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SHOWMAN
ten dollars a week. I knew there would be plenty of grins among the professional cast as I trotted round and knocked at their doors backstage, but I grabbed at it anyway.
In two weeks I had my reward, one of those things that fiction is full of and occasionally do happen in the theater. Max Freeman, playing Natchez Jim, the Mississippi gambler, took sick just before a performance. The house was full to bursting and the idea of calling off the show and returning perfectly good money was always repugnant to any right-thinking company. Natchez Jim had to be a scowling, staggering bad man with a streak of pure gold at bottom. He tackles the brutal overseer who was always pursuing the heroine: "By what right do you interfere?" asks the overseer. "By the right to see fair play," thunders Natchez Jim. "And by the eternal this little girl's going to have it." Then he snatches a lighted lantern, throws it down a hatch-way, the steam-boat catches fire and the act ends on a big smoke and flames effect.
One after another the Pacific Coast actors were tried and failed. I wasn't exactly the type— skinny and short, weighing 125 pounds at the time— but, when nobody else could read the lines right, I pulled Campbell's coat-tails and looked pleading. His being at his wits' end was the only reason for giving me a crack at it. I growled and shouted through the lines: "Go make up," he says. William H. Thompson, that fine old actor, snatched me down to his dressing-room and
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