Helen’s mother, in a dressing gown, joined them.
“Someone should have called me,” she said.
“But you don’t have to report on the lot and we do,” Helen reminded her mother.
It was 5:30 o’clock when they finished breakfast.
“I’ll drive you over to the lot,” said Henry Thorne. “Mother, you dress while I’m away and we’ll take a long drive into the mountains and stop someplace for lunch. We’ll sort of have a day’s vacation for ourselves.”