Page:Wilson - Merton of the Movies (1922).djvu/320

 end he was revealed slowly, very slowly, clambering into the saddle!

They had used here, he saw, one of those slow cameras that seem to suspend all action interminably, a cruel device in this instance. And for his actual escape, when he had ridden the horse beyond camera range at a safe walk, they had used another camera that gave the effect of intense speed. The old horse had walked, but with an air of swiftness that caused the audience intense delight.

Entered Marcel, the detective, in another scene Merton had not watched. He emerged from the dance hall to confront a horse that remained, an aged counterpart of the horse Merton had ridden off. Marcel stared intently into the beast's face, whereupon it reared and plunged as if terrified by the spectacle of the cross-eyed man.

Merton recalled the horse in the village that had seemed to act so intelligently. Probably a shot-gun had stimulated the present scene. The detective thereupon turned aside, hastily donned his false mustache and Sherlock Holmes cap, and the deceived horse now permitted him to mount. He, too, walked off to the necromancy of a lens that multiplied his pace a thousandfold. And the audience rocked in its seats.

One horse still remained before the dance-hall. The old mother emerged. With one anguished look after the detective, she gathered up her disreputable skirts and left the platform in a flying leap to land in the saddle. There was no trickery about the speed at which her horse, belaboured with the mop-pail, galloped in pursuit of the others. A subtitle recited—"She has watched her dear ones leave the old nest flat. Now she must go out over the hills and mop the other side of them!"

Now came the sensational capture by lasso of the detective. But the captor had not known that, as he dragged his quarry at the rope's end, the latter had somehow possessed himself of a sign which he later walked in with, a sign reading, "Join the Good Roads Movement!" nor that the