ks. He kicked,
but Hugo says the plot demanded it. I bet, at that, he was just trying
to cut down his salary list. I bet that continuity this minute shows Pa
drinking his corn out of a jug and playing a fiddle for the dance right
down to the last scene. Don't artists get the razz, though. And that
Hugo, he'd spend a week in the hot place to save a thin dime. Let me
tell you, Countess, don't you ever get your lemon in his squeezer."

There were audible murmurs of sympathy from the Countess.

"And so the old trouper had to start out Monday morning to peddle
the brush. Took him three days to land anything at all, and then it's
nothing but a sleeping souse in a Western bar-room scene. In here now he
is--something the Acme people are doing. He's had three days, just lying
down with his back against a barrel sleeping. He's not to wake up even
when the fight starts, but sleep right on through it, which they say
will be a good gag. Well, maybe. But it's tough on his home. He gets all
his rest daytimes and keeps us restless all night making a new kind of
beer and tending his still, and so on. You bet Ma and I, the minute he's
through with this piece, are going pronto to get that face of his as
naked as the day he was born. Pa's so temperamental--like that time he
was playing a Bishop and never touched a drop for five weeks, and in bed
every night at nine-thirty. Me? Oh, I'm having a bit of my own in this
Acme piece--God's Great Outdoors, I think it is--anyway, I'm to be a
little blonde hussy in the bar-room, sitting on the miners' knees and
all like that, so they'll order more drinks. It certainly takes all
kinds of art to make an artist. And next week I got some shipwreck
stuff for Baxter, and me with bronchial pneumonia right this minute, and
hating tank stuff, anyway. Well, Countess, don't take any counterfeit
money. So long."

She danced through a doorway and was gone--she was one who seldom
descended to plain walking. She would manage a dance step even in the
short distance from the casting--office door to the window. It was
not of such material, Merton Gill was sure, that creative artists were
moulded. And there was no question now of his own utter seriousness.
The situation hourly grew more desperate. For a week he had foregone the
drug-store pie, so that now he recalled it as very wonderful pie indeed,
but he dared no longer indulge in this luxury. An occasional small
bag of candy and as much sugar as he could juggle i