Picture Play Magazine (Oct-Nov 1915)

8 PICTURE-PLAY WEEKLY could escape from the house, Charlie sank back weakly in the chair. "Will you get me a glass of water, please?" he requested. "I feel quite woozy in the head !" With alacrity, the cross-eyed man's friend left the room upon the errand. Charlie rose from the chair. And then he sat down in it again. The crosseyed man himself entered. At sight of Charlie — whom he was also fooled into taking for a pretty girl — he looked back cautiously through the portieres that separated the drawingroom from the one in which he had just left his wife, and then he hastened to Charlie's side. Dropping on his knees at his side, he breathed fervently : "Tell me where you came from, you beautiful angel !" His friend, returning at that moment to find the master of the house paying court to the supposed girl he had just left, tiptoed forward and poured the glass of water, which Charlie had asked him to bring, over the other's head, as he knelt there on the floor. The cross-eyed man rose, spluttering. "You keep away from my girl !" his friend warned him angrily. "She's not yours !" the other retorted, with as much heat. "She's mine!" Charlie, in the role of peacemaker, intervened. "Now, wait!" said he coyly. "I'll be fair to both of you. You can each have a kiss — on my cheek, mind ! Now, one of you stand on one side of me. And one on the other. When I say 'three,' you can both kiss me at the same time. Are you ready? All right, then — one, two, three!" Charlie ducked and stepped back. And the two men, eagerly bringing their heads forward to imprint the promised kiss upon Charlie's cheek, kissed each other, instead. The cross-eyed man, angrily seizing his equally infuriated friend, picked him up bodily by the back of his coat collar and the slack of his trousers, and ran him out of the house. Then he returned to Charlie. Dropping down on his knees beside him once more, he grasped the hem of his skirt and pressed it to his lips. And at that moment his wife and daughter entered the room behind him. His wife, not being in on the joke, was likewise fooled into thinking that it was a young and beautiful girl at whose feet she saw her husband kneeling. With lowering brows, she was on the point of interrupting the ardent love scene by striding forward to seize her spouse by the hair and pull him back from the "charmer." Her daughter, silently convulsed at the spectacle her father presented on his knees beside Charlie, checked her. "Wait, mother," she whispered. "It's all a mistake — as you'll understand in a minute, I guess." It was less than that brief space of time, when the revelation of Charlie's masquerade came, not only to the crosseyed man's wife, but to the latter, as well. Charlie, discovering that the man was kissing the hem of his skirt, had started to walk simperingly away. The man held onto his skirt. And it came off in his hands, leaving him staring in wideeyed amazement at a pair of white cotton tights that were too big for the legs they clothed. In an instant he sprang up with rage smoldering in his eyes. He had recognized Charlie; and, closing his fist, he began to roll up his sleeve above it. Charlie, who was the only one in the room that did not know his skirt had come off, was strolling up and down the floor, with his eyebrows coyly lifting and his shoulders shrugging overtime. The cross-eyed man drew back his arm and was just about to launch a blow at his unsuspecting head. His daughter, running forward, caught his arm. "Ah, spare him, father !" she declaimed melodramatically. "I love him !" Her father turned hesitatingly and looked at Charlie. That young man, with dawning terror in his countenance, was looking down at his undraped legs. He straightened, and met the cross-eyed man's gaze fixed upon him. With a weak smile, Charlie raise the toque on his head at him. The girl squeezed her father's arm, to which she still held on appealingly. "Please, daddy!" she urged. With a shrug of resignation, the man took his daughter's hand in one of his. He held out the other to Charlie, and Charlie placed his hand in it. Then her father was about to bring their hands together, a la the final moving-picture scene in which the hero gets the heroine. But abruptly the thought of all that Charlie had done to him surging across his memory, he changed his mind. He hauled off and knocked Charlie sprawling across the room. "Get out of here!" the cross-eyed man roared after him, as Charlie, picking himself up, was dashing for the door. "Get out of the city ! Get out of this country — or I won't be responsible for the consequences !" And Charlie, running up the street with a girl's hat on his head, a girl's waist and jacket on the upper part of his body, and nothing but a pair of white cotton tights on the lower part, mused to himself : "I'll get into the observation ward of some hospital, if I'm seen in this rig, that's what I'll do! And there's no hope of my not being seen, either. There's only one thing for me to do." And Charlie, at the same dead run, turned the next corner in the direction of the river — as the one place left for him to hide his untrousered legs. Saved by His Face. MARC MacDERMOTT, Edison, has just returned from a vacation in the Catskill Mountains — the first in three years of a busy life — with an adventure to rival motion pictures. With two friends, one starless night, he had walked into the woods, when around the bend of a road there whirred a big automobile with dazzling headlights, filled with four men who lost no time in pointing rifles into the wayfarers' faces, with a gruff "Come over here !" and "Who're you?" Puzzled, yet firmly believing it a holdup, the two men said that they were from the "Inn." "I know you — saw you in pictures," abruptly assured one of the riders, as he got the light on MacDermott's wellknown face. Somewhat eased, but nerves stirred by the steady friendship of the rifles' end. Marc could stand the tension no longer, and asked : "What's all this?" "There's been a bad robbery down the road, and we're after 'em. You had better get in the machine, or some of the others out might pop you with their rifles in the darkness." And so. over the rough, dark roads Marc and his friends had to ride, to save their skins, until three o'clock in the morning, letting out many an aside as to what they thought. Motion-picture ballroom scenes appear to be clearing houses for affairs of the heart.