"You've got to promise me you'll stop lyin' and four-flushin'!" she tells him. "Tell the truth and don't kid yourself that you'd have been President, if you hadn't been jobbed. That stuff is poor and will get you nowheres. Make good and you won't have to tell anybody about it--it'll be in the papers! As far as I can see, the best thing about you right now is ME! If you can't get over with _that_, I'll see that you do!"

"We'll get married to-night!" yelps Joe. "There's a minister in Film City and--"

"Don't crowd me!" interrupts Gladys, lettin' herself be kissed. "Do you promise?"

"Anything!" grins Joe.

"Just what _are_ you supposed to do in this picture?" she asks him.

"Fall off a horse!" says Joe.

"Is that all?" asks Gladys.

Joe nods.

"Well," Gladys tells him, "you won't do it! I don't want no crippled bridegroom at my weddin'. Now listen to me! If you could _write_ that stuff you've been wastin' on the air around here, you ought to make a pretty good press agent. Mr. Potts, the man who owns the company and the fellow you or your father _never_ palled around with, has a man on his payroll named Struther. He's head of what they call the publicity department, it says so on ten of his cards I have. He once claimed he'd do anything for me in such a loud voice that the floorwalker had to speak to him. I'm goin' over to the office now and ask him to give you a job back in New York. To be perfectly truthful with you, that's what I came over here for to-day in the first place!"

"But--but," stammers Joe. "I can't have you asking favors for me, Gladys, and--and, why New York?"

"Because," she says, "that's where I come from, and I want to look at it again--I'm simply crazy to yell down a dumbwaiter and throw a quarter in my own gas meter!"

Well--that's about all. They had a big weddin' right in the middle of Film City and everybody sent in and bought 'em a present. Potts got a flash at Gladys, moans regretfully and has the ceremony filmed, givin'

the result to Joe as a special gift. Of course Gladys got Joe that job. That dame could have got frankfurters and sourkraut in Buckingham Palace! Before they left for New York, I tried Joe out.

"It'll be terrible here, when you're gone!" I says, "because you know more about makin' movies than Rockefeller does about oil."

Joe shakes his head and grins.

"No!" he says. "I guess I don't know much about anything!"

I p.r.o.nounced him cured to myself and shook his hand. The Kid went to the train with him and his bride. I didn't feel up to seein' that guy goin' away with Gladys.

I met the Kid as he was comin' up from the railroad station, and seein'

he was laughin', I asked him if the happy pair got off all right.

"Yeh!" he says. "Everything went fine. Me and Miss Vincent waited till the train was pullin' out. Gladys was inside and Joe was standin'

on the steps of the Pullman, talkin'. Just before the thing pulled out, I shook Joe's hand and said I hoped he got past in New York, because it was a big burg and a tough one for losers." The Kid stops and laughs some more.

"Well," I says, "what's the joke?"

"Sweet Papa!" says the Kid, wipin' his eyes. "Joe's face lights all up and that old glitter comes back in his eyes!

"'Make good?' he yells to me. 'Well, I ought to make good--my father owns half the town, and I was the biggest thing in it when I left!'"

CHAPTER V.

"EXIT, LAUGHING"

Every time I see one of them big, fat, dignified guys that looks like they have laid somebody eight to five they can go through life without smilin' once, I wonder just how much they'd give in American money to be able to put on a suit of pink pajamas and walk down Fifth Avenue some crowded afternoon, leadin' a green elephant by a string!

I'll bet they's many a bank president, brigadier-general and what not, that would part with their right eye if they could only force themselves to let down for five minutes, can this dignity thing and give a imitation of what a movie comedian thinks is humor. The best proof of this is that the first chance any of them birds gets--_that's just what they do_!

Y'know, you've seen in the papers lots of times where Archibald Van Hesterfeld has been among the starters in the bazaar for the relief of the heat prostration victims in Iceland, or words to that effect. Or, if it wasn't Archibald it might have been General Galumpus or Commodore Fed.i.n.k--or all of them. Away down at the bottom of the page, if it's a copy of the Succotash Crossing _Bugle_, or right up in the headlines, if it's a big town sheet, after readin' what dignity and so forth the "distinguished guests lent to the affair," you'll see that at midnight they was large doin's on the dance floor. It is even bein' whispered around that the general, commodore or governor fox-trotted with the girls from the Follies and one-stepped with such of the fair s.e.x as cared practically nothin' for the neighbors. Along about the time the milkman was sayin', "Well, here's another day!", the well known distinguished guests was actin' like a guy who knows a Harvard man does, after they have beat Yale or vice versa.

One of them birds acts so dignified at the office all day that not even the most darin' of his clerks would _think_ of a joke in the same room with him. He'll breeze home on baby's birthday with a trick lion or a jumpin' jack for the kid, and spend three or four hours on the dinin'-room floor makin' it go, while friend infant wishes to Heaven father would call it a day and commence readin' the papers, so's _he_ could toy with it for a while.

The rest of the family stands around and tells each other that the old man must have a good heart at that, because look how he goes out of his way to amuse the baby. Father growls up at 'em and prays that they'll all go to bed, includin' the one that's just learnin' to walk, so's he can be let alone to really enjoy the thing himself!

We're all babies at heart, and the reason most of us don't admit it and give in to our childish desires is because we're afraid the people in the next flat will think we're nutty or have found a way to beat prohibition. Now and then some extry brave guy sneers at the neighbors and lets himself loose, and shortly afterward a committee is appointed to look after his money. Finally, he is shipped f.o.b. to some sanitarium where a pa.s.sin' nod from the head doctor is listed at twenty-five bucks and where the victim is fed strange foods and tucked in bed at the devilish hour of nine.

This is naturally very discouragin' to the rest of us which was about to tear loose ourselves, so we sigh, growl at the universe--and lay off!

I feel sorry for the guys that have to have their comedy served up to them in disguise, like lobster a la Newburg, for instance. These birds claim they like stuff you got to study for five minutes before you get it, and then at a given signal you pull a nice lady-like laugh, the while remarkin', "How subtle!" You don't want to cackle too loud or the people across the hall will get the idea that you're a tribe of lowbrows, and it'll get said around that your great-grandfather was known to go in hysterics over the funny sheet of the Sunday papers!

They think the vaudeville or movie cut-up that does the funny falls is a vulgar lunatic who ought to be in jail, and their idea of the height of humor is the way a iceman p.r.o.nounces decollete, or somethin' like that.

I like my own comedy straight! I want it to wallop me right on the laugher, so's I can get it the first time and giggle myself sick. I'm extry strong for the loud and common guffaw, and I claim that because I go into hysterics over the fat-man-on-the-banana-peel stuff, it don't prove that I'm a heavy drinker, beat my wife and will probably wind up in jail. On general principles I'm infatuated with the bird that can make me laugh, and I don't care how he does it as long as he makes good. I care not whether he laughs with me or for me, as long as they's a snicker in there somewheres. I can even stand him laughin' at me, because, if his stuff is funny enough--I'll laugh too!

No guy who can look around him, no matter how things is breakin' for him and see somethin' to laugh at as the mob goes by, is beat. That bird is just gettin' ready to pull a new punch from somewheres and he's the baby you want to watch! The guy that can't see nothin' funny in life, whether he's eight or eighty, is through!

Me and Kid Scanlan saved one of them guys. His name was Jason Van Ness.

I was sittin' in Genaro's office one afternoon about seven or eight months after me and the Kid had decided to give the movies a boost, when the door opens and in comes a guy which at first glance I figured must at least be the governor of the state. He's there with a cane, a high hat and the general makeup of a Wall Street broker in a play where he won't forgive his son for marryin' the ingenue. Also, he's built all over like a heavyweight champ, except his face, the same runnin' to the dignified lines of the bloodhounds, them big, flabby, over-lappin'

jaws--get me?

"I say, old chap--are you Mister Genaro?" he pipes.

"Nope!" I says. "I'm Johnny Green, manager of Kid Scanlan, welterweight champion of the world."

"Really!" he remarks.

"Well," I says, "d'ye wanna see the contract or will we go over to a notary so's I can swear to it?"

At that he frowns and waves a finger at me.

"Come, my man," he says, "no chaffing now! You may tell Mister Genaro I have arrived! Of course you know who I am?"

That "my man!" thing was a trifle more than I could take! I throws my feet up on Genaro's desk and give this guy a long, careless once over, puttin' everything I had on the stare.

"I ain't got no more idea who you are," I tells him finally, "than a oyster has of roller-skatin'. Who are you? I never seen _your_ face on no postage stamps!"

"Oh, I say!" he busts out, registerin' wild indignation. "Don't you ever read the newspapers?"

"Sure!" I says. "But then, escapin' convicts don't get much s.p.a.ce in 'em any more! At that, I think I know you now, though."