“Why not? Ain’t I a good stunt actress? I’ll tell the lot she hasn’t found any one yet that can get away with her stuff better than what I do.”
“But she—I heard her say herself she never allowed any one to double for her—she wouldn’t do such a thing.”
Here sounded a scornful laugh from Jimmie, the prop—boy. “Bunk!” said he at the laugh’s end. “How long you been doublin’ for her, Miss Montague? Two years, ain’t it?—I know it was before I come here, and I been on the lot a year and a half. Say, he ought to see some the stuff you done for her out on location, like jumpin’ into the locomotive engine from your auto and catchin’ the brake beams when the train’s movin’, and goin’ across that quarry on the cable, and ridin’ down that lumber flume sixty miles per hour and ridin’ some them outlaw buckjumpers—he’d ought to seen some that stuff, hey, Miss Montague?”
“That’s right, Jimmie, you tell him all about me. I hate to talk of myself.” Very wonderfully Merton Gill divined that this was said with a humorous intention. Jimmy was less sensitive to values. He began to obey.
“Well, I dunno—there’s that motorcycle stuff. Purty good, I’ll say. I wouldn’t try that, no, sir, not for a cool million dollars. And that chase stuff on the roofs down town where you jumped across that court that wasn’t any too darned narrow, an’ say, I wisht I could skin up a tree the way you can. An’ there was that time—”
“All right, all right, Jimmie. I can tell him the rest sometime. I don’t really hate to talk about myself—that’s on the level. And say, listen here, Jimmie, you’re my favourite sweetheart, ain’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” assented Jimmie, warmly. “All right. Beat it up and get me about two quarts of that hot coffee and about four ham sandwiches, two for you and two for me. That’s a good kid.”
“Sure!” exclaimed Jimmie, and was off.
Merton Gill had been dazed by these revelations, by the swift and utter destruction of his loftiest ideal. He hardly cared to know, now, if Beulah Baxter were married. It was the Montague girl who had most thrilled him for two years. Yet, almost as if from habit, he heard himself asking, “Is—do you happen to know if Beulah Baxter is married?”
“Baxter married? Sure! I should think you’d know it from the way that Sig Rosenblatt bawls everybody out.”