But Tausig received me with open arms.

"Got tired of staying out in the cold--eh?" he grinned.

"I'm tired of vaudeville," I answered. "Can't you give me a chance in a comedy?"

"Hm! Ambitious, ain't you?"

"Obermuller has a play all ready for me--written for me. He'd star me fast enough if he had the chance."

"But he'll never get the chance."

"Oh, I don't know."

"But I do. He's on the toboggan; that's where they all get, my dear, when they get big-headed enough to fight us."

"But Obermuller's not like the others. He's not so easy. And he is so clever; why, the plot of that comedy is the bulliest thing--"

"You've read it--you remember it?"

"Oh, I know it by heart--my part of it. You see, he wouldn't keep away from me while he was thinking of it. He kept consulting me about everything in it. In a way, we worked over it together."

The little man looked at me, slowly closing one eye. It is a habit of his when he's going to do something particularly nasty.

"Then, in a way, as you say, it is part yours."

"Hardly! Imagine Nance Olden writing a line of a play!"

"Still you--collaborated; that's the word. I say, my dear, if I could read that comedy, and it was--half what you say it is, I might--I don't promise, mind--but I might let you have the part that was written for you and put the thing on. Has he drilled you any, eh? He was the best stage-manager we ever had before he got the notion of managing for himself--and ruining himself."

"Well, he's all that yet. Of course, he has told me, and we agreed how the thing should be done. As he'd write, you know, he'd read the thing over to me, and I--"

"Fine--fine! A reading from that fool Obermuller would be enough to open the eyes of a clever woman. I'd like to read that comedy--yes?"

"But Obermuller would never--"

"But Olden might--"

"What?"

"Dictate the plot to my secretary, Mason, in there," he nodded his head back toward the inner room. "She could give him the plot and as much of her own part in full as she could remember. You know Mason. Used to be a newspaper man. Smart fellow, that, when he's sober. He could piece out the holes--yes?"

I looked at him. The little beast sat there, slowly closing one eye and opening it again. He looked like an unhealthy little frog, with his bald head, his thin-lipped mouth that laughed, while the wrinkles rayed away from his cold, sneering eyes that had no smile in them.

"I--I wouldn't like to make an enemy of a man like Obermuller, Mr.

Tausig."

"Bah! Ain't I told you he's on the toboggan?"

"But you never can tell with a man like that. Suppose he got into that combine with Heffelfinger and Dixon and Weinstock?"

"What're you talking about?"

"Well, it's what I've heard."

"But Heffelfinger and Dixon and Weinstock are all in with us; who told you that fairy story?"

"Obermuller himself."

The little fellow laughed. His is a creaky, almost silent little laugh; if a spider could laugh he'd laugh that way.

"They're fooling him a bunch or two. Never you mind Obermuller. He's a dead one."

"Oh, he said that you thought they were in with you, but that nothing but a written agreement would hold men like that. And that you hadn't got."

"Smart fellow, that Obermuller. He'd have been a good man to have in the business if it hadn't been for those independent ideas he's got.

He's right; it takes--"

"So there is an agreement!" I shouted, in spite of myself, as I leaned forward.

He sat back in his chair, or, rather, he let it swallow him again.

"What business is that of yours? Stick to the business on hand. Get to work on that play with Mason inside. If it's good, and we decide to put it on, we'll pay you five hundred dollars down in addition to your salary. If it's rot, you'll have your salary weekly all the time you're at it, just the same as if you were working, till I can place you. In the meantime, keep your ears and eyes open and watch things, and your mouth shut. I'll speak to Mason and he'll be ready for you to-morrow morning. Come round in the morning; there's n.o.body about then, and we want to keep this thing dark till it's done. Obermuller mustn't get any idea what we're up to.... He don't love you--no--for shaking him?"

"He's furious; wouldn't even say good-by. I'm done for with him, anyway, I guess. But what could I do?"

"Nothing, my dear; nothing. You're a smart little girl," he chuckled.

"Ta-ta!"

XIII.

Just what I'd been hoping for I don't know, but I knew that my chance had come that morning.

For a week I had been talking Obermuller's comedy to Mason, the secretary. In the evenings I stood about in the wings and watched the Van Twiller company in Brambles. There was one fat role in it that I just ached for, but I lost all that ache and found another, when I overheard two of the women talking about Obermuller and me one night.

"He found her and made her," one of 'em said; "just dug her out of the ground. See what he's done for her; taught her every blessed thing she knows; wrote her mimicking monologues for her; gave her her chance, and--and now--Well, Tausig don't pay salaries for nothing, and she gets hers as regularly as I draw mine. What more I don't know. But she hasn't set foot on the stage yet under Tausig, and they say Obermuller--"

I didn't get the rest of it, so I don't know what they say about Obermuller. I only know what they've said to him about me. 'Tisn't hard to make men believe those things. But I had to stand it. What could I do? I couldn't tell Fred Obermuller that I was making over his play, soul and as much body as I could remember, to Tausig's secretary.

He'd have found that harder to believe than the other thing.

It hasn't been a very happy week for me, I can tell you, Maggie. But I forgot it all, every shiver and ache of it, when I came into the office that morning, as usual, and found Mason alone.

Not altogether alone--he had his bottle. And he had had it and others of the same family all the night before. The poor drunken wretch hadn't been home at all. He was worse than he'd been that morning three days before, when I had stood facing him and talking to him, while with my hands behind my back I was taking a wax impression of the lock of the desk; and he as unconscious of it all as Tausig himself.

The last page I had dictated the day before, which he'd been transcribing from his notes, lay in front of him; the gas was still burning directly above him, and a shade he wore over his weak eyes had been knocked awry as his poor old bald head went b.u.mping down on the type-writer before him.

The thing that favored me was Tausig's distrust of everybody connected with him. He hates his partners only a bit less than he hates the men outside the Trust. The bigger and richer the Syndicate grows, the more power and prosperity it has, the more he begrudges them their share of it; the more he wants it all for himself. He is madly suspicious of his clerks, and hires others to watch them, to spy upon them. He is continually moving his valuables from place to place, partly because he trusts no man; partly because he's so deathly afraid his right hand will find out what his left is doing. He is a full partner of Braun and Lowenthal--with mental reservations. He has no confidence in either of them. Half his schemes he keeps from them; the other half he tells them--part of. He's for ever afraid that the Syndicate of which he's the head will fall to pieces and become another Syndicate of which he won't be head.