Blue-grass and Broadway

by Maria Thompson Daviess

"Yes," answered Miss Lindsey, and a sudden radiance shone from her dark, intellectual face that lit up the whole arbor and lighted a flame in the creative hearts of both Mr. Gerald Height and Mr. William Rooney. And what it lighted in the hearts of both of those gentlemen was nothing to the blaze it fanned in the heart of Mr. Dennis Farraday, where it had been smouldering along from a spark touched off the day of the beefsteak and mushrooms. "If you'll help me play it as I have seen it all along, Mr. Rooney, I can go on to-morrow night."

"Good," agreed Mr. Rooney. "I'll shove Miss Grayson up into your part, and cut out hers until we get a girl. We'll get the little author busy right now, blotting out the Hawtry smell and putting you in, as I say, refined and—"

"Oh, but where is she?" moaned Mr. Farraday, coming back to his agony of uneasiness, which had been drugged by hearing and seeing "The Purple Slipper" and Mr. Vandeford's fortunes rescued and reconstructed right before his ears and eyes.

"There ain't but two places for a refined lady to run in Atlantic City,—the railroad station and the ocean,—and I bet Mr. Vandeford is lugging her from the railroad station right now," Mr. Rooney said with easy conviction. "Course she'd dodge back to the Christian ladies home the first mud-puddle she stepped into, but we'll set her on her feet and rub the splashes off her white stockings and—"

Mr. Rooney was interrupted in his kindly flow of reassurance by the appearance of a wheel-chair propelled by the shrewd Italian youth, who had that evening made his individual fortune, in which sat Mr. Vandeford and the author of "The Purple Slipper." Without command, he stopped beside the group of friends, and Mr. Vandeford alighted, but Miss Adair shrank back into the shadow of the perambulator.

"Oh, darling, listen," cried Miss Lindsey, as she reached into that retreat and drew Miss Adair into her arms. "Miss Hawtry has thrown up the part and gone back to New York, and I am going to act it for you just as you and I have talked about it all this time. Mr. Rooney is going to help us, and we—we are going to make good for you—and Mr. Vandeford—to-morrow night. We are!"

"Just watch us, Miss Adair. I'll do my best, and I'll—I'll be like we talked the other day," Mr. Height said as he came to the other side of the wicker retreat of the hunted author. Something in his voice made Mr. Dennis Farraday put his arm around the lizard's shoulders, a thing he would not have thought of doing a week ago.

"We are all going to stand by, little girl, and it'll be some play that we produce at the New Carnival October first," Mr. Farraday put in by way of his contribution to the wounded young author.

However, it was the crack of Mr. Rooney's whip that brought her to her feet again.

"Miss Adair, you and Lindsey come back with me to the theater now," he commanded the shrinking and tragic author. "Somebody get Fido and tell him to wake up everybody and have 'em all at the theater to rehearse in a hour; that'll be three o'clock. Mr. Vandeford, you'd better get in a press story over long distance before Hawtry beats you to it. You may catch a morning paper or two. Now, everybody get out and work like fun and we'll show Broadway a sure-fire hit October first."