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SHOWMAN
companies that hit town carried only principal actors, depending on local volunteers at four bits a night for supernumeraries— armies, mobs, citizenry and such. Lots of poor souls "suped" at that rate to keep what was left of body and soul together. I don't deny that, even in my own case, fifty cents was often a welcome addition to the seven dollars a week I got for selling papers. But mainly I was suping for the sake of getting under my betters' feet and keeping eyes and ears open. A super had a versatile career without half trying— I've gone on as a soldier, a sailor, a hoodlum, a jail-bird, a burglar, a stage-door johnny, a Chinaman, and a medieval swash-buckler in high boots and rattling rapier. I've played Indians of every known tribe and some tribes that never existed outside a hack dramatist's imagination. Wild-western plays were just getting into their stride then— the country had waked up with a bang and a whoop to the joys of the cowboy and Indian business— and every time a production of "Wild Bill" or "Texas Jack" came to town, there I was, dyked out in war paint and feathers, doing my best to carry out the stage-manager's idea of a war dance.
Presently, besides, I'd edged my way into one of those theatrical clubs of amateurs which during that period infested not only San Francisco but New York and New Orleans and Chicago and Baltimore. In those times each big town was a theatrical center in its own right, with its own producers, authors, supply of actors
SO