“Well, it’s hard work all right,” the captain admitted, “though now that the water is in, and we can use scows and dredges, instead of railroad cars, we can get rid of the dirt easier.  You boys should have been here when the cut was being dug, before the water was let in.”

“I wish we had been,” Blake said.  “We could have gotten some dandy pictures.”

“That’s what you could,” went on the captain.  “It was like looking at a lot of ants through a magnifying glass.  Big mouthfuls of dirt were being bitten out of the hill by steam shovels, loaded on to cars and the trains of cars were pulled twelve miles away to the dumping ground.  There the earth was disposed of, and back came the trains for more.  And with thousands of men working, blasts being sent off every minute or so, the puffing of engines, the tooting of whistles, the creaking of derricks and steam shovels—­why it was something worth seeing!”

“Sorry we missed it,” Joe said.  “But maybe we’ll get some pictures just as good.”

“It won’t be anything like that—­not even if there’s a big slide,” the captain said, shaking his head doubtfully.

Though the Canal was practically finished, and open to some vessels, there was much that yet remained to be done upon it, and this work Blake and Joe, with Mr. Alcando to help them at the cameras, filmed each day.  Reel after reel of the sensitive celluloid was exposed, packed in light-tight boxes and sent North for development and printing.  At times when they remained in Culebra Cut, which they did for two weeks, instead of one, fresh unexposed films were received from New York, being brought along the Canal by Government boats, for, as I have explained, the boys were semi-official characters now.

Mr. Alcando was rapidly becoming expert in handling a moving picture camera, and often he went out alone to film some simple scene.

“I wonder how our films are coming out?” asked Blake one day, after a fresh supply Of reels had been received.  “We haven’t heard whether Mr. Hadley likes our work or not?”

“Hard to tell,” Joe responded.  But they knew a few days later, for a letter came praising most highly the work of the boys and, incidentally, that of Mr. Alcando.

“You are doing fine!” Mr. Hadley wrote.  “Keep it up.  The pictures will make a sensation.  Don’t forget to film the slide if one occurs.”

“Of course we’ll get that,” Joe said, as he looked up at the frowning sides of Culebra Cut.  “Only it doesn’t seem as if one was going to happen while we’re here.”

“I hope it never does,” declared Captain Watson, solemnly.

As the boys wanted to make pictures along the whole length of the Canal, they decided to go on through the Pedro Miguel and Miraflores locks, to the Pacific Ocean, thus making a complete trip and then come back to Culebra.  Of course no one could tell when a slide would occur, and they had to take chances of filming it.