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SHOWMAN
general, major, non-com and private in the outfit whenever and wherever we met.
Naturally, you couldn't trail that kind of mob round the country without losing men through illness and desertion. To fill the gaps in their ranks we hired some local ringers. They weren't all nature's noblemen, these recruits of ours, and a few of them proceeded to get into trouble with the law right away. When it came out in court that these purported Boer heroes were named Murphy, Ginsberg and Greenfield, nasty remarks were made both in the press and from the bench— "The prisoners," said one magistrate, "are obviously boorish, but they don't seem very Boerish."
That was bad medicine just before our show opened. But it went fine for a while and our thirty percent of the proceeds was a young gold mine while it lasted. Our stadium seated sixteen thousand and we filled it again and again by giving the customers more scenery and effects and noise than Coney Island has seen since— which is saying something. But, although Harriman and I were making money, the troupe's seventy percent just couldn't be big enough to cover the back-salaries that had been piling up for months in the sunny southland. About the middle of August our armies began to come apart much after the fashion of the Russian army in late '17. Lewis ran the thing on a co-operative basis for a while to finish out the season on Labor Day. After that it was curtains. The
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