n uncouth slumber. Carl's nose wrinkled with
bitter fastidiousness as he pulled off his clothes, sticky with heat,
and glared at the swathed forms of the waiters. He was the aristocrat
among proletarians, going back to His Own People--of the Great Riley
Tent Show.

* * * * *

As second juvenile of the Tent Show, Carl received only twelve dollars
a week, but Mr. Riley made him promises rich as the Orient beryl, and
permitted him to follow the example of two of the bandsmen and pitch a
cot on the trampled hay flooring of the dressing-room tent, behind the
stage. There also Carl prepared breakfast on an alcohol-stove. The
canvas creaked all night; negroes and small boys stuck inquisitive
heads under the edge of the canvas. But it was worth it--to travel on
again; to have his mornings free except for an hour's rehearsal; to
climb to upland meadows of Virginia and Kentucky, among the pines and
laurel and rhododendron; tramping up past the log cabins plastered
with mud, where pickaninnies stared shyly, past glens shining with
dogwood, and friendly streams. Once he sat for an hour on Easter Knob,
gazing through a distant pass whose misty blue he pretended was the
ocean. Once he heard there were moonshiners back in the hills. He
talked to bearded Dunkards and their sunbonneted wives; and when he
found a Confederate veteran he listened to the tale of the defense of
Richmond, delighted to find that the Boys in Gray were not merely
names in the history-books.

Of all these discoveries he wrote to his mother, wishing that her
weary snow-bleached life might know the Southern sun. And the first
five dollars he saved he sent to her.

But as soon as Carl became an actor Parker Heye grew jealous of him,
and was gratingly contemptuous when he showed him how to make up,
among the cheap actors jammed in the men's dressing-room, before a
pine board set on two saw-horses, under the light of a flaring
kerosene-torch. Carl came to hate Heye and his splotched face, his
pale, large eyes and yellow teeth and the bang on his forehead, his
black string tie that was invariably askew, his slovenly blue suit,
his foppishly shaped tan button shoes with "bulldog" toes. Heye
invariably jeered: "Don't make up so heavy.... Well, put a _little_
rouge on your lips. What d'you think you are? A blooming red-lipped
Venus?... Try to learn to walk across the stage as if you had _one_
leg that wasn't wood, anyway.... It's custom