“Was, you mean.”

“He isn’t now?”

“No.”

“Well, I don’t understand——”

“Neither do I. We have the opera house engaged for the eighteenth, and King is to play here the nineteenth, yet his paper covers every board in town, and I can’t even find one of our lithographs in a window. What does it mean?”

“Why, your company has gone up.”

“Gone up?”

“Yes, bu’sted.”

“Who told you that?”

“Dispatch from King said so.”