Then followed a scene he had not been allowed to witness. There swung Marcel, the detective, played too emphatically by the cross-eyed man. An antler point suspended him by the seat of his trousers. He hung limply a moment, then took from his pocket a saw with which he reached up to contrive his release. He sawed through the antler and fell. He tried to stand erect, but appeared to find this impossible. A subt.i.tle announced: "He had put a permanent wave in Marcel."

This base fooling was continuously blown upon by gales of stupid laughter. But not yet did Merton Gill know the worst. The merriment persisted through his most affecting bit, the farewell to his old pal outside--how could they have laughed at a simple bit of pathos like that? But the watching detective was seen to weep bitterly.

"Look a' him doin' Buck Benson," urged the hoa.r.s.e neighbour gleefully.

"You got to hand it to that kid--say, who is he, anyway?"

Followed the thrilling leap from a second-story window to the back of the waiting pal. The leap began thrillingly, but not only was it shown that the escaping man had donned a coat and a false mustache in the course of his fall, but at its end he was revealed slowly, very slowly, clambering into the saddle!

They had used here, he saw, one of those slow cameras that seem to suspend all action interminably, a cruel device in this instance. And for his actual escape, when he had ridden the horse beyond camera range at a safe walk, they had used another camera that gave the effect of intense speed. The old horse had walked, but with an air of swiftness that caused the audience intense delight.

Entered Marcel, the detective, in another scene Merton had not watched.

He emerged from the dance-hall to confront a horse that remained, an aged counterpart of the horse Merton had ridden off. Marcel stared intently into the beast's face, whereupon it reared and plunged as if terrified by the spectacle of the cross-eyed man.

Merton recalled the horse in the village that had seemed to act so intelligently. Probably a shot-gun had stimulated the present scene. The detective thereupon turned aside, hastily donned his false mustache and Sherlock Holmes cap, and the deceived horse now permitted him to mount.

He, too, walked off to the necromancy of a lens that multiplied his pace a thousandfold. And the audience rocked in its seats.

One horse still remained before the dance-hall. The old mother emerged.

With one anguished look after the detective, she gathered up her disreputable skirts and left the platform in a flying leap to land in the saddle. There was no trickery about the speed at which her horse, belaboured with the mop-pail, galloped in pursuit of the others. A subt.i.tle recited--"She has watched her dear ones leave the old nest flat. Now she must go out over the hills and mop the other side of them!"

Now came the sensational capture by la.s.so of the detective. But the captor had not known that, as he dragged his quarry at the rope's end, the latter had somehow possessed himself of a sign which he later walked in with, a sign reading, "Join the Good Roads Movement!" nor that the faithful old mother had ridden up to deposit her inverted mop-pail over his head.

Merton Gill had twice started to leave. He wanted to leave. But each time he found himself chained there by the evil fascination of this monstrous parody. He remained to learn that the Montague girl had come out to the great open s.p.a.ces to lead a band of train-robbers from the "Q.T. ranche."

He saw her ride beside a train and cast her la.s.so over the stack of the locomotive. He saw her pony settle back on its haunches while the rope grew taut and the train was forced to a halt. He saw the pa.s.sengers lined up by the wayside and forced to part with their valuables. Later, when the band returned to the ranche with their booty, he saw the dissolute brother, after the treasure was divided, winning it back to the family coffers with his dice. He saw the stricken father playing golf on his bicycle in grotesque imitation of a polo player.

And still, so incredible the revealment, he had not in the first shock of it seemed to consider Baird in any way to blame. Baird had somehow been deceived by his actors. Yet a startling suspicion was forming amid his mental flurries, a suspicion that bloomed to certainty when he saw himself the ever-patient victim of the genuine hidalgo spurs.

Baird had said he wanted the close-ups merely for use in determining how the spurs could be mastered, yet here they were. Merton Gill caught the spurs in undergrowth and caught them in his own chaps, arising from each fall with a look of gentle determination that appealed strongly to the throng of lackwits. They shrieked at each of his failures, even when he ran to greet his pictured sweetheart and fell headlong. They found the comedy almost unbearable when at Baird's direction he had begun to toe in as he walked. And he had fallen clumsily again when he flew to that last glad rendezvous where the pair were irised out in a love triumphant, while the old mother mopped a large rock in the background.

An intervening close-up of this rock revealed her tearful face as she cleansed the granite surface. Above her loomed a painted exhortation to "Use Wizard Spine Pills." And of this pathetic old creature he was made to say, even as he clasped the beloved in his arms--"Remember, she is my mother. I will not desert her now just because I am rich and grand!"

At last he was free. Amid applause that was long and sincere he gained his feet and pushed a way out. His hoa.r.s.e neighbour was saying, "Who is the kid, anyway? Ain't he a wonder!"

He pulled his hat down, dreading he might be recognized and shamed before these shallow fools. He froze with the horror of what he had been unable to look away from. The ignominy of it! And now, after those spurs, he knew full well that Baird had betrayed him. As the words shaped in his mind, a monstrous echo of them reverberated through its caverns--the Montague girl had betrayed him!

He understood her now, and burned with memories of her uneasiness the night before. She had been suffering acutely from remorse; she had sought to cover it with pleas of physical illness. At the moment he was conscious of no feeling toward her save wonder that she could so coolly have played him false. But the thing was not to be questioned. She--and Baird--had made a fool of him.

As he left the theatre, the crowd about him commented approvingly on the picture: "Who's this new comedian?" he heard a voice inquire. But "Ain't he a wonder!" seemed to be the sole reply.

He flushed darkly. So they thought him a comedian. Well, Baird wouldn't think so--not after to-morrow. He paused outside the theatre now to study the lithograph in colours. There he hurled Marcel to the antlers of the elk. The announcement was "Hearts on Fire! A Jeff Baird Comedy.

Five Reels-500 Laughs."

Baird, he sneeringly reflected, had kept faith with his patrons if not with one of his actors. But how he had profaned the sunlit glories of the great open West and its virile drama! And the spurs, as he had promised the unsuspecting wearer, had stood out! The horror of it, blinding, desolating!

And he had as good as stolen that money himself, taking it out to the great open s.p.a.ces to spend in a bar-room. Baird's serious effort had turned out to be a wild, inconsequent farrago of the most painful nonsense.

But it was over for Merton Gill. The golden bowl was broken, the silver cord was loosed. To-morrow he would tear up Baird's contract and hurl the pieces in Baird's face. As to the Montague girl, that deceiving jade was hopeless. Never again could he trust her.

In a whirling daze of resentment he boarded a car for the journey home.

A group seated near him still laughed about Hearts on Fire. "I thought he'd kill me with those spurs," declared an otherwise sanely behaving young woman--"that hurt, embarra.s.sed look on his face every time he'd get up!"

He cowered in his seat. And he remembered another ordeal he must probably face when he reached home. He hoped the Pattersons would be in bed, and walked up and down before the gate when he saw the house still alight. But the light stayed, and at last he nerved himself for a possible encounter. He let himself in softly, still hoping he could gain his room undiscovered; but Mrs. Patterson framed herself in the lighted door of the living room and became exclamatory at sight of him.

And he who had thought to stand before these people in shame to receive their condolences now perceived that his trial would be of another but hardly less-distressing sort. For somehow, so dense were these good folks, that he must seem to be not displeased with his own performance.

Amazingly they congratulated him, struggling with reminiscent laughter as they did so.

"And you never told us you was one of them funny comedians," chided Mrs.

Patterson. "We thought you was just a beginner, and here you got the biggest part in the picture! Say, the way you acted when you'd pick yourself up after them spurs threw you--I'll wake up in the night laughing at that."

"And the way he kept his face so straight when them other funny ones was cutting their capers all around him," observed Mr. Patterson.

"Yes! wasn't it wonderful, Jed, the way he never let on, keeping his face as serious as if he'd been in a serious play?"

"I like to fell off my seat," added Mr. Patterson.

"I'll tell you something, Mr. Armytage," began Mrs. Patterson with a suddenly serious manner of her own, "I never been one to flatter folks to their faces unless I felt it from the bottom of my heart--I never been that kind; when I tell a person such-and-such about themselves they can take it for the truth's own truth; so you can believe me now--I saw lots of times in that play to-night when you was even funnier than the cross-eyed man."

The young actor was regarding her strangely; seemingly he wished to acknowledge this compliment but could find no suitable words. "Yes, you can blush and hem and haw," went on his critic, "but any one knows me I'll tell you I mean it when I talk that way--yes, sir, funnier than the cross-eyed man himself. My, I guess the neighbours'll be talking soon's they find out we got someone as important as you be in our spare-room--and, Mr. Armytage, I want you to give me a signed photograph of yourself, if you'll be so good."

He escaped at last, dizzy from the maelstrom of conflicting emotions that had caught and whirled him. It had been impossible not to appear, and somehow difficult not to feel, gratified under this heartfelt praise. He had been bound to appear pleased but incredulous, even when she p.r.o.nounced him superior, at times, to the cross-eyed man--though the word she used was "funnier."

Betrayed by his friends, stricken, disconsolate, in a panic of despair, he had yet seemed glad to hear that he had been "funny." He flew to the sanct.i.ty of his room. Not again could he bear to be told that the acting which had been his soul's high vision was a thing for merriment.

He paced his room a long time, a restless, defenceless victim to recurrent visions of his shame. Implacably they returned to torture him.

Reel after reel of the ign.o.ble stuff, sp.a.w.ned by the miscreant, Baird, flashed before him; a world of base painted shadows in which he had been the arch offender.

Again and again he tried to make clear to himself just why his own acting should have caused mirth. Surely he had been serious; he had given the best that was in him.

And the groundlings had guffawed!

Perhaps it was a puzzle he could never solve. And now he first thought of the new piece.

This threw him into fresh panic. What awful things, with his high and serious acting, would he have been made to do in that? Patiently, one by one, he went over the scenes in which he had appeared. Dazed, confused, his recollection could bring to him little that was ambiguous in them.

But also he had played through Hearts on Fire with little suspicion of its low intentions.

He went to bed at last, though to toss another hour in fruitless effort to solve this puzzle and to free his eyes of those flashing infamies of the night. Ever and again as he seemed to become composed, free at last of tormenting visions, a mere subt.i.tle would flash in his brain, as where the old mother, when he first punished her insulter, was made by the screen to call out, "Kick him on the knee-cap, too!"

But the darkness refreshed his tired eyes, and sun at last brought him a merciful outlet from a world in which you could act your best and still be funnier than a cross-eyed man.

He awakened long past his usual hour and occupied his first conscious moments in convincing himself that the scandal of the night before had not been a bad dream. The shock was a little dulled now. He began absurdly to remember the comments of those who had appeared to enjoy the unworthy entertainment. Undoubtedly many people had mentioned him with warm approval. But such praise was surely nothing to take comfort from.

He was aroused from this retrospection by a knock on his door. It proved to be Mr. Patterson bearing a tray. "Mrs. P. thought that you being up so late last night mebbe would like a cup of coffee and a bite of something before you went out." The man's manner was newly respectful.

In this house, at least, Merton Gill was still someone.

He thanked his host, and consumed the coffee and toast with a novel sense of importance. The courtesy was unprecedented. Mrs. Patterson had indeed been sincere. And scarcely had he finished dressing when Mr.

Patterson was again at the door.

"A gentleman downstairs to see you, Mr. Armytage. He says his name is Walberg but you don't know him. He says it's a business matter."

"Very well, I'll be down." A business matter? He had no business matters with any one except Baird.