“What!” says I. “You ain’t thinkin’ of puttin’ that old sour face on the stage, are you? Say, you’re batty!”
“Batty, am I?” says Chunk, kind of swellin’ up. “All right, I’ll show you. I’ve made half a million, my boy, by just such batty moves as that. It’s because I know people, know ’em through and through, from what they’ll pay to hear, to the ones who can give ’em what they want. I’m a discoverer of talent, Shorty. Where do I get my stars from? Pick ’em up anywhere. I don’t go to London and Paris and pay fancy salaries. I find my attractions first hand, sign’ em up on long contracts, and take the velvet that comes in myself. That’s my way, and I guess I’ve made good.”
“Maybe you have,” says I; “but I’m guessin’ this is where you stub your toe. Hot line that’ll be for the head of a bill, won’t it—an accordion player? Think you can get that across?”
“Think!” says Chunk, gettin’ indignant as usual, because someone suggests he can fall down on anything. “Why, I’m going to put that over twice a day, to twelve hundred-dollar houses! No, I don’t think; I know!”
And just for that it wouldn’t have taken much urgin’ for me to have put up a few yellow ones that he was makin’ a wrong forecast.
But, say, you didn’t happen to be up to the openin’ of Peter K.’s new Alcazar the other night, did you? Well, Sadie and I was, on account of being included in one of Chunk’s complimentary box parties. And, honest, when they sprung that clouded moonlight water view, with the Long Island lights in the distance, and the Sound steamers passin’ back and forth at the back, and the rocks in front, hanged if I didn’t feel like I was on the veranda of our yacht club, watchin’ it all over again, the same as it was that night!
Then in from one side comes this boat; no ordinary property piece faked up from something in stock; but a life sized model that’s a dead ringer for the old Queen of the Seas, even to the stovepipe and the shirts hung from the forestay. It comes floatin’ in lazy and natural, and when Cap Spiller goes forward to heave over the anchor he drops it with a splash into real water. He’s wearin’ the same old costume,—shirt sleeves, cob pipe, and all,—and when he begins to putter around in the cabin, blamed if you couldn’t smell the onions fryin’ and the coffee boilin’. Yes, sir, Chunk had put it all on!
Did the act get ’em interested? Say, there was fifteen straight minutes of this scenic business, with not a word said; but the house was so still I could hear my watch tickin’. But when he drags out that old accordion, plants himself on the cabin roof with one leg swingin’ careless over the side, and opens up with them old tunes of his—well, he had ’em all with him, from the messenger boys in the twenty-five-cent gallery to the brokers in the fifteen-dollar boxes. He takes five curtain calls, and the orchestra circle was still demandin’ more when they rung down the front drop.
“Chunk,” says I, as he shows up at our box, “I take it back. You sure have picked another winner.”
“Looks like it, don’t it?” says he. “And whisper! A fifty-minute act for a hundred a week! That’s the best of it. Up at the Columbus their top liner is costing them a thousand a day.”