“Recognize a friend?” Farson inquired. Brainard nodded. They turned over the leaves of their program to find the name of the heroine. It was Lorilla Walters, in large black type.
“Lorilla,” Farson murmured. “Good stage name.”
“It sounds like her!” Brainard agreed.
Just then the curtain went up for the third act. Here was a rapid succession of scenes representing the pursuit and escape of the villain in the Arizona desert, with one very lurid background of flaming mountains and sagebrush plain. Pistol shots and a chase through an adobe haçienda outside a Mexican village concluded the act.
“Whew, these people have wire nerves!” Farson commented, wiping his brow.
“They have treated the story rather freely,” Brainard remarked grimly. Farson talked nervously.
“Louisiana would like that!” he said. “There’s something doing all the time. I bet that’s Lorilla. What do you say to trying her at the People’s? She’s a trifle broad in her methods, but sound—and lets herself go all the time. It’s just a bit loud in tone.”
“Not louder than life sometimes.”
“It carries home—look at the audience!”
In the fourth act the villain was at last cornered by the stenographer-heroine and the hero-lover, aided by a United States cruiser, which intercepted the villain and his sample case as they were about to sail away from the port of Vera Cruz on a Spanish steamer. The captain of the steamer on which the villain had taken refuge with his sample case blasphemously defied the flag of the United States with loud curses. But a booming shot from the wings knocked his smokestack out of service, and brought him to his senses. The captain thereafter gracefully received the smart American lieutenant who came aboard in holiday uniform and collared the villain, denounced by the heroine, as he cowered behind the fallen smokestack—still wearing the long ulster.