“I’ve got a surprise for you,” he said, as he carved the meat. “How’d you boys like to be movie actors?”
“Oh, you Charlie Chaplin!” Bennie grinned. “Sure, I’d like it. Spider, though, ain’t beautiful enough.”
“Of course, he hasn’t your classic Greek features,” said Uncle Billy, looking hard at Bennie’s snub nose. “But maybe he can ride a horse. Can you ride a horse, Bennie?”
“Sure—I guess so. I never tried.”
“Can you, Spider?”
“Not very well, sir. I have ridden our old delivery horse a good bit, though, but mostly bareback.”
“You see, Bennie,” the doctor laughed, “he’s going to be a better actor than you are, after all, in spite of your fatal beauty.”
“What do you mean, actors, anyhow?” Bennie demanded. “What’s the big idea?”
“Well,” the doctor explained, “we’re not going alone on this trip. I have a friend, a business man here in Portland, who is a fine amateur photographer. He’s got a new movie camera now, that he wants to experiment with. He wants to take a sort of scenic picture of the Oregon mountains, so he’s coming along, in his car, with his son, Lester. You and Spider and Lester and I have got to be the troupe. Whenever he sees a nice precipice he wants to shoot, we’ll have to do a Douglas Fairbanks up the side of it, or make a Pearl White jump down a thousand-foot waterfall. How does that strike you?”
“Uncle Billy,” Bennie said, very solemnly, “you have come to exactly the right people. Spider and me—I—are the original human flies. We walk up precipices before breakfast every day at home.”