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SHOWMAN
parts at a good salary. My first impulse was to refuse it on the girl's account. But she wouldn't hear of that. She did whimper a little when the wire came, but then she got hold of herself and set herself to send me away. "You don't belong here, Billy," she said. "This is your chance to get going again, and you've got to grab it." It took days of heart-breaking argument, but I finally grabbed— and I never saw her again. She never answered my letters, having the courage to make the break clean if it had to be made. The only news I ever got of her was from a strolling actor who had heard somewhere at fourth or fifth hand that she had married a man who owned a gold mine. I hope it was true —anything to get her out of that Portland mad-house would have been all to the good.
In the bright lexicon of my youth, Portland had a way of meaning complications. I'd played the place before, in a company putting on a miniature imitation of the Kiralfry Brothers' production of "Michael Strogoff" that had been the sensation of San Francisco in 1882. They had had 200 actors, a huge ballet, horses, elephants, camels and a bear for the hero to fight. We dispensed with the camels, the elephants and all but one of the horses; our ballet consisted of four girls, and since there were only twelve members in our company, we had to spread the sixty speaking parts of the original over the most complicated doubling I had ever seen up to that moment. I was the Czar of Russia in the first scene, a telegraph operator in the second, a bearded
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