the same.
But she wasn't, and so I for one should be afraid that if we put that
fillum out she'd come back from the dead to stop it!"

He sank his voice, glancing apprehensively over his shoulder.

"Lobel, you wouldn't dare do it!"

"Lobel," said Quinlan, "he's right! We wouldn't dare do it!"

"Quinlan," admitted Lobel, "it's right--I wouldn't dare do it."

In that same instant of his confession, though, Mr. Lobel bounded out of
his chair, magically changing from a dumpy static figure of woe into the
dynamo of energy and resourcefulness the glassed-in studios and the
out-of-door locations knew.

"I got it!" he whooped. "I got it!" He threw himself at an inner door of
the executive suite and jerked it open. "Appel," he shouted, "don't
start yet! I got more instructions still for you. And say, Appel, you
ain't seen nobody but only Quinlan and Geltfin--eh? You ain't told
nobody only just them? Good! Well, don't! Don't telephone nobody! Don't
speak a word to nobody! Don't move from where you are!"

He closed the door and stood against it as though to hold his private
secretary a close prisoner within, and faced his amazed partners.

"It's a cinch!" he proclaimed to them. "I just this minute thought it up
myself. If I must say it myself, always in a big emergency I can think
fast. Listen! Nobody ain't going to know Monte is dead; not for a year,
not maybe for two years; not until this last big picture is old and worn
out; not until we get good and ready they should know. Vida Monte, she
goes right on living till we say the word."

"But--but--"

"Wait, wait, can't you? If I must do all the quick thinking for this
shop shouldn't I sometimes get a word in sideways? What I'm telling you,
if you'll please let me, is this: The girl is dead all right! But nobody
knows it only me and you, Quinlan, and you, Geltfin, and Appel in this
next room here. Even the doctor up there at Hamletsburg he don't know it
and his wife she don't know it and nobody in all that town knows it. And
why don't they know? Because they think only it is a woman named Sarah
Glassman that is dead. Actually that sickness no doubt changed her so
that even if them rubes ever go to see high-class feature fillums there
didn't nobody recognize her. If they didn't suspect nothing when she was
alive, for why should they suspect something now she is dead? They
shouldn't and they won't and they can't!

"What give me the idea was, I just remembered that when t