“They’re around somewhere,” explained Miss Shay, when the other members of the company, with whom they had spent so many happy and exciting days, had offered their greetings.  “Are you in such a hurry to see them?” she asked of Blake.

“Oh, not in such an awful hurry,” he answered with a laugh, as Birdie Lee came out of a dressing room, smiling rosily at him.

“I guess not!” laughed Miss Shay.

Soon the interval between the scenes of the drama then being “filmed,” or photographed, came to an end.  The actors and actresses took their places in a “ball room,” that was built on one section of the studio floor.

“Ready!” called the manager to the camera operator, and as the music of an unseen orchestra played, so that the dancing might be in perfect time, the camera began clicking and the action of the play, which included an exciting episode in the midst of the dance, went on.  It was a gay scene, for the ladies and gentlemen were dressed in the “height of fashion.”

It was necessary to have every detail faithfully reproduced, for the eye of the moving picture camera is more searching, and far-seeing, than any human eye, and records every defect, no matter how small.  And when it is recalled that the picture thrown on the screen is magnified many hundred times, a small defect, as can readily be understood, becomes a very large one.

So great care is taken to have everything as nearly perfect as possible.  Blake and Joe watched the filming of the drama, recalling the time when they used to turn the handle of the camera at the same work, before they were chosen to go out after bigger pictures—­scenes from real life.  The operator, a young fellow; whom both Blake and Joe knew, looked around and nodded at them, when he had to stop grinding out the film a moment, to allow the director to correct something that had unexpectedly gone wrong.

“Don’t you wish you had this easy job?” the operator asked.

“We may, before we come back from Panama,” answered Blake.

A little later Mr. Ringold and Mr. Hadley came in, greeting the two boys, and then began a talk which lasted for some time, and in which all the details of the projected work, as far as they could be arranged in advance, were gone over.

“What we want,” said Mr. Hadley, “is a series of pictures about the Canal.  It will soon be open for regular traffic, you know, and, in fact some vessels have already gone through it.  But the work is not yet finished, and we want you to film the final touches.

“Then, too, there may be accidents—­there have been several small ones of late, and, as I wrote you, a man who claims to have made a study of the natural forces in Panama declares a big slide is due soon.

“Of course we won’t wish the canal any bad luck, and we don’t for a moment want that slide to happen.  Only—­”

“If it does come you want it filmed!” interrupted Blake, with a laugh.