“Well,” said the Press Agent, coolly, “did the show do any business?”
“Business!” replies the Bill Poster; “you’d a thought there was a fire in the neighborhood ev’ry night, the crowd was there so thick fightin’ to git in. An’ say, the guys what got broke up in the boat race is so stuck on the joke that they gives a theatre party an’ the papers is full of it.”
“Yes,” said the Press Agent, “and it took the press agent to get that in the papers.”
“But the bill posters got ’em in the house,” retorted the Bill Poster, with the air of a man who had knocked the local welterweight over the ropes.
THE CANDY BUTCHER’S DREAM OF LOVE.
It was generally conceded that the Candy Butcher was the handsomest man in the outfit. To be sure, the gent who did the sixty-one horse act in Ring Three was a Charlie boy for good looks, but it was only when he was in the red coat and working. When he left the dressing tent and went red light hunting in a one night stand he looked like a canvasman on a visit home to his people, but he was a hot card when he had the dicer on in the horse act. It was so different with the Candy Butcher—he was always dressed up and he never looked like he felt it.
No one ever saw the Candy Butcher wear a coat, but his checked trousers were always creased whether the big show was playing a one night in Keokuk or doing a run in the Madison Square Garden over in the hot city. And he always wore a vest, but it was never buttoned and there was a red striped shirt with one of those Montana boys screwed in the bosom right under the dickey dot of a bow. The vest was something to speak about—it had the band wagon way to the bad on the distribution of colors and looked like page 89 in a wall paper drummer’s sample book. There was a shiny chain with an elk’s tooth and a tiger’s claw and in one vest pocket was a date book with a tooth brush and a blue pencil doing a duet on the other side of the rainbow. The Candy Butcher always wore pink underwear and had his sleeves rolls up to his elbows. And you don’t want to forget the little miniature of “blondy” that he had pinned right over his blood pump.
And as a matter of detail the Candy Butcher always had this get up the whole season and no grease spots ever scored—he was just the same whether it was back of the tub and the peanuts giving the “five tonight good people” gag, selling concert tickets during the run-offs in the hippodrome or Sunday afternoon in the ladies’ coach, section three, telling the big blonde who did the cloud swing in the round top rigging that of all the girls she was the onliest.