“I have seen. Now to do!”
“You will meet me again before long,” he said to the old miner, when they parted. “And then we’ll make the Melody sing!”
PART II: MELODY
I
“So that’s why I missed you in San Francisco four years ago!” Brainard exclaimed. “Because you wanted to write a play!”
He threw back his head and laughed as if the idea was peculiarly ironical.
“Yes!” the ex-reporter Farson replied, with an echo of Brainard’s irony. “You see I had always meant to be a playwright and took to reporting to make a living. When you came along and gave me that five hundred for helping you crack the safe and get away with the contents, I chucked the newspaper job and moved on to Broadway—been here ever since.”
“Well, how has it gone?”
Farson’s face wrinkled comically.
“I haven’t quite persuaded Broadway that I am another Sardou. In fact the only creation of mine that ever saw the footlights is a melodrama, founded on our adventures that evening in Frisco. And I sold that for fifty dollars to a western syndicate. I have never heard from it since. I need hardly say it does not satisfy my aspirations.”