Picture Play Magazine (Oct-Nov 1915)

the use of it, the shipowner sprang aboard the launch and ordered its engineer to point it out to sea with all speed — in pursuit of the vessel which he had ordered sunk for the insurance money, and on board which his only daughter had hidden herself. Thus it was that when Charlie reached the hold, he was surprised to come face to face with the girl he loved, who had left her place of concealment behind the piled-up sacks of grain. "Ah, Charlie !" she sobbed. "We are doomed ! Look !" She pointed to the keg of giant powder and the case of dynamite which the mate and the skipper had carried down into the hold behind the crew's back. "They're going to blow up the ship !" the girl answered the blank stare which Charlie turned from the explosives to her face. "I heard them plotting it down here, not half an hour ago. But hush — I think they're coming back now !" She drew Charlie down out of sight with her behind the sacks in a corner of the hold, just as the captain and the mate entered. In the skipper's hand was a coil of fuse, while the mate held a box of safety matches. The captain attached the fuse to the explosives. The mate struck one of the matches and ignited it. Then, nudging each other with malicious grins, the fiendish pair prepared to depart. "Quick, now !" the captain admonished. "We'll lower a boat over the side and make our get-away in it before the fireworks start!" Alone together once more in the hold, Charlie and the girl came out of their hiding place. "Put it out! Oh, put it out!" she cried to Charlie. And Charlie, bending down over the sputtering fuse, attempted to do so — by blowing it. At that moment, in sight of the doomed vessel, the shipowner was dancing up and down in feverish impatience in the cockpit of the launch, as it came speeding across the water toward the Sally Ann. "Water's the only thing that will do it!" Charlie muttered to himself. Picking up the barrel of powder and the box of dynamite both, with the sputtering fuse still attached, he carried them up to the deck in his arms, followed by the girl. PICTURE-PLAY WEEKLY Charlie threw the explosives over the side without looking. But his aim could not have been better. The barrel of powder and the box of dynamite fell in the boat that the captain and the mate were rowing away from the vessel. There was a crash, as of a head-on collision between a freight train and an express. And the two rogues had met their just deserts. Five minutes later, Charlie and the leaning far out over the gunwale to peer down into the water. "He's gone !" Charlie — who had climbed back into the launch over the other side — placed his foot against that portion of the shipowner's anatomy which was uppermost as he continued to lean over the side. "No, he isn't !" said Charlie, and as he did so he sent his foot forward and pushed the shipowner overboard. "But you're a goner !" A strange disinclination for food seized Charlie. girl were in the launch with the shipowner. The latter, holding his daughter tight in a thankful embrace, utterly ignored the young man who had saved her. "Do you consent to our marriage now?" Charlie asked him. Still her father paid no heed to him. "Very well," said Charlie, in a firm tone ; and as he spoke he mounted to the gunwale of the launch. "Unless you give me your daughter, I'll jump overboard. I don't care what becomes of me if I can't have her." Without looking around, the shipowner addressed him impatiently : "Go ahead and jump !" Charlie shrugged hopelessly. Then, holding his nose between his finger and thumb, he stepped off the side of the boat into the sea. Her father ran to the side over which Charlie had disappeared. "He's gone !" he exclaimed joyously, And Charlie sat down with the girl in his arms, to give the grinning engineer the curt order: "Home, James!" Three Days From Now. I I AVE you read the announcement * * elsewhere in this copy of PICTURE-PLAY WEEKLY, telling of the change to be made in the date of its publication, in its title, and in the size and quality of its contents? Remember to look on the news stands for PICTURE-PLAY MAGAZINE, on December ist. Among the 128 pages of reading matter to which it will be enlarged, there will be exclusive features, such as the fiction version of a Triangle play, a short story written from a Mary Pickford picture, a department conducted personally by Francis X. Bushman, and instruction and advice in the writing and marketing of scenarios, given by the expert Clarence J. Caine.