ted toward his
room, followed by Joe.

"Is--is that right?" asked the hotel clerk, doubtfully.

"Are you sure it isn't dynamite?" inquired the officer.

"Well, if _we're_ not afraid to take a chance in going in the same room
with what you call an infernal machine, _you_ ought not to be," said
Joe, with a smile.

This was logic that could not be refuted, and they followed the boys to
the room. There, just where they had left it, was the camera, the motor
clicking away industriously. It worked intermittently, running for five
minutes, and then ceasing for half an hour, so as not to use up the reel
of film too quickly. Also, it made a diversity of street scenes, an
automatic arrangement swinging the lens slightly after each series of
views, so as to get the new ones at a different angle.

"Now we'll show you," said Blake, as, having noted that all the film was
run out, and was in the light-tight exposed box, he opened the camera
and showed the harmless mechanism. Several of the hotel employees
crowded into the room, once they learned there was no danger.

The boys explained the working of the apparatus, and this seemed to
satisfy the officer.

"But we were surely suspicious of you at first," he said, with a smile.

"Yes," said the clerk. "A chambermaid called my attention to the
clicking sound when she was making up the room. I investigated, and when
I heard it, and saw the queer box, and remembered that we had had
dynamiting here, I sent for the police."

"We're sorry to have given you a scare," said Blake, and then the
incident was over, and the crowd in the street dispersed on learning
there was to be no sensation.

"Say, I think there's some sort of hoodoo about us," remarked Joe, as he
and Blake sat in their room.

"Why, you're not going to come any of that gloomy C. C. business on me;
are you?" asked Blake.

"Not at all," went on his chum. "But what I mean by a hoodoo is that
something always seems to happen when we start out anywhere. We've been
on the jump, you might say, ever since we lost our places on the farms
and got into this moving picture business."

"That's so. And the latest is being taken for dynamiters."

"Yes. But if things are going to keep on happening to us I wish they'd
take a turn and help me find my father," went on Joe. "You don't know
how it feels, Blake, to know you've got a parent somewhere and not be
able to locate him. It's--why, it's almost as bad as if--as if he were
dea