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104
MOTION PICTURE MAGAZINE
promptly fainted, but I got the tobacco and never enjoyed it more."
There was silence for a while, and the pipes glowed in the darkness.
"Once " commenced Bill Shay.
Every one gasped. Bill was going to talk. Hastily I reached for my pencil and pulled down my cuffs. This was too good to miss. Bill Shay,
WILLIAM SHAY
the Sphinx, the silent, was going to talk.
"Once," said Bill, "when I was traveling in England with Burgess' Stock Company, in the days of the 'County Fair' and 'Spinster by Preference,' we missed the boat back, and rather than wait a month for its return, we took a sailing vessel. The fifth night out we were startled by the cry of 'Fire!' We rushed on deck and found the after part of the ship in flames. One cannot
imagine the horrors of a fire at sea. A pitch-black night, the flames casting a lurid light skyward, and the shrieks of the terrified women."
Here he stopped, and I held my breath for fear he would not go on. But my fears were groundless. He continued: "When all hope was gone, the captain ordered the boats lowered. Two aft were destroyed by the flames, that licked Jiungrily at the decks and ran up the tarred ropes. The heat was terrible. We crowded into the four boats, left with only a handful of provisions and one water-cask for four boats. We stuck together and watched the ship go down. The captain was grief-stricken; the first ship he had lost in thirty-eight years of sailing. We passed the next day in tolerable comfort, for it was cloudy, but on the second day a terrible storm arose, and two of the boats, one with the water-cask in it, upset. All were lost. The third day the sun was scorching, beating down on our unprotected heads. Two of the men went crazy and leaped overboard. A gruesome corpse, half-burned, floated by us. I recognized it as Mather, our 'heavy.' He must have been left on the ship. At the sight of the corpse, his wife, who was playing lead, jumped after him and never came up. The thirst was unbearable, but on the evening of the third day we were picked up by a passing ship and reached land safely."
"Why didn't the ship company provide the ship with fire-extinguishers?" I ventured. "It was something like forty years ago," replied Bill; "there weren't any." I remained extinguished for the rest of the evening.
"All of my adventures have happened right here in li'l ole Noo Yawk," quoth Wallie Van. "Before I stopped work to act, I was boss of a construction gang building the subway under the river. We were at the bottom of a shaft, when the pump that was supplying us with air broke and we almost suffocated. The air-pressure being cut off, the barrier that was. holding the water back