“Return date, well I should reckon. Went back there in two months an’ still foun’ ’em ripe. But there was only one way to do it. The Boss had to paint over all the cars an’ wagons an’ change the name of the show. The hay boys thought it was a new outfit.”
THE BILL POSTER’S VISIT.
The Bill Poster was a stranger to most every one in the outfit. He traveled a month ahead of the show on Advertising Car No. 2, and while he hung around during the run in New York he never got well enough acquainted to mix in with the ring bank squatters. While the outfit had great respect for him, and especially for his work, he wasn’t generally understood, and this did not keep his popularity up to par. He always seemed solid with the business staff and called the assistant treasurer by his first name, and these two conditions were known to the sawdust boys. They always took off their hats to anybody on the staff, and the man in the ticket wagon was only known at the pay-off. Then, too, he dressed well and wore a diamond, that is, a real one, and altogether his financial condition was too good.
But for some reason or other the Bill Poster did happen back on the show one afternoon. Just after the matinee, when the gang sat down on the bank for the spiel, he was seen walking across the track, and the boys at once began to speculate on what brought the paste spreader back to home. Some of them thought it was for a call-down, and the concert manager declared that was the cause, for, said he, “I never seen a town billed so rotten as this un.” But the gasoline man, who was a close observer, thought different. He knew that there was a little fairy working in the Fall of Rome ballet that was sweet on the paste boy, and he put the rest of the crowd wise before the conversation got too far from the shore.
“Cert’nly,” he said. “Didn’t I see the guy in his plaid rags ev’ry night when he was playin’ the Garden, gittin’ the little lady at the dressin’ room door and blowin’ her off to butter cakes an’ coffee before she chases to the bridge an’ home.”
The gasoline man was getting real gabby on the love affair, when the Bill Poster came through the red curtains over the dressing tent entrance and walked across the ring to where the gang sat in the shadows. He had a sassy little “Howdy” for everybody and then passed around a box of Turkish cigarettes. Everybody passed it up, and the Boss Canvasman bit off a two-by-three chew from his plug and looked sour.
“Slipped back to see the Boss,” said the Bill Poster, as he lighted one of the Turkish boys with a match he took out of a sterling box that had a beer ad. on it. “Ain’t no secret; I want a transfer. I’m good an’ tired of the slow work on No. 2 car, an’ so I gets a day off an’ runs back to see if the Boss won’t put me with the opposition crew.”
The gang was silent. Nobody had asked for the why, so nobody commented on it. The fact that he was going to have nerve enough to ask to get in the opposition crew filled the concert manager with disgust, for he knew something about bill posting, and also knew that it took a triple-plated crackerjack to hold a place with this crowd of rush pasters of a three-ring outfit.