A year before, Linton had acquired the Spanish-American concession for Edison’s recently invented “Kinetophone,” or “talking moving-pictures,” and, having played before all the uncrowned heads of Peru, Chile, Uruguay, and the Argentine, was still operating two separate outfits of this theatrical novelty in the last two of those countries. The entertainment had taken so well in Spanish-America that he had purchased the rights for Brazil also, and, having left Buenos Aires on the last day of July, little suspecting what the world had in store for itself, he was planning to start a third outfit in Rio de Janeiro.
“But I’m in tough luck,” said Linton, after our preliminary greetings and immediate personal history had ended.
“How come?” I asked, rather idly, to tell the truth, for my thoughts were still chiefly on my own predicament.
“You remember my B. A. manager?” he replied. “Splendid fellow and just the man I needed to handle the proposition up here in Brazil as soon as I get it started. But he is a Frenchman, and the day after I sailed he was called home to join the army. So now I’ve got to rush back to B. A. to keep that end going, and I have a brand new outfit, with special films in Portuguese and a man fresh from the Edison plant, landing to-day from the States. This man knows all the mechanical and electrical part of the job to perfection, but he probably never heard of the Portuguese language and couldn’t tell a Brazilian from an honest man. So I am mighty hard up for someone to take charge up here, and I don’t know where on earth I’ll find another fellow like the Frenchman.
“By Jove!” he went on a moment later, as the street-car swung out upon the Beira Mar, “I wish you felt like staying down here six months or so longer. I’d make you a proposition.”
“For instance?” I asked, merely out of idle curiosity. “I will not spend another month in South America under any circumstances, but I may have to in spite of myself.”
“If I could get a man who knows the South American from spats to hair-oil as well as you should after three years down here,” went on Linton with great earnestness, “I’d offer him a salary and a percentage, guaranteeing that he would not get less than——” naming a considerably larger sum than I had ever been paid as a respectable member of society—“a month, with all his actual traveling expenses, first class, all arrangements to be in U. S. currency, to take charge of the Brazilian end of this business and play in every city of over fifteen thousand population in the country—there are about fifty of them—and cover the whole republic, coast and interior, from the Uruguayan border clear up to where the Amazon begins to run down off the Andes. It would mean about six months’ playing the principal towns, and after that the man could take the thing around for another half year to the smaller places, and by the time he got through he’d know Brazil better than Edison knows electricity.”
“Mighty interesting proposition,” I remarked, as the street-car drew up at its destination beside the Largo da Carioca, “and I hope you find the man you need. I have a serious problem on my hands, too, and that is how to get back to the U. S. A. early enough this fall to join in an important coon hunt.”
For I did not for a moment seriously consider the offer as made to me, or at least as acceptable. I had already been three times as long in South America as I had expected to be when I first set out to explore the traces of the old Inca highway between Quito and Cuzco. I was decidedly “fed up” with “Spigs” and all their ways; too long a time outside the United States atmosphere is not good for the mind one wishes to keep American, just as too long a time in the tropics is injurious to the body one would keep robust. Moreover, never having seriously tested it, I was not at all certain I had the charlatanism indispensable to any success in the realms of “practical business”—and there was still a possibility that I might get aboard something or other northward bound.
Next day I took to pursuing ships and skippers with renewed energy. But the town was swarming with stranded Americans willing and able to pay any sum that could be mentioned in one breath for the privilege of sleeping in a stokehole of anything bound for the United States. That afternoon I dropped in on Linton at his hotel and entertained him with a hypothetical question.