The apartment Pep found himself in was used as a lumber room. It seemed to run under the entire stage space. It was littered up with damaged chairs, pieces of boards, some stage scenery and such trumpery as is regularly broken or discarded in a motion picture playhouse.
There was not a break in the solid stone wall enclosing the apartment except where a deep, barred window showed, too high for Pep to reach. Even could he have done this and have removed the bars, he quickly discerned that a cat could hardly hope to squeeze through the narrow aperture.
“I’m fairly booked, I guess,” reflected the youth. “I wonder how it will all come out? There’s a ventilator that might help me, if I could reach it. No, it isn’t that. It’s a dump chute.”
As Pep spoke he advanced under a hole in the floor that formed the ceiling overhead. It was far beyond ready reach. Studying the break in the floor, however, he found that a box-like structure ran up about four feet into the room overhead. Then Pep knew that it was a chute into which the sweepings of the playhouse were dumped.
A heap of dust, scraps of paper, splinters of wood and the like, littered the floor. Pep the inquisitive pulled the mass over. He apparently had some leisure to spare. He proceeded to utilize it to some purpose.
He felt that he could not know too much of the enemies of the Standard. There were quite a lot of envelopes, postals, advertising matter and the like. He inspected what there was. There were several duns for unpaid bills, applications for engagements, offers of service from film houses.
Pep’s eyes brightened as he fished out a part of a letter. There was not much of it and he could not find the connecting fragments, but he felt satisfied with his discovery.
“It’s from the people who got up that camel film,” decided Pep. “‘Can make a series of about twenty camel subjects’ that scrawl says, ‘and then work in educational nature reels like bees, butterflies and birds. Must be secret and cautious and will ship from B twice a week.’ Where’s ‘B’, I wonder?”
Pep pulled over the papers in the heap several times, but he could not find the rest of the letter. He had kicked aside a creased sheet of manilla paper several times. Casually picking it up, Pep noticed that it had enclosed some goods shipped to the New Idea. It bore an address in ink. Then he noticed that it had the impress of a red stamp in one corner. As he read what this said he almost uttered a shout.
“Got it, sure!” he crowed and he tore address and stamped words from the manilla sheet. “This is the paper a package of camel films came in, sure as shooting. I want to get out of here now, if I can. Yes, I’m going to do it.”