t it.

"I heard you," said Green, stopping now dead short, directly in front of
the resplendent front of the Regal Motion Picture Palace. He
contemplated with an apparently unwarranted interest the illuminated and
lithographed announcements of the morrow's bill.

"I'm perfectly willing to stay in the background," he said. "But--but
I've just this very minute thought of a plan that ought to make us
absolutely sure of our man--providing the plan works! Are you at all
familiar with the tragedy of 'Macbeth'?"

"I don't know as I am," admitted Mr. Cassidy honestly. "When did it
happen and who done it?"

Again his employer seemed not to hear him.

"Let's go into this place," he said, turning in towards the hospitable
portals of the Regal. "I want to have a business talk with the
proprietor of this establishment, if he's in."

The manager was in, and they had their talk; but after all it was
money--which in New York speaks with such a clarion-loud and convincing
voice--that did most of the talking. As soon as Judson Green had
produced a bill-roll of august proportions, the proprietor, doubtful
until that moment, showed himself to be a man open to all reasonable
arguments. Moreover, he presently scented in this enterprise much free
advertisement for his place.

VI

On the following afternoon, the weather being rainy, the Regal opened
its doors for the three-o'clock performance to an audience that was
smaller than common and mostly made up of dependable neighbourhood
patrons. However, there were at least two newcomers present. They sat
side by side, next to central aisle, in the rearmost row of
chairs--Judson Green and Michael J. Cassidy. Their man was almost
directly in front of them, perhaps halfway down toward the stage. Above
a scattering line of heads of women and children they could see, in the
half light of the darkened house, his head and shoulders as he bent his
body forward at an interested angle.

Promptly on the hour, a big bull's-eye of light flashed on, making a
shimmering white target in the middle of the screen. The music started
up, and a moving-picture soloist with a moving-picture soloist's voice,
appeared in the edge of the illuminated space and rendered a
moving-picture ballad, having reference to the joys of life down in Old
Alabam', where the birds are forever singing in the trees and the
cotton-blossoms bloom practically without cessation. This, mercifully,
being soon over, a film entitled "