Dominick laughed, and the actor allowed a slight, sour smile to disturb the professional gravity of his face.
“Yes,” he nodded, “that’s the way of the transgressor, especially when his transgressions ain’t of his own doing. After I’d been there two weeks, I hadn’t a V between me and starvation. I looked for jobs with the water squelching in my boots, and finally I had to do a turn in a fifth-rate variety performance that showed in a sort of cellar down a flight of stairs. That’s where the ‘Klondike Monologue’ was born. Like lots of other good things, it had a pretty mean beginning. I just pieced it together from bits and scraps that were the tailings of the two years I had spent in that Arctic mill up there. It caught on from the start—let the public alone to recognize a good thing when they see one! That dirty cellar was pretty well sprinkled the first week, and the second they had the standing room signs out. I didn’t introduce the spangle till the end of the engagement. Some people think it a great touch.”
He looked with sober questioning at Dominick, who said apologetically,
“So I hear, but I haven’t seen it.”
Buford raised his flexible brows with an air of stimulated, excusing memory.
“True, true,” he replied, “I had forgotten. Two nights after I had introduced the spangle, one of the ‘Granada’ people saw me. I didn’t know it at the time, but I am a true artist; whatever my audience, I give it of my best, and, in that instance, it was only one more case of bread cast upon the waters. There’d been a vacancy here. Estradilla, the Spanish Snake Dancer, was taken suddenly sick, collapsed after her third performance, tied her intestines up in a knot with her act, they say, and the wonder was she hadn’t done it before. Anyhow, they had to substitute in a hurry, heard of my Klondike act and sent a man up to see if I’d do to fill in. The next week I was here and—you know the rest.”
“They say every man has his chance. You didn’t suppose the snowstorm that caught you at Antelope was going to be the foundation of yours?”
Buford raised his brows till they about touched his hair, and said with his most magisterial sonority of tone,
“No, no indeed. The ways of Fate—or let me say Providence—are truly inscrutable. I thought that lock-up in the Sierras would be my undoing, and I’m sure I never imagined the two years I spent in that accursed Arctic were going to return to roost as blessings. I turned my face to the North in a bitter hour, and it was in a bitter hour that I adopted the stage.”
Dominick was exceedingly surprised. He had supposed Buford always to have been an actor, to have been born to it. If he had heard that the man had made his debut as an infant prodigy or even in his mother’s arms in swaddling clothes, he would have felt it was in keeping with Buford’s character, and just what he suggested. Now, in a tone expressing his surprise, the young man queried,