play will establish my reputation," he told me.
"If the boss had had any notion of what you were pulling, he'd have been
here himself. But what about the author? I thought you were going to
have to call the police when you failed to produce the author."

* * * * *

It had been rough. The skimpy crowd had milled about for a half hour
screaming "Author, author!" Meanwhile, I was too choked up after the
last heart-wrenching scene to get up and make a speech.

Everything had gone perfectly. Even the brief rehearsal time failed to
leave any rough edges. Crawley and Pennington were so carried away with
their parts that they easily doubled their considerable dramatic stature
that first performance. The supporting cast caught fire, too, and,
well--the likes of it is rarely seen anywhere.

The lines seemed to come out of the actors' hearts, not their mouths.
Cue-lines blended with the dialogue interplay, the artificiality of
stage-sets, costumery and make-up disappeared, and the simple, yet
profound drama unreeled like a bolt of vividly printed silk, flowing
smoothly, strongly, absorbingly to the tragic-comical climax that left
the emotions reeling from the suspense and warm with relief.

Two days later I looked at the figures on advance ticket sales and could
find only one conceivable complaint. _Parodisiac_ would make Hillary
Hardy so much money that not even taxes could force him to produce
another for a great while.

What promised to be a major irritation, fending off the press from Hardy
and protecting his anonymity, was converted into a master
publicity-stroke by Hec Blankenship. He swore the few of us who knew
about Hardy's youth and whereabouts, to complete secrecy, then he
proceeded to build his publicity around the "mystery-author."

"But he's got a past!" I objected when Hec first presented the scheme.
"Old friends and relatives will spill the beans."

"Have you really looked into Hillary's past?" Hec asked.

I confessed I hadn't. Hec said that he had. It developed that Hillary
Hardy was not our boy's real name. In his passion for anonymity he had
been changing his name every time he changed locations, which was often.
Hec had traced his background through three moves that brought the
author across the country, but the trail petered out at a ranch in
Wyoming where Hillary had worked a month as a cow-hand.

The mystery-author gag worked. Inside of two weeks our promotion expens