But the villain had reckoned without the telephone. In the next scene the stenographer-heroine slowly grabbed the ether cone from her face, gaspingly crawled to the corner, where the telephone hung conspicuously, and called Central. Presently the bolts began to grumble, and were shot back by a young man who rushed in and dragged the tottering woman from the safe, while she murmured in a dying whisper audible for two blocks:
“The ferry, Jasper! The ferry! The thief!” Then the noble girl fell swooning and apparently lifeless.
“There’s something doing!” Farson remarked with an appreciative grin, and added with a peculiar expression, “They’ve taken more than a hint from my one play.”
“And several more from life,” Brainard muttered.
“I believe it _is_ life through the medium of my play—but altered somehow,” Farson observed.
The next scene was labeled, “AT THE FERRY SLIP—SAN FRANCISCO.” As the curtain rose, the villain—no longer masked, but with a long ulster concealing all but his sinister eyes—was deftly transferring himself and his sample case, stuffed with money and bonds, on board the ferry-boat. The bell rang—business in the wings. Then on rushed the hero-lover, clutching vainly at the disappearing sample case. There was a desperate tussle between the hero and the villain, while the dummy passengers on the deck above obligingly turned their backs. The villain cut loose from his pursuer with a wicked knife, threw the case upon the moving boat, and leaped two yards after it, leaving the prostrate figure of the hero-lover half dropping over the slip. The stenographer-heroine appeared—in a neat traveling suit—and pulled her lover safely ashore. Curtain.
“Bravo!” Farson shouted enthusiastically. “If it isn’t exactly life, it’s the way we’d all like to have it happen, anyway.”
“It may be nearer life than you think,” Brainard assented with a queer smile. In this scene he had been able to get a good view of the heroine of the piece. Beneath the coarse make-up he thought he recognized familiar features, and felt sure that he had heard in real life that pert, nasal voice which had just uttered the last speech—“Escaped! We’ll track him into the darkest wilds of Africa!”
“Recognize a friend?” Farson inquired. Brainard nodded. They turned over the leaves of their program to find the name of the heroine. It was Lorilla Walters, in large black type.