"I can't tell yet whether it's a bite or only an itch," grinned Heitmuller. "For a while he was reciting at smokers and parties and things, and then I heard he was teaching elocution at home nights. Now he's got a small dramatic company and goes out around giving one-act plays and scenes from Shakespeare. Pretty good, too, they say!"
"Well, I be damned," Mitchell commented, when Heitmuller had finished.
"He's only away from eleven-thirty to one-thirty," explained Heitmuller. "He was so anxious and does so much more work than any two men that I couldn't refuse him."
"Of course not," assented Mitchell.
"Besides," added the chief clerk, "he might have gone, anyway. John's getting a little headstrong, I've noticed, since he's coming out so fast."
"Naturally," observed Mitchell drily, after which he dismissed Heitmuller and appeared to dismiss the subject by turning again to his desk.
CHAPTER IV
ADVENT AND ADVENTURE
But the General Freight Agent took care that Mrs. Mitchell, Bessie, and himself were in a box at the Burbank on the following Monday night, when the curtain went up on the Mowrey Stock Company's sumptuous production of Quo Vadis, which for more than nine days was the talk of the town in the city of angels, oranges, atmosphere, and oil. The Mitchells strained their eyes for a sight of their late-grown protégé, but it appeared he was not "on." However, in the midst of a garden scene with Roman lords, ladies, soldiers in armor and slaves decking the view, there appeared a huge barbarian, long of hair and beard, his torso bound round with an immense bearskin, his sandals tied with thongs, his sinewy limbs apparently unclad, savage bands of silver upon his massy, muscled arms, the alpine ruggedness of his countenance and the light of a fanatical devotion that gleamed in his eye contributing in their every detail to make the creature appear the thing the programme proclaimed him, "Ursus, a Christian Slave."
But the programme claimed something more: that this Ursus was John Hampstead.