"Go on, my boy," said Mr. Wattles, who, with his protégé stood upon the stage, just behind the curtain. "What are you trembling for? This ought to be the proudest moment of your life."
With these words he fairly pushed the boy before the audience.
Then arose a whirlwind of applause. When it had subsided, Al tried to begin his speech. But to his utter consternation, he found that he had forgotten every word of it.
But he was not, after all, obliged to deliver it. As he stood, trying to remember at least one word of the carefully prepared effort, a man suddenly advanced from the rear of one of the proscenium boxes, leveled a pistol at the boy's head and fired.
The bullet whistled past Al's ear, but did not graze it. The next moment the would-be assassin was struggling in the hands of the other occupants of the box. He managed to free himself; then came another report, and the next moment Jack Farley lay dead on the floor of the box, a suicide.
How he had escaped from the doom with which he had been threatened on the previous night, how he had succeeded in entering the theater without attracting attention, will never be known.
Al's speech was forgotten in the excitement, and he was not obliged to make it, after all.
In a few weeks Al ceased to be a popular idol, but he was daily learning new "points" and becoming more and more valuable to his employer; he was already recognized as one of the brightest advance agents on the road.
One morning, about two months after the tragedy that we have just recorded, his sister came to him and said: