THE PICTURE, THE SKY Pirate, having made a great success, I need only briefly outline Tish’s story. As an elderly clerk in the secret service, she is appalled by the amount of rum smuggling going on, especially by dirigible from Mexico. She volunteers to stop it, and is refused permission. She then steals an airship from the Army, funds from the Treasury in Washington, an air pilot from the Marines, and starts west, unheralded and unsung, in pursuit of her laudable purpose.
The various incidents, as the great American public will recall, include her fastening a Mexican governor in a cave by exploding dynamite in the hillside above him; dropping from a bridge to a moving train below to search the express car for liquor; trapping the chief smuggler on top of the structural-iron framework of a building, and so on. In the end, by holding up the smugglers’ dirigible with her own aeroplane and a machine gun, Tish forces them to hand over the valise containing their ill-gotten gains, and with it descends by a parachute to the ground and safety. Later on, as you will recall, she finds the smugglers at an orgy, and with two revolvers arrests them all.
This simple outline only barely reveals the plan of the story. It says nothing of the pursuits on horseback, the shipwreck, the fire, and so on. But it shows clearly that the original story contained no love interest.
I lay stress on this at this point in the narration, because it was very early in the picture that we began to notice Mr. Macmanus.
Mr. Macmanus was a tall gentleman with a gray mustache, and with a vague resemblance to Mr. Ostermaier, but lacking the latter’s saintliness of expression. We paid little attention to him at first, but he was always around when Tish was being photographed—or shot, as the technical term is—and in his make-up.
Aggie rather admired him, and spoke to him one day while he was feeding peanuts to Katie, the tame studio elephant—of whom more anon.
“Are you being shot to-day?” she inquired.
“No madam. Not to-day, nor even at sunrise!” he replied in a bitter tone. “From what I can discover, I am being paid my salary to prevent my appearance on any screen.”
He then gloomily fed the empty bag to Katie, and went away.
We had no solution for the mystery of Mr. Macmanus at that period, and indeed temporarily forgot him. For the time had come for Tish to take the air, and both Aggie and I were very nervous.
Even Tish herself toyed with her breakfast the morning of that day, and spoke touchingly of Charlie Sands, observing that she was his only surviving relative, and that perhaps it was wrong and selfish of her to take certain risks. To add to our anxiety, the morning paper chronicled the story of a fatal crash the day before, and she went, I think, a trifle pale. Later on, however, she rallied superbly.
“After all,” she said, “the percentage of accident is only one in five hundred. I am sorry for the poor wretch, but it saves the lives of four hundred and ninety-nine others. Figures do not lie.”
From that time on she was quite buoyant, and ate a lamb chop with appetite.
During the flight Aggie, Hannah and I remained in the open, looking up, and I must admit that it was a nervous time for us, seeing our dear Tish head down above the earth, and engaged in other life-imperiling exploits. But she came down smiling and, when the aeroplane stopped, spoke cheerfully.
“A marvelous experience,” she observed. “One feels akin to the birds. One soars, and loses memory of earth.”
She was then helped out, but owing to the recent altitude her knees refused to support her, and she sank to the ground.