“Well, we know it wasn’t,” returned Blake consolingly.  “Come on, we’ll get ready to do it over again; but, from the way Mr. Hadley wrote in his last letter, he’ll be sorry about the delay.”

“Is he eager for you to get over on the other side?” asked the helper.

“Yes.  And I understand he asked if you wanted to go along as our assistant, Mac.”

“He did?  First I wasn’t going, but now I believe I will.  I don’t want to stay on the same side of the pond with that Frenchman!  He may run into me again.”

“Don’t be a C. C.,” laughed Joe.  “Cheer up!”

“I would if I saw anything to laugh at,” was the response.  “But it sure is tough!”

The moving picture boys felt also that the incident was unfortunate, but they were used to hard luck, and could accept it more easily than could their helper.

The commanding officer at the camp was quite exercised over the matter of the spoiled films.

“Well,” he said to Blake when told about it, “I suppose it can’t be helped.  It may delay matters a bit, and we counted on the films as an aid in the recruiting.  There have been a good many stories circulated, by German and other enemies of Uncle Sam, to the effect that the boys in camp are having a most miserable time.

“Of course you know and I know that this isn’t so.  But we can’t reach every one to tell them that.  Nor can the newspapers, helpful as they have been, reach every one.  That is why we decided on moving pictures.  They have a wider appeal than anything else.

“So we army men felt that if we could show pictures of life as it actually is in camp, it would not only help enlistments, but would make the fathers and mothers feel that their sons were going to a place that was good for them.”

“So they are; and our pictures will show it, too!” exclaimed Blake.  “On account of the accident we’ll be a bit delayed, and if that Frenchman runs his auto——­”

“Well, perhaps the less said about it the better,” cautioned the officer.  “He is our guest, you know, and if he was a bit awkward we must overlook it.”

“And yet, after all, I wonder, with Mac, if it was a pure accident,” mused Blake, as he walked off to join Joe and arrange for the retaking of the films that were spoiled.  “I wonder if it was an accident,” he repeated.

In the days that followed the destruction of the army films and while the arrangements for taking new pictures were being made, Joe and Blake heard several times from Mr. Hadley.  The producer said he was going to send Macaroni abroad with the two boys, if the wiry little helper would consent to go; and to this Charles assented.

He would be very useful to Joe and Blake, they felt, knowing their ways as he did, and being able to work a camera almost as well as they themselves.

“Did the boss tell you just what we were to do?” asked Blake of Joe one day, when they were perfecting the details for taking the new pictures.