“I am,” replied Mr. Armytage.
* * * * * * *
Miss Montague, after parting with her protege had walked quickly, not without little recurrent dance steps—as if some excess of joy would ever and again overwhelm her—to the long office building on the Holden lot, where she entered a door marked “Buckeye Comedies. Jeff Baird, Manager.” The outer office was vacant, but through the open door to another room she observed Baird at his desk, his head bent low over certain sheets of yellow paper. He was a bulky, rather phlegmatic looking man, with a parrot-like crest of gray hair. He did not look up as the girl entered. She stood a moment as if to control her excitement, then spoke.
“Jeff, I found a million dollars for you this morning.”
“Thanks!” said Mr. Baird, still not looking up. “Chuck it down in the coal cellar, will you? We’re littered with the stuff up here.”
“On the level, Jeff.”
Baird looked up. “On the level?”
“You’ll say so.”
“Shoot!”
“Well, he’s a small-town hick that saved up seventy-two dollars to come here from Goosewallow, Michigan, to go into pictures-took a correspondence course in screen—acting and all that, and he went broke and slept in a property room down in the village all last week; no eats at all for three, four days. I’d noticed him around the lot on different sets; something about him that makes you look a second time. I don’t know what it is-kind of innocent and bug-eyed the way he’d rubber at things, but all the time like as if he thought he was someone. Well, I keep running across him and pretty soon I notice he’s up against it. He still thinks he’s someone, and is very up-stage if you start to kid him the least bit, but the signs are there, all right. He’s up against it good and hard.