“Just a minute,” answered Blake, in an aside. “I’ll give you the whole story in a minute. I want to get it straight first.”
Then he continued to listen, and while he is thus at the telephone I will tell my new readers, briefly, something about the moving picture boys.
In the initial volume of this series, entitled “The Moving Picture Boys; Or, Perils of a Great City Depicted,” I introduced Blake Stewart and Joe Duncan. They were farm lads, and, most unexpectedly, one day, a company of moving picture actors and actresses came to their village to make scenes in a rural drama. The two boys became interested, especially in the mechanical end of the work of making films.
Later they had an opportunity of taking up the business under the direction of Mr. Calvert Hadley, a moving picture operator, who offered to teach Joe and Blake how to properly use the wonderful cameras.
The boys went to New York, and met the members of the Film Theatrical Company, with which Mr. Hadley was associated. That gave Joe and Blake their start in life, and since then they had been in the business of taking moving pictures. They became experts, and their services were in great demand, not only in filming dramas acted by the company, but in making independent views.
They went out West, as told in the second volume, and got some stirring views of cowboys and Indians, and then they went to the Pacific Coast, and later to the jungle, where there were more strenuous times.
Their latest venture had been to Earthquake Land, and on returning from there they felt the need of a vacation. They engaged board at the farmhouse of Hiram Baker, in Central Falls, about fifty miles from New York City, and they were taking their rest there when the newspaper story of the flood on the Mississippi, and the long-distance telephone call, rather interrupted their ease and quiet.
I might add that in their trip to the coast Joe located his long-lost father, and later, in an expedition to the jungle, he succeeded in locating his sister, who had gone to the Dark Continent as a missionary’s helper.
Mr. Duncan and his daughter Jessie made their home together, and Joe stayed with them when he was not off with Blake making moving pictures—which was quite often.
For a time Joe and Blake had worked with the Film Theatrical Company, which went to various parts of the country to get the proper backgrounds for their films. But of late, as I have said, the two boys had started out for themselves.